Family Background
Max Weber was born on 21 April 1864 in Erfurt, the eldest son of Max Weber (1836-1897) and Helene Fallenstein (1844-1919). Alfred Weber (1868-1958), who in 1909 published his important study of industrial location, was a younger brother.
Max Weber senior’s family had been active in the cloth trade around Bielefeld, but by mid-century their fortunes were declining; when he met Helene in Berlin in 1860 he was working for the Berlin City Council and was already active in politics. The family of Helene Fallenstein (nee Souchay) had made its money in the Frankfurt cloth wholesale trade. Although Max Weber senior’s career as a National Liberal politician would dominate the household in which Max Weber junior grew up, the family’s wealth came through his wife (Roth 2001: 631-42). It would be the same, later, with Max Weber junior. When on 20 September 1893 he married his great-niece Marianne Schnitger (1870-1954) he had no regular source of income; he did in 1894 become Professor of Political Economy and Financial Science at Freiburg, but only nine years later he resigned his Heidelberg chair and in so doing lost his salary. Max and Marianne were for a period substantially dependent on Helene Fallenstein’s generosity, until in 1907 Marianne finally came into a significant inheritance. From then on Max was supported financially by his wife (Radkau 2005: 450-52). Max and Marianne had no children. He died in Munich on 14 June 1920 of pneumonia, following an infection of the lung contracted earlier that month. His posthumous reputation was quickly provided for by his widow, who saw a number of works through the press, collected correspondence, and then in 1926 published a biography that remains a central source for understanding the life and work of Max Weber (Hanke 2009).In 1869 Max senior moved the family back to Berlin where he became first a city councillor, and then a deputy in the post-Unification Reichstag.
Max Weber junior began his career as a law student in the summer semester of 1882 at Heidelberg University. After three semesters he moved to Strasbourg for one year of military service, following which he enrolled in Berlin for two semesters of Roman and German law. For the Winter Semester of 1885-86 he prepared for his state examinations in Gottingen, passing in May 1886; he then moved back into his parent’s home in Berlin, where he would live until he moved to Freiburg in 1894.He became an unpaid court clerk in Berlin and at the same time worked under the supervision of Levin Goldschmidt, Professor of Commercial Law, on a dissertation for which he was awarded a doctorate in August 1889 (Kaelber 2003: 6-9). In October 1890 Weber passed the second state law examination which formally qualified him to practise, but instead of pursuing this he turned to the study of Roman agrarian law. He attended Meitzen’s seminar on agrarian history, and in October 1891 published for his Habilitation the Romische Agrargeschichte, qualifying on this basis to lecture on 1 February 1892. From the summer semester of 1892 he lectured in the Law Faculty, and when in May 1892 Goldschmidt had a stroke he also took over the lecturing of his former supervisor. He was not however made an “extraordinary” (that is, unpaid adjunct) professor of German and Commercial Law in the University of Berlin until November 1893.