Georg Wertheim

Georg Wertheim (portrait of Emil Orlik ), ca.1930

In the first Wertheim department store in Stralsund , Western Pomerania

Berlin parent company Abraham Wertheim in the illumination for the Crown Prince's declaration of age on May 6, 1900

Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz

Georg Wertheim (born February 11, 1857 in Stralsund , † December 31, 1939 in Berlin ) was a German businessman and entrepreneur in the textile retail trade . He was one of the founders of the Wertheim Group .

Live and act

Wertheim grew up in Stralsund. After completing his commercial apprenticeship at Wolff & Apolant , in 1876, together with his brother Hugo, he took over the Stralsund shop for haberdashery and trimmings from parents Abraham Wertheim (1819–1896) and Ida Wertheim, born in 1875 . Wolff (1830-1918).

The two brothers quickly brought new ideas to the business: customers were given the opportunity to exchange goods, the prices were no longer negotiable but reliable, and sales were only made for cash . Since he did without certain previously common calculation items ( risk surcharge , storage costs ), he was able to offer his goods more cheaply than the competition. The concept was successful, he was able to open a larger store on the Alter Markt in Stralsund, and after opening a branch in Rostock , a first branch was established on Rosenthaler Strasse in Berlin-Mitte in 1885 and the range was expanded to include household goods.

Wertheim quickly recognized the changing requirements of the growing metropolis Berlin in the time of industrialization and opened the first retail store called a department store in 1890 on the corner of Moritzplatz and Oranienstrasse . The sales rooms were more spacious and allowed for a better presentation of goods, the goods were freely displayed, and larger quantities allowed cheaper sales.

Increasingly, however, the restrictions that the shops in the middle of the residential area brought with them became apparent: the rooms were not particularly large and offered little opportunities for the expanding business.

Georg Wertheim had trained on Sunday courses at the Berlin Art Academy and was now working with the architect Alfred Messel to design a building that was solely intended for the sale of goods. In 1892 a branch was opened on Leipziger Strasse, and in 1894 sales began in the department store on Oranienstrasse that was the first to be planned and built for this purpose.

The famous Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz , the first phase of which began in 1896 and opened in 1897, went one step further. Wertheim wanted to be able to fulfill all the needs of its upscale customers, who had previously stayed away from department stores, under one roof, and the new building in the city's busiest square was soon opened. In the following years the building was extensively expanded several times. The Wertheim on Leipziger Platz was mentioned in the same breath as Harrods in London and the Galeries Lafayette in Paris . The big sales hall with its arched glass roof, the more than twenty meter high square columns and the larger than life statue of a woman with a shopping cart, a work by the sculptor Ludwig Manzel, was particularly famous . The wall paintings by F. Gehrke - an ancient port and its modern counterpart with the steamer Germany - celebrated the trade.

Further new buildings on Rosenthaler Strasse (1903), on Königsstrasse (1911) and again on Moritzplatz (1913) followed. In the 1920s, Wertheim financed the relocation of the new subway line D via Moritzplatz to enable customers to access it directly from the subway platform, as his competitor Rudolph Karstadt had done in the department store on Hermannplatz . In the end, direct access could not be implemented.

In 1905 Georg Wertheim became a Protestant and married Ursula Gilka, granddaughter of the liqueur manufacturer JA Gilka , with whom he had two children. In 1911 Georg Wertheim acquired Saßleben Castle , where the family spent their holidays in the following decades. In order to protect his wife from the effects of the Nazi racial laws , Georg Wertheim divorced her in December 1938 and then gave her the castle, which removed it from the Nazi bureaucracy's expropriation efforts. In 1945 after the end of the war, the castle was destroyed to the ground by a fire with an unknown cause and its ruins were later torn down.

In 1913, the Wertheim Group was the largest German company of its kind. The success soon called Neider onto the scene, and since most of the department stores, such as Wertheim, were owned by Jewish family businesses, there were various campaigns against the department stores. They were accused of working with the wrong measures, offering inferior goods, exploiting employees and morally endangering customers. The Wertheim family tried to counteract such allegations with special quality and with safety precautions for their employees.

After the seizure of power of the Nazi party in 1933, the Jewish members of the Wertheim family were forced to the shares in the business to "arisieren" . On January 1, 1937, Georg Wertheim left the company. The company name was changed to Allgemeine Warenhandels-Gesellschaft (AWAG) and the company was declared "German".

Wertheim family grave on the Trinity Churchyard II in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Georg Wertheim died on December 31, 1939 in Berlin of pneumonia . He was buried in a family grave in the Trinity Churchyard II (in field H).

After the Second World War , AWAG was expropriated in the GDR in 1949; in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Hertie department store group bought the majority of the shares in 1951 and continued to operate under the Wertheim name. The members of the family received a small amount of compensation and gave up all claims on the shares sold to Hertie. In 1984 Hertie acquired the rest of the Wertheim shares.

For a long time, the department store on the corner of Schloßstrasse and Treitschkestrasse in Berlin-Steglitz was of great importance. In the 1960s it was greatly expanded, which led to the restructuring of an entire residential area (in the direction of Schildhornstrasse). In the following decades, a large Karstadt department store and several covered shopping centers were built right next to the Wertheim department store up to the corner of Schloßstraße and Bornstraße, where a department store belonging to the Held chain , later Hertie , had been located for a long time .

In 1994 the only remaining department store in Wertheim on Kurfürstendamm passed into the ownership of the Karstadt company together with the Hertie Group .

The descendants of the Wertheim family now live in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA and in 2003 filed a lawsuit against Karstadt for compensation. A return transfer of the companies and properties expropriated in the GDR, which they carried out, failed in court in 2004. In 2005, a lawsuit by KarstadtQuelle was rejected, making compensation more likely. On March 30, 2007 the KarstadtQuelle Group announced that it would compensate the heirs of the Jewish merchant family Wertheim, which had been expropriated by the National Socialists. The group announced that an out-of-court settlement had been reached with the Jewish Claims Conference .

literature

• Erica Fischer, Simone Ladwig-Winters: The Wertheims. Story of a family. 2nd edition, Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-62292-2 .
• Simone Ladwig-Winters: Wertheim. A department store company and its owners. Example of the development of Berlin department stores up to "Aryanization". (= Adaptation, self-assertion, resistance , volume 8.) LIT, Münster 1997, ISBN 3-8258-3062-4 . (also dissertation , Free University Berlin , Berlin 1996)

Web links

Commons : Georg Wertheim  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Georg Wertheim (short biography)
• The department store , from: Jewish Correspondence No. 2/2002
• German department store kings ( Memento from January 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive )