A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 22 April 2025 - T for civil code and white wine.

 

Good morning lovely girls, and happy (B)Earthday Elizabeth!

How are you all? When you read this, I will be in the UK. I have written most of this on Sunday, as I would be traveling on Monday.

I have a postcard for you :

This postcard was sent to me by Peter who lives in Germany. It reads: Ja zum Leben, which means 'Yes to life'. And there's a couple of sweethearts over the rainbow looking at the stars and spotting the engagement ring. A lovely card. (I won't read too much into it).

Peter writes that he is a musician and plays the organ, the piano and the cymbals. He has once played the carillon (a set of bells in a tower, played with fists on a large keyboard).

Here are the stamps:

The large one celebrates “125 Years of the German Civil Code – BGB”

From the Federal Ministry of Finance's website I got the following information:

On January 1, 1900, the German Civil Code came into force, unifying civil law, which regulates the rights and obligations between equal citizens and other private law subjects. This ended the legal fragmentation in the German Empire of 1871, which had significantly hampered industry, trade, and transport.

Eduard Pape (Top left in the photo) was appointed President of the Commission for the Development of a General German Civil Code by Otto von Bismarck in 1874, but he died in 1888 so he never saw the work completed. 

Arnold Nieberding (Top right) was also an important collaborator and was responsible for the standardisation of German law. In a speech in 1896, according to Wikipedia, Nieberding described the legal situation in Germany as a "colorful muddle, .. for so long forgotten, citizens and families have determined their own legal relationships for themselves."

The German Civil Code was a product of its time, its language and regulatory techniques influenced by 19th-century jurisprudence. Following the system of Pandectal scholarship, it contains five books. The first book contains the General Part, which sets out provisions on personal law, general provisions on legal transactions, deadlines, and statutes of limitations. The second book governs the law of obligations. The third book contains property law. The fourth book contains family law, and the fifth book contains inheritance law.

Even 125 years after its entry into force, the Civil Code still contains the central provisions of civil law that determine the legal relationships between citizens, without most people being familiar with the individual provisions of the Civil Code.

The long validity of the law was only possible because, over the 125 years of its existence, it has been continuously developed by legislators and case law in order to adapt it to social and economic change, a feat that has been achieved time and again.

I know nothing about law, let alone the law in Germany, so I found this quite interesting.

But enough of that. On Saturday my friends and I had lunch  at my friend Janet's. She had cooked a lovely chicken oven dish. And we were drinking white wine.

It's T-Day today, hosted by Elizabeth and Bleubeard, so the white wine is my drink offering.

Janet is very good at making desserts, and this time was no exception. She had made a lovely lemon and lime cheesecake on a base of ginger biscuits.

No calories at all of course! Haha!

And to finish it off here is a recent photo of Ronnie:

That's it for today,

Happy T-Day all,

Lisca

PS My journey went well and I am now in England, but I had to wait for the family to get up so I could get the WIFI code.(Hence the late publishing time)