Erik Blumenfeld

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Erik Blumenfeld (1968)

Erik Bernhard Blumenfeld (* 27. March 1915 in Hamburg , † 10. April 1997 ) was a German businessman and politician of the CDU .

Life and work

Stumbling block for Erik Blumenfeld in front of the Spetzgart Castle near Überlingen, which is part of the Salem boarding school

Erik Blumenfeld was the son of the Jewish ship owner, coal importer and trader Ernst Blumenfeld († 1927) from Hamburg and Edda († March 1946), the daughter of a Danish landowner. He spent his early childhood in Denmark with his older sister Sonja. In 1933 he graduated from the Salem Castle Boarding School , which he had attended from 1930. Before that, he was at the Oberrealschule Altona-Ottensen from 1924 and started school in the Bertha-Lyzeum in the then Prussian Altona in 1921 and lived on the former country estate Gustav Godeffroy on the Elbchaussee , which his father had inherited from Bernhard Blumenfeld . He completed his language and commercial training in England until 1935 , after which he studied mining and metallurgy at the TH Berlin until 1939 . As early as 1938 he was appointed a member of the board of the family-owned Norddeutsche Kohlen- und Cokes Werke AG . From 1939 to 1940 he took part in the Second World War as a private . He was released from the Wehrmacht as a “half-Jew”, arrested on December 7, 1942 for “ decomposing military strength ”, transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp in October 1943 . Since his mother had contact with Heinrich Himmler's body masseur Felix Kersten , Blumenfeld was released for forced labor in August 1944, but then arrested again on January 9, 1945 in Berlin for attempting to hide a Jew. He managed to escape and he was from mid-April 1945 by the then managing director and general counsel of Diago works Moeller & Co and later time -Verleger Gerd Bucerius , who is also the family lawyer Blumenfeld, was in his house in Hamburg-Othmarschen hidden.

After the end of the war, he set about rebuilding his father's company - Bd. Blumenfeld GmbH and Blumenfeld & Co. - with a focus on shipping and fuel trading, of which he became personally liable partner in 1946 after the death of his mother. In 1955 he also became managing director of Nordatlantische Kohlen Schiffahrt-Gesellschaft mbH and was one of the largest West German coal importers until the end of 1957.

Also in 1946, Blumenfeld became Vice President of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce and remained in this position until 1954. There he worked on the industry committee and took over the chairmanship of the transport committee. From May 1946 he was also in charge of the municipal transport office - on a voluntary basis - and thus, in combination with his functions as a Chamber of Commerce, was in a key position for all Hamburg traffic and transport issues. As early as April 3, 1946, the appointed citizenship made him a member of the 30-person denazification central commission set up on behalf of the British military government . Blumenfeld was personally well acquainted with John Jay McCloy .

The Übersee-Club on the Inner Alster was re-established in June 1948 on the initiative of Blumenfeld. In 1948 with the Anglo-German Club on Hamburg's Outer Alster and in 1952 with the organization Transatlantik-Brücke - from 1956 Atlantik-Brücke , he was one of the founding members. For the Atlantic, he was vice chairman and treasurer. In 1954 he founded the Haus Rissen Hamburg - Institute for International Politics and Economics .

According to the news magazine DER SPIEGEL on February 2, 1970, after his political career in 1969 , Blumenfeld took over the chairmanship of the board of the newly founded German branch of the US investment sales company "Plafinance" based in Vaduz in the Principality of Liechtenstein . He was also the owner of the seaport publisher Erik Blumenfeld in Hamburg, owner of a ship brokerage company, shareholder in Norddeutsche Kohlen- und Cokes Werke AG and chairman of the supervisory board - until the end of 1969 - of the Hamburg company for apartment ownership and family homes (GEWOFA).

Election poster for the Hamburg state elections in 1966

From 1977 to 1991 he was President of the German-Israeli Society .

Honors

After Blumenfeld had refused to be awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1968 with reference to the Hamburg tradition , he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit in 1989. In 1980, Blumenfeld received an honorary doctorate from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev , Be'er Scheva , and in 1992 from the Technion University of Technology , Haifa . In 1990 he was awarded the Mayor Stolten Medal in his hometown and after his death the Blankeneser Bahnhofsplatz was named after him. In 2014 Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling block for him in front of his former Schloss Salem school . - On the occasion of his 100th birthday, the CDU awarded the Erik Blumenfeld Medal in his honor for the first time and went to the current chairman of the Atlantik-Brücke and pioneer of the CDU, Friedrich Merz .

Private

He was friends with the German actress Brigitte Horney . Gerd Bucerius and Axel Springer were among his best friends, and Countess Marion Dönhoff also lived in his house for seven years from 1946 . His first marriage was after the end of the war from 1945 to the artist Sibylle Brügelmann, then shortly after joining the German Bundestag from 1962 to the Swiss Ursula Roelli and from 1987 to the Hamburg lawyer Brigitte Lichtenauer-Blumenfeld. His uncle was Otto Blumenfeld and his grandfather Bernhard Blumenfeld.

Political party

Blumenfeld was a founding member of the CDU in Hamburg. As early as 1946, the party nominated him for the office of Senator for Economics in the case of participation in government (which subsequently did not occur). In the summer of 1949 he was part of the CDU negotiating commission with state chairman Hugo Scharnberg and VBH founder Paul de Chapeaurouge , which explored the possibility of an election agreement with the FDP in the 1949 federal election and the subsequent state elections. From its founding on September 28, 1953 to November 26, 1954, he was together with Edgar Engelhard ( FDP ) and Erwin Jacobi ( DP ) chairman of the bourgeois electoral party Hamburg-Block (HB). His successor in the HB chairmanship was Mayor Kurt Sieveking . In 1958 he was elected regional chairman of the CDU in Hamburg. He held this office until 1968 and was elected honorary chairman in 1980.

MP

Blumenfeld (right) with politicians from Vietnam (1968)

As early as 1946, Blumenfeld was elected to the Hamburg parliament for the first time in the Harvestehude constituency and remained a member until 1955. From 1966 to 1970 and from 1978 to 1979 he was again a member of the citizenry. From 1953 until he left the citizenry he was parliamentary group leader of the Hamburg block in the citizenry. In 1961 he became a member of the German Bundestag , and in 1973 also of the European Parliament . In addition to his work in the Bundestag, he was again a member of the Hamburg Parliament from 1966 to 1970 and from 1978 to September 30, 1979. He left the Bundestag in 1980 and the European Parliament in 1989.

During his time as a member of parliament, Blumenfeld was primarily involved in foreign policy . He was particularly committed to developing and maintaining relations with Israel and the United States . In early 1968, Blumenfeld visited South Vietnam in his capacity as chairman of the Vietnam Aid Committee .

Publications

  • Profiles: Personal u. Political 1955–1970 . Seehafen-Verlag, Hamburg 1970.

literature

  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 44f.
  • Frank Bajohr : Erik Blumenfeld in the Hamburg Heads series , published by the ZEIT Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius. Ellert & Richter Verlag, Hamburg 2010. ISBN 978-3-8319-0403-7
  • Frank Bajohr: Hanseatic and cross-border commuters. Erik Blumenfeld, a political biography. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0600-4 ( review )
  • Helmut Stubbe da Luz : Erik Blumenfeld. Was there a mission to fulfill in the CDU? In: approximations. 50 years of Christian-Jewish cooperation in Hamburg. Hamburg 2002, pp. 67-73.
  • Helmut Stubbe da Luz: Blumenfeld, Erik . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 3 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , p. 50-52 .

Web links

Commons : Erik Blumenfeld  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Erik Blumenfeld…, Hamburger Abendblatt from March 27, 2010
  2. ^ Adenauer Foundation: Blumenfeld
  3. ↑ Founding of the shipping company . Hamburger Abendblatt from October 4, 1955
  4. ↑ 19,000-ton "Cassiopeia" in Hamburg / twelve round trips a year. Big coal charter deals . Hamburger Abendblatt dated July 11, 1956
  5. ^ Ruhr / Zechen. The political coals . DER SPIEGEL 43/1957 of October 23, 1957
  6. ↑ The Hamburger Abendblatt congratulates. Bd. Blumenfeld founded his company 100 years ago. The "Hohenzollern" also steamed with its coal . Hamburger Abendblatt from January 7, 1971
  7. ↑ Der Club , anglo-german-club.de , accessed on February 28, 2016
  8. ^ History of the Atlantik-Brücke , atlantik-bruecke.org ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on February 28, 2016
  9. ^ Haus Rissen , Geschichte , accessed on February 28, 2016
  10. ↑ Transatlantic Culture Wars. Shepard Stone, the Ford Foundation and European Anti-Americanism (= Transatlantic Historical Studies. Vol. 21). Steiner, Stuttgart 2004
  11. ^ Professional: Erik Blumenfeld , DER SPIEGEL of February 2, 1970
  12. ↑ Vortex for order rain to Bonn deputies. In: Abendblatt.de. Hamburger Abendblatt , June 28, 1968, accessed on August 4, 2018 ("[...] I kindly ask you to refrain from awarding me a medal. We Hamburgers maintain an old tradition on this issue, which some may not always understand, and I intend to keep this up for myself quite consciously. ").
  13. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette. No. 171, September 12, 1989, p. 4294 ( online ).
  14. ↑ Matthias Schmoock: memory of a great Hanseaten. In: Hamburger Abendblatt. January 11, 2014, accessed on March 2, 2016 (access with costs).
  15. ↑ Erik Blumenfeld in the series Hamburger Köpfe , Bajohr, page 123 / time table
  16. ↑ Erik Blumenfeld, Profiles. Personal and Political 1955–1970 (Hamburg: Seehafen Verlag, 1970).
  17. ^ Hanseatic and cross-border commuters. Erik Blumenfeld, a political biography. , Bajohr, page 198
personal data
SURNAME Blumenfeld, Erik
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blumenfeld, Erik Bernhard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman and politician (CDU), MdHB, MdB, MdEP
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg , Germany
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1997
Place of death Hamburg , Germany