Abstammung und Adoption: eine Abstandsmessung

German law is one of the many legal orders that distinguish between parentage and adoption. The German Civil Code of 1900 was drafted in such a way that parentage and adoption were treated in many respects as contraries of one another. Since then, some of the former distance between parentage and adoption has been bridged in the respective doctrines. The history of the guiding concepts behind parentage and adoption is marked by their convergence over time. This realization suggests that it is worth considering whether to subsume adoption and parentage under a single, unified legal institution.