The business of Mr. Ouvrard

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The business of Mr. Ouvrard. From the life of a brilliant speculator , one of Otto Wolff's with the help of the historian Dr. Alfred Ludwig Schmitz prepared biographical work on Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard .

History of origin

The 348-page edition was published in 1932 by Rütten & Loening Verlag in Frankfurt am Main and was reprinted in 1960 by the Rheinische Verlags-Anstalt in Wiesbaden. The title of the English translation is Ouvrard: Speculator of Genius , published in London in 1962. Henry Ashby Turner saw it in 1985 as "still a remarkable study". Without detracting from the seriousness, the author was also able to incorporate autobiographical features into it, partly inevitable due to the history of its origin. Since 1916 Otto Wolff felt compelled to look for means in his company that were suitable to cushion the inflation caused by the financing of the war . Active in the arms business, he became aware of the problem even before the economists. He read, looked for something comparable in history, found what he was looking for in the events from the French Revolution to the restoration epoch after Napoleon I and, in the merchant Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard , chose a person around whom everything could be summed up perfectly. Currency disruption, as with assignats and mandates , became apparent for the mark in Germany during the First World War . Historical reading became source studies and finally the economic-historical writer Otto Wolff (p. 9):

“The true connections between economy and politics are seldom conveyed to us through tradition and historiography; this book represents an attempt in this direction. "

Alfred Ludwig Schmitz emphasizes in the afterword that "the attempt is being made with the book to detach Ouvrard's personality from the shadow of Napoleon and to grasp it entirely from its own legality". (P. 279) This also served as a demarcation from Arthur Lévy 's book Un grand profiteur de guerre , which was a stimulus for Otto Wolff , as he was defamed by the National Socialist press as a war profiteer of the first order.

effect

The reference was made, and so it was inevitable that the lawyer Paul L. Weiden wrote about the relationship between Otto Wolff and Ottmar Strauss in a restitution request in 1950:

“Since 1904 they had worked and lived together with great success and experienced a rise that the shareholders of an OHG have seldom enjoyed. Herr Otto Wolff compared himself to one of Napoleon's great army suppliers, about whom he even wrote a book. In 1929 , however, the Napoleonic career took an interruption for both parties. "

On the other hand, the manner in which Paula Buber apparently made use of the "Ouvrard" to point a finger in 1953 was of a more refined manner . Her novel Muckensturm , written as early as 1938-40, was finally printed, in chapter 56 of which one of the main characters meets a nameless steel industrialist who in 1933 sharply condemned the Nazi system that had just emerged, which arouses astonishment because he had to be taken for a member at first that "caste that paved the way for them to power". At the meeting in Holland, however, the remark that he had recently brought over valuable works of art from Germany “just in case” was appealed to by the Reich Ministry of Finance in 1927-28 with audible press coverage for flight of capital and the shifting of foreign currency abroad - ultimately without success). The steel industrialist begins a conversation about “the historical material” of one of his visitor's books, with a particular interest in “certain economic and customs tendencies of the medieval imperial era, related to today's”. This could have been aimed at another steel industrialist instead of Otto Wolff, but a figure appears in the novel, a collector of Napoleon portraits and busts:

"Well, his maternal ancestor was Napoleon's army supplier, a court grocer who had become rich, of course."

Otto Wolff's real connection to the world of Ouvrard's merchants

That Wolff's relation to the Ouvrard material was not only of a literary nature can be seen from two incidents. In the years from 1920 to 1925 he developed into the main shareholder of NV Delfstoffen Maatschappij "Hollandia" (Delfo), which was closely connected to the Amsterdam bank Hope & Co. - an important business partner of Ouvrard in the Empire . The possibility of researching the archives of this old company also gave him an information advantage over other works about Ouvrard that were made during this period. After Ouvrard's failed Silberschatz project, one of the contributors stubbornly came to Hope & Co. with saved bills of exchange: Marc Antoine Grégoire Michel , known as Michel jeune. The latter had the reputation of having belonged to the “banquiers du coup d'État” who financed Napoleon's coup d'état . This did not prevent him from being paid with so-called army supplier goods like other military equipment suppliers . One of these goods belonged to two ironworks and two smelting furnaces; it was located in Neunkirchen and was sold on to the Stumm brothers in 1806. 119 years later, the Stumm Brothers company still existed, but it was down, the Reich Ministry of Finance and the Reich Ministry of Economics as well as the State of Prussia were discussing a support action. Accordingly, Otto Wolff's initiative in 1925 to reorganize the company by buying its French shares came in handy. Since the French side did not want to sell to a German company, Wolff's Amsterdam Delfo acted - in the style of Ouvrard, who had also used straw men several times . The hut made headlines. On February 10, 1933, the gasometer explosion in Neunkirchen caused a devastating accident with around 70 deaths. Wolff, against whom criminal proceedings for tax evasion were opened at the instigation of the National Socialists in 1934 , was now an ideal target for communist propaganda. In the summer, Comintern man Willi Munzenberg sent the writer Gustav Regulator “to the Saar to collect material for a book that he could throw into the 1935 election campaign ”. The result was a "Saar novel" that also addresses the accident:

"Where did the money come from? Didn't the Wolff over there give him one? The same money he saved on the workers. Werner laughed angrily. What if he had set his gasometer in the woods instead of in the middle of the workers' houses? Quite right, then maybe he could have bought Adolf less. "

Regulator later distanced himself from the novel with the advice "never to mash up art with party propaganda".

Details

The book contains a 15-page "Zeittafel zum Leben Ouvrard", a 6-page bibliography that is less used to obtain a picture of the time than to present the personality, 48 images (black and white) with precise information on origin, a 22-page reproduction of documents and an 8-page register.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Henry Ashby Turner : The big entrepreneurs and the rise of Hitler , Berlin 1985, p. 315
  2. ↑ Eckart Conze : "Titans of the modern economy". Otto Wolff (1881-1940) . In: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, p. 125
  3. ↑ Walther Herrmann: Otto Wolff (1881-1940) . In: Economic and Business Association in the Rhenish-Westphalian Industrial Area, etc. (Ed.): Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiographien , Volume 8, Münster 1962, p. 137
  4. ^ Henry Ashby Turner : The Big Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Hitler , Berlin 1985, p. 316
  5. ↑ Restitution application from attorney Paul L. Weiden to the Chamber for Compensation Matters at the Cologne Regional Court, 1950, RWWA, Dept. 72, A2-4-1, quoted from Elfi Pracht : Ottmar Strauss: Industrialist, State Official, Art Collector . In: Julius H. Schoeps et al. (Ed.): Menora. Yearbook for German-Jewish History. 1994 , Munich 1994, p. 49
  6. ^ Dittmar Dahlmann : The Otto Wolff company: from scrap iron trade to global corporation (1904 - 1929) . In: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, p. 90 f.
  7. ^ Georg Munk (di Paula Judith Buber): Muckensturm. A year in the life of a small town , Heidelberg 1953 (reprint Berlin 2008) p. 285
  8. ^ Dittmar Dahlmann: The Otto Wolff company: from scrap iron trade to global corporation (1904 - 1929) . In: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, p. 26 f.
  9. ↑ Marten G. Buist: At Spes non fracta. Hope & Co. 1770 - 1815. Merchant Bankers and Diplomats at Work , The Hague 1974, p. 37
  10. ↑ Louis Bergeron: Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire à l'Empire , Paris et al. 1978, p. 147 and 149
  11. ^ Gabriele B. Clemens: Real estate dealers and speculators. The socio-economic and historical significance of large buyers at the national goods auctions in the Rhenish departments (1803 - 1813) , Boppard am Rhein 1995, p. 188
  12. ^ Dittmar Dahlmann: The Otto Wolff company: from scrap iron trade to global corporation (1904 - 1929) . In: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, p. 74
  13. ↑ Eckart Conze: "Titans of the modern economy". Otto Wolff (1881-1940) . In: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, p. 132
  14. ↑ Gustav Regulator: The ear of Malchus. A life story , Frankfurt am Main / Basel 2007, p. 276
  15. ↑ Gustav Regulator: In the cross fire. A Saar novel , Editions du Carrefour , Paris 1934, p. 19
  16. ^ Alfred Diwersy: Gustav Regulator. Pictures and documents , Saarbrücken 1983, p. 51