Carl Hagen (banker)

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Carl Hagen also Karl Hagen , actually Carl Levy (born June 28, 1856 in Cologne ; died January 30, 1938 in Potsdam ) was a German banker and patron.

Life

Carl Hagen came from a Cologne banking family of Jewish faith. He was born in 1856 to Hermann Abraham Levy (actually: Löb) and Johanna Levy, née Coppel. Among his six siblings were among the brothers Albert Levy , later a pioneer of social work in Germany and Louis Hagen , who after training as a banker in Cologne, the paternal bank A. Levy & Co. initiated. The sister Emma later married the sculptor Hugo Rheinhold , the sister Fanny was married to the lawyer Maximilian Kempner . Carl Hagen had the family name Levy until 1906 and then changed it to the adopted name Hagen. Hagen was the maiden name of the wife of his brother Louis, who had already changed his surname in 1893. Carl Hagen was married to Katharina Philippi (1864–1906). There were four children from this marriage. The screenwriter Hans Oliva-Hagen is one of his grandchildren and the singer Nina Hagen is a great-granddaughter . From 1895, Carl Hagen and his family lived in the Villa Schwatlo, named after its builder Carl Schwatlo , at Kurfürstenstraße 57 / Derfflingerstraße 12 in the elegant Tiergarten district of Berlin . He also had the spacious Villa Carlshagen built as a summer residence in Potsdam on Lake Templin from 1906 .

Former home of Carl Hagen in Berlin-Tiergarten

At first, Carl Hagen worked like his brother Louis in his father's bank in Cologne. He later headed the company's Berlin representative office. Then he founded his own banking house Hagen & Co. in Berlin's Charlottenstrasse. The bank specialized in industrial finance and counted Bayerische Motoren Werke AG among its customers. Carl Hagen held numerous supervisory board mandates and was a member of the Jewish aid association Gesellschaft der Freunde . He carried the title of Privy Councilor of Commerce and received the Order of the Red Eagle 4th class in 1898 . From the founding year 1911 to 1936 he was a "supporting member" of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society . He was a member of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association and appeared repeatedly as a patron. In particular, he donated important works to the Berlin National Gallery. These included the paintings Landhaus in Rueil by Édouard Manet and The Afternoon of Children in Wargemont by Pierre-Auguste Renoir , both of which he financed in 1906. Together with the banker Karl Steinbart , he donated the painting The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois by Claude Monet in 1906 and the painting Wiese in Bezons by the same artist in 1907 .

His granddaughter Helga Hagen characterizes his attitude as follows: "My grandfather also tried to bring up his children appropriately. They were all enormously patriotic and enormously nationalistic. My grandfather did everything to get medals and decorations from the emperor and gave an enormous amount of money for them Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, gave wonderful pictures to museums. "

Carl Hagen died on January 30, 1938 at the age of 81. His grave can be found in the Jewish cemetery Schönhauser Allee in Berlin. A few weeks earlier, on January 1, 1938, the Hagen & Co. bank was liquidated due to anti-Jewish legislation. The family had to sell the villa in Berlin-Tiergarten in 1938 to Berliner Kindl Brauerei AG , which then made major changes to the building. The son Hermann Hagen was murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 .

literature

  • Günter Braun, Waldtraut Braun: Patronage in Berlin, citizenship and cultural competence under changing conditions . De Gruyter, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-11-013788-7 .
  • Cella-Margaretha Girardet: Jewish patrons for the Prussian museums in Berlin, a study on patronage in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic . Hänsel-Hohenhausen, Egelsbach 1997, ISBN 3-8267-1133-5 .
  • Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern , Peter-Klaus Schuster (ed.): Manet to van Gogh, Hugo von Tschudi and the struggle for modernity. Nationalgalerie Berlin and Neue Pinakothek Munich 1996, ISBN 3-7913-1748-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cella-Margaretha Girardet: Jewish patrons for the Prussian museums in Berlin, a study on patronage in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic , p. 166.
  2. ↑ see Claudia Bergemann with the collaboration of Marion Kazemi and Christel Wegeleben: Directory of members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, Part I: A - K , Berlin 1990, series of publications from the archive on the history of the Max Planck Society, Volume 3 / 1, page 100
  3. ^ Conversation with Helga Hagen in New York by Thomas Hartwig , in: The promised city: German-Jewish emigrants in New York; Conversations, impressions, etc. Pictures , Berlin: Das Arsenal 1986, ISBN 3-921810-66-3 , page 14. Helga Hagen was the daughter of the eldest son Hermann Hagen.
personal data
SURNAME Hagen, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hagen, Karl; Levy, Carl (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German banker and patron
DATE OF BIRTH June 28, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1938
Place of death Potsdam