Felix German

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Felix German (1928)

Felix Deutsch (born May 16, 1858 in Breslau ; † May 19, 1928 in Berlin ) was a German-Jewish industrialist and co-founder of the AEG .

Working life

Felix Deutsch was trained as a businessman and at the age of 15 joined W. Heimann in Wroclaw, a manufacturer of sugar processing machines, and traveled through Germany, Poland and Austria for this company.

In 1882 he moved to Jakob Landau's bank in Berlin. After just 5 months, he had brought the Rositzer sugar factory up to the state-of-the-art and was appointed director of the factory. This did not please him, however, and so after the acquaintance with Emil Rathenau , who had just founded a study society for the evaluation of light bulbs, in April 1883 he joined the now established German Edison Society , from which the Allgemeine Electricitäts- Gesellschaft ( AEG ), where he was director two years later. In 1901 he was accepted into the Society of Friends .

After Emil Rathenau's death in 1915, he became chairman of the board of directors and later chairman of the company's board of directors. In his career he developed the sales organization of AEG at home and abroad as a decisive creation for the business conduct of the entire group.

Within management, he was seen as a rival of Emil Rathenau's son Walther Rathenau , who also joined AEG and who adored Felix Deutsch's wife Elisabeth 'Lili' Deutsch according to the popular pattern of Goethe - Charlotte von Stein . The friendship was based on reciprocity, and so after Rathenau's murder Lili Deutsch was one of the sources of Harry Graf Kessler when compiling Rathenau's biography.

In 1921 the Karlsruhe Technical University awarded Felix Deutsch an honorary doctorate, and Cologne University followed suit with an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Political Science. He was also an honorary citizen of the Technical University of Berlin, head of numerous technical and economic associations, long-term member of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council .

Publications

  • What can the employees expect from the socialists? (1919)
  • Contemporary history essays on economic issues

family

Felix Deutsch's tombstone in the Lichterfelde park cemetery

Felix Deutsch was born as the third child of cantor Moritz Deutsch and Amalie Ausch from Breslau.

On October 17, 1893, Felix Deutsch married Elisabeth "Lili" Kahn in Mannheim, daughter of Bernhard Kahn and Emma Eberstadt from Mannheim.

The couple had three children:

  • Gertrud Deutsch (born September 27, 1894 in Berlin, † in May 1940 in Ostend), married to the composer and conductor Gustav Brecher (born February 5, 1879 in Eichwald, † in May 1940 in Ostend, shared suicide to avoid deportation in to escape a concentration camp )
  • Frank Gerhart Deutsch (* 1899 in Berlin; † September 1934 in Ivry-en-Montagne ), married to the actress Maria Ley (* August 1, 1898 in Vienna; † October 14, 1999 in New York), who later became the director Erwin Piscator got married.
  • Georg Felix Deutsch (born April 5, 1901 in Berlin, † July 15, 1957 in London, married to Julia Holzapfel, later Ward).

The family lived in a stately home in Berlin W10, Rauchstr. 16. In Mittelschreiberhau in the Giant Mountains the family built a country estate in the immediate vicinity of the country house of the writer Gerhart Hauptmann , with whom they cultivated an intense friendship.

Lili Deutsch ran a large salon. The most important personalities of the financial world, industry, trade, politics and diplomacy, as well as the arts and sciences, met there. Among others was the papal nuncio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII. welcome guest. Lili Deutsch sponsored such well-known artists as Richard Strauss , who often stayed with Deutschs during his stays in Berlin, and was in close contact with Maximilian Harden and Walther Rathenau . With her brother Otto Hermann Kahn , she made it possible to publish the collected legal treatises of her brother Franz Kahn, who died young .

Felix Deutsch died in Berlin and was buried next to his parents in the Jewish cemetery in Breslau. But there is also a large tombstone in the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde in Berlin, on which only his life data are written. Felix Pinner (Frank Faßland) published a very lively contemporary portrait in 1922 in the “Weltbühne”. It was then included in the book edition "German Business Guide".

The Deutsch family and their importance for Germany were no longer valid when the National Socialists came to power. Lili Deutsch wrote to her son Georg in England in 1939 about the “difficult darkness of the present” shortly before she had the exit papers with each other and was able to emigrate to Belgium with her daughter Gertrud and her husband Gustav Brecher. In Ostend they waited in the hotel for their valuable possessions, which had gone to Luxembourg but had not been given to them. During this time they were supported by Addie Kahn, her sister-in-law from New York. The last message from them was a postcard to friends in Switzerland dated April 27, 1940. Since the German troops marched in, they have all been considered lost.

literature

  • Mary Jane Matz: The many lives of Otto H. Kahn. New York: Pendragon Press 1963.
  • Friedrich Mörtzsch:  German, Felix. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 623 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Felix Pinner (Frank Fassland), German business leader, Verlag der Weltbühne, Berlin, 15th, expanded edition 1925, pp. 259–264; originally in issue 22 of June 1, 1922 of the Weltbühne, p. 548ff.
  • Wilderotter, Hans (Ed.): The extremes are touching - Walther Rathenau 1867–1922; An exhibition by the German Historical Museum in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute , New York. Argon, Berlin, 1993 (families Eberstadt, Kahn, Deutsch, Jonas, Pollack) therein: Schulin, Ernst: Walther Rathenaus Diotima; Lili Deutsch, her family and the group around Gerhart Hauptmann (pp. 55–66).
  • John Kobler: Otto The Magnificent. The Life of Otto Kahn. Charles Scribner's Sons , New York: MacMillan Publishing Company 1988.
  • Thomas Irmer: "The time will come when it all has to be paid back" . The AEG and anti-Semitism, in: Biggeleben, Christof / Schreiber, Beate / Steiner, Kilian JL (eds.): “Arization” in Berlin, Berlin 2007, pp. 121–149.
  • Dr. Felix Deutsch on his 70th birthday. AEG-Rundschau on May 16, 1928.

Individual evidence

  1. John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 117.

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