Biography|Günther Bräunig — The Law Faculty Where He Took a Doctorate

Most German bank CVs treat Johannes Gutenberg University as a line of Latin.

For Günther Bräunig the Gutenberg campus is where the line was drawn.

He was born in Wiesbaden on 10 October 1955.

From 1975 to 1980 he studied law at Mainz, with a period at the University of Dijon in Burgundy.

Between 1980 and 1982 he wrote a doctoral dissertation in law at Mainz and took the degree of Dr. jur. in 1982.

The building that housed that faculty then is still here.

Haus Recht und Wirtschaft II, at Jakob-Welder-Weg 4, was planned from 1955 and finished in 1960-61 to designs by Hans Joachim Lenz.

It is the older of the two ReWi houses that now face each other across a small piazza.

The later ReWi I block, finished in 1991-92 after the university added a business degree, did not exist while he was a student.

A visitor walking Jakob-Welder-Weg from the Forum Universitatis reaches the older house in under a minute.

Stand at this facade and the later titles look less like a jump.

A Wiesbaden-born lawyer who had already sat through first-state-exam lectures here could walk back across the Rhine for a Referendariat at the Landgericht, sit the second state exam in 1983, and then enter Commerzbank's Frankfurt investment-banking desk in 1984.

Airbus sales finance in Toulouse and Washington followed from 1986.

KfW hired him in 1989 as head of international capital markets.

The doctorate was the ticket.

The campus was the place the ticket was issued.

Mainz is not a banking school in the Frankfurt sense.

It is a state university that still trains the lawyers German public institutions actually hire.

Photo: Patrick R. Nisch, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. The cover shows the Forum Universitatis a few metres east of ReWi II on the same Gutenberg campus, January 2006.