Carl Melchior

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Carl Melchior in the German delegation to negotiate the Versailles Treaty , first from the right

Carl Melchior (born October 13, 1871 in Hamburg ; † December 30, 1933 there ) was a German lawyer , banker and politician . He was the head of the German finance delegation in the peace negotiations on the Versailles Peace Treaty .

life and work

Origin and family

Carl Melchior came from a respected and wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. His father Moritz Melchior (1839–1905) was a businessman and from 1883 to 1889 a member of the Hamburg city council , then a member of the Hamburg tax deputation for another five years. His grandfather Sally Gerson (1814–65) was managing director and partner of the private bank J. Goldschmidt Sohn, which Moritz Melchior joined in 1865. Moritz Melchior was later CFO at Hamburger Sparkasse . Carl Melchior's mother was Emilie Melchior, b. Reé (1847–1873), daughter of the grain dealer Martin Rée.

Carl Melchior visited the Johanneum . When he started school, the family lived on Schulweg 7 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel . The parental home no longer exists today; there is an apartment building built after 1945. In 1889 Melchior passed the school leaving examination at the Johanneum.

In 1933 Carl Melchior married his long-time lover Marie de Molènes (1899–1985). The connection resulted in a child, Charles Melchior de Molènes (1934–2011), later a French diplomat. The family owned a townhouse in the Heimhuderstraße 55 in Hamburg-Rotherbaum , which from 1939 to 1941 as a Jewish property under curatorship was. Melchior's widow lived in Paris after his death. In 1951 she sold the family's town house on Heimhuder Strasse to the Institut français , which still operates its Hamburg branch there today . There is also the French Consulate General in Hamburg.

education and profession

From the summer semester of 1890, Melchior studied law at the University of Bonn , then from 1891 to 1893 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. In 1893 Melchior received his doctorate at the University of Jena , and then passed the 1st legal state examination in Berlin. He then did military service and passed the second state examination in law in Hamburg in 1897. In 1899 Melchior was appointed magistrate in Hamburg .

In 1902 Melchior left the judicial service and joined the MMWarburg & CO bank as a syndicus , where he was appointed general representative in 1911 . After the outbreak of the First World War , he was one of the initiators of the central purchasing company . Melchior volunteered and took part in the war. He was seriously wounded and after his recovery in 1917 became the first non-family partner in MM Warburg & Co. He took over the shares from Felix M. Warburg , who, since he had become an American citizen in 1907 , his shares in a German one when the USA entered the war Company had to give up. Melchior, together with Max Warburg, determined the bank's successful course in the following years. He had other influential offices, for example he became chairman of the supervisory board of Beiersdorf AG in 1922 .

politics

Melchior was close to the German Democratic Party , which he helped found without later holding an office. He was head of the German fiscal delegation for the Versailles Peace Treaty . He was unable to assert his positions in these negotiations and left the negotiations prematurely in protest against what he saw as impossible conditions.

Melchior was one of the most important German financial politicians who repeatedly refused to become Reich Finance Minister . His advice was sought, for example, during the occupation of the Ruhr , a three-day secret conference took place in Berlin from June 8, 1923, attended by Melchior, Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno , Foreign Minister Frederic von Rosenberg and, for the British government, John Maynard Keynes .

In 1923 Melchior and Max Warburg founded the Institute for Foreign Policy at the University of Hamburg , which still exists today. When the German Reich joined the League of Nations in 1926 , Melchior became the German representative, and in 1930 finally chairman of its finance committee. At the end of 1930 he resigned from the finance committee and concentrated on his new position, which he assumed in 1930, as deputy director of the newly founded Bank for International Settlements in Basel ( Switzerland ), which he held until April 1933.

death

Melchior suffered from heart problems, a stay in a sanatorium on the Bühlerhöhe in the summer of 1933 brought only temporary improvement. At the end of 1933, at the age of 62, he died of a stroke, weakened by a winter cold. Melchior's grave is in the Ohlsdorf Jewish cemetery .

Honors and aftermath

Memorial plaque on the last house of Melchior and his wife de Molénes in Hamburg
  • In 1930 Melchior was awarded the Mayor Stolten Medal , the highest honor in Hamburg after honorary citizenship.
  • In 1932 he received the Walther Rathenau Medal
  • January 18–30. June 2019: Exhibition Carl Melchior. Jewish champion of a European peace. Jewish Museum Berlin .

John Maynard Keynes set a memorial to his former negotiating “opponent” Melchior in his story, Friend and Enemy . Keynes first presented his memoirs to the Bloomsbury Group in the spring of 1920. The text was published in 1949, after Keynes' death. In 1995, Niall Ferguson claimed in his book Paper and Iron. Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927 , that Keynes' settlement with the Versailles Treaty (1919) was not only influenced by his Germanophilia but also by his homosexual affection for Melchior.

In 1984 the Carl Melchior Chair for International Politics was established at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in memory of Carl Melchior . That same university founded the Melchior Minerva Center for Economic Growth in 1999 , which aims to promote economic growth and research cooperation between Israel and Germany.

literature

Commons : Carl Melchior  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Peter Freimark:  Melchior, Carl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 11 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ^ Henning Albrecht: Alfred Beit: The Hamburg Diamond King . Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-943423-01-3 , pp. 19-20.
  3. ↑ Birgit Gewehr: Maria Rebecca Auerbach, b. Rée . Stolpersteine ​​project Hamburg, September 2015.
  4. ↑ Real estate: Heimhuder Straße 55 ( Memento of the original from April 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Reference 113-6_135, owner Marie Melchior in the Hamburg State Archives  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / recherche.staatsarchiv.hamburg.de
  5. ↑ Margarete Mehdorn: French culture in the Federal Republic of Germany Böhlau, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20417-4 , pp. 140f.
  6. ^ Website of the Institut français in Hamburg, Heimhuder Strasse 55.
  7. ^ Website of the Consulat Général de France à Hamburg , Heimhuder Strasse 55.
  8. ↑ John Maynard Keynes: Friend and Enemy, p. 11.
  9. ↑ John Maynard Keynes: Friend and Foe, p. 22.
  10. ^ ML: Carl Melchior, businessman and statesman . In: Der Morgen, Heft 7 (January 1934), pp. 398-401. ( online )
  11. ↑ Carl Melchior - a tombstone and nothing more . Blog post in Signs of Life from the Trench , April 24, 2015. Melchior's grave is in the Ohlsdorf Jewish Cemetery, Ohlsdorf, Ilandkoppel 68, field L1.
  12. ^ Matthias Schmook: A road for Carl Melchior. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , August 22, 2020, p. 15
  13. ↑ Melchior, Carl at Deutsche Biograpühie
  14. ↑ Carl Melchior
  15. ^ Felix Salmon: Niall Ferguson's history with Keynes. In: Reuters . May 7, 2013, accessed September 5, 2019 (English): "Brad DeLong has found a 1995 article by Niall Ferguson which pretty much puts the lie to Ferguson's claim about his take on John Maynard Keynes."
  16. ^ Melchior Minerva Center for Economic Growth , homepage at the HUJI
personal data
SURNAME Melchior, Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, banker and politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1933
Place of death Hamburg