Adele Spitzeder

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Adele Spitzeder

Adele Spitzeder (also Adele Vio ; born February 9, 1832 in Berlin as Adelheid Spitzeder; † October 27, 1895 in Munich ) was a German actress , cheater and folk singer .

Life

Adele Spitzeder was the daughter of the singer and actor couple Josef Spitzeder and Betty Spitzeder-Vio . She attended expensive private schools and socialized in high society. In 1856 she made her debut as an actress in Coburg and was then engaged in Mannheim , Munich, Brno , Nuremberg , Frankfurt am Main , Karlsruhe and Altona . She had several girlfriends.

Spitzeder did not have an apartment of his own but lived in hotels and inns and had a private employee. She could not finance this lavish lifestyle with her income from acting.

The Spitzedersche private bank

Completely penniless, she promised the wife of a carpenter ten percent interest a month for 100 guilders and immediately paid her the first two monthly interest. Word got around quickly and soon other citizens came who wanted to invest their money on these terms. In 1869 she and her partner Emilie Stier founded a bank in Munich's Dachauer Strasse . She continued to pay the interest in cash, which was not common at the time and gave her company some word of mouth.

The “Spitzedersche Privatbank” went from being an insider tip to a large company in a very short time. In 1871, Spitzeder moved from a simple hotel to the house purchased for 54,000 guilders in Schönfeldstrasse 9, in the first location in Munich. She had this property converted and lavishly furnished for her own purposes.

Their business practices and accounting were not only unconventional, they were downright chaotic. The money was piled up in sacks in the apartment and some of it was kept in a hairdresser's safe. Employees, all without commercial training, regularly used the funds and the financial accounting was limited to a receipt book in which it was noted who had paid how much. There was no systematic commercial administration of the external funds it received ; Spitzeder's basic concept was a Ponzi system , the first on record in Germany and probably the world.

Spitzeder knew the benefits of a good public presentation; she bribed several editors with up to five-digit guilder amounts for positive press coverage. At times she even had her own newspaper. She paid loan brokers commissions of five to seven percent of the loan amount submitted. With generous donations and sometimes resolute, sometimes pious appearance, she gained trust and a reputation as a benefactor. For example, Spitzeder opened the people's kitchen in the Orlandohaus on Platzl .

Due to the mostly rural customers from the northern area around Munich, their facility was soon called "Dachauer Bank". The Spitzeder household with an attached "bank" had 40 employees. Farmers sold their farms because they believed they could live on the interest. Spitzeder expanded its business and bought and sold various houses and properties all over Bavaria .

At its prime, it had 83 employees, many of them credit agents, and issued more than 1,000 bills a day. People brought in more than 100,000 guilders every day; Spitzeder took business away from other banks, so the Münchner Sparkasse suffered 50,000 guilders in debt in one year. She was able to act freely for a long time because there was as yet no banking law and no financial supervision to bother her.

Bankruptcy and conviction

Spitzeder was able to withstand the increasing pressure from the government, the banks and individual newspapers, which campaigned against the "swindle bank", for some time. When the opponents organized around 60 creditors who wanted to have their money paid out at the same time, the bank collapsed. Spitzeder was not solvent and was arrested on November 12, 1872 on charges of fraud.

In just under two years, 32,000 citizens were cheated out of a total of 38 million guilders (the equivalent of 400 million euros). The liquidator found assets that were only 15 percent of the claims. Some citizens committed suicide . Churches were also ruined. At the same time, the banking system and the economy plunged into the start-up crisis , part of which was the Spitzeder bankruptcy.

Adele Spitzeder was tried and sentenced to three years in prison after ten months of pre-trial detention. The lack of official bookkeeping requirements and the fact that Spitzeder would never have advertised with any securities were recognized as mitigating the penalty. For health reasons, Spitzeder did not serve her sentence in prison, but in the prison on Baaderstrasse in Munich, where she wrote her memoirs.

Life after imprisonment

After her imprisonment, Spitzeder went abroad because she could no longer get any engagements in Germany, but then returned to Munich and published the story of my life in 1878 . In 1880 she tried again to open a banking business, but was immediately arrested again due to lack of authorization.

Spitzeder later appeared as a folk singer under the name Adele Vio and, supported by friends and patrons, led a relatively carefree life.

On October 27, 1895, Adele Spitzeder died of heart failure in Munich at the age of 63 .

tomb

Grave of Adele Spitzeder in the Altes Südfriedhof , Munich

Adele Spitzeder was buried in the city's Old Southern Cemetery . The grave site is located in grave field 18 - row 14 - place 26 location . The tombstone does not reveal the name Adele Spitzeder because she was buried there anonymously.

Editing of the topic

As early as February 12, 1873, the Königsberg City Theater had the first performance of a farce with singing in one act by Caesar Beck: Adele Spitzeder as a marriage obstacle, or: The suspended Dachauerbank and the interrupted coffee gossip.

Adele Spitzeder's story was brought to the stage as a puppet play by Gabriel Gailler and, in 1972, Martin Sperr , directed by Peer Raben, turned it into a television play with Ruth Drexel in the title role. The play Die Spitzeder von Sperr premiered on September 11, 1977.

In 1966 the comedy Das Gold von Bayern by Reinhard Raffalt was published by Prestel-Verlag in Munich.

In 1992, the television documentary Adele Spitzeder or the fairy tale of the interest by Hannes Spring was created for Bayerischer Rundfunk .

In 2010 the topic was filmed again as a co-production by Bayerischer Rundfunk and ORF . Birgit Minichmayr played the Adele Spitzeder. The film was shot in Regensburg , Munich, Tittling and Vienna . Under the title The Seductress Adele Spitzeder , the historical film was broadcast on January 11, 2012 by ARD at 8:15 p.m.

literature

  • Adele Spitzeder: story of my life. Stuttgarter Verlagscomptoir, Stuttgart 1878, (reprint: Buchendorfer Verlag, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-927984-54-X , ( historical original texts on the history of Munich )).
  • Puppet Theater Museum Munich (Ed.): Adele Spitzeder. Marionette play about a Munich financial scandal in 1873. Verbatim reproduction of an old manuscript . With a foreword by Irena Raithel-Živsa. Puppentheatermuseum, Munich 1981, ( series of publications by the Münchner Puppentheatermuseum H. 2).
  • Dirk Schumann: The case of Adele Spitzeder 1872. A study on the mentality of the "little people" in the early days . In: Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 58th year 1995, pp. 991-1026 ( digitized version ).
  • Christine Spöcker: The money man. A tragicomic piece about the capitalist excess of Adele Spitzeder, banker in Munich, who in 1872 drove 30,860 creditors into disaster by the bankruptcy of her Dachauer Bank. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-10-074201-X , ( Theater im S.-Fischer-Verlag ).
  • Karl Weinberger: Adele Spitzeder. Novel of a strange woman . Madruck, Frankfurt am Main 1956.
  • Heidi Rehn: death in the English garden. Historical detective novel. Emons Verlag, Cologne 2008. [Spitzeder's credit practice forms the background to a murder story.]
  • Richard Winkler:  Spitzeder, Adele Luise. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 717 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Julian Nebel: Adele Spitzeder: The greatest banking fraud of all time , FinanzBook Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-95972-048-9 .

Web links

Commons : Adele Spitzeder  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Harald Freiberger: This woman made the fraud by the "pyramid scheme" great. In: sueddeutsche.de. November 11, 2017. Retrieved June 14, 2018 .
  2. ^ Julian Nebel: Adele Spitzeder. Actress, banker, cheater . In: G / history. People, events, epochs . No. 3/2018 . Bayard Media, 2018, p. 72 ff .
  3. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Adele Spitzeder
  4. ↑ From the BR in the First - The Seductress Adele Spitzeder. Press release. In: br.de. January 11, 2012, accessed July 9, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Spitzeder, Adele
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vio, Adele; Spitzeder, Adelheid (maiden name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION German actress and cheater
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1832
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1895
Place of death Munich