Hans Fuerstenberg

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Hans Fürstenberg (around 1928)

Hans Fürstenberg (French Jean Fürstenberg ; born January 20, 1890 in Berlin , † May 3, 1982 in Beaumesnil , France ) was a Franco-German banker and book collector.

Life

Hans Fürstenberg was the son of the banker Carl Fürstenberg and Daniela Natanson. After graduating from high school in 1908, he first studied in Berlin and Munich and then from 1910 completed a banking apprenticeship at the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft (BHG) , which largely belonged to his father, which also took him to London and Paris from 1912 to 1914. Thanks to his large private fortune, Fürstenberg was able to build up a bibliophile book collection at a young age. He was also active as a journalist and scientist in this field. 1914-1915 he worked as a volunteer soldier in the First World War and the Iron Cross awarded. From 1915 until the end of the war in 1918 he was employed in the banking department of the German General Government in occupied Belgium in Brussels , where he worked with Hjalmar Schacht , Willy Dreyfus and Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy .

From 1919, after his father partially retired, he was one of the business owners of the BHG and expanded the corporate lending business. Like his father, he became a member of the Society of Friends . Even after power was handed over to the National Socialists in 1933, he was a member of the BHG's administrative board from 1935 to 1937 and represented it on 25 supervisory boards.

As a Jew, he had to emigrate in 1936 and paid the Reich flight tax for it , but was able to take his library with 16,000 volumes with him. In 1938 he bought and moved into the renaissance castle Beaumesnil in Normandy . In 1938 he donated his collection of 800 first editions of the Weimar Classics to the Bibliothèque nationale de France . After the outbreak of war in 1939, he and the library director Julien Cain organized a partial relocation of the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale to Beaumesnil. The holdings of the Archives nationales and the private archives of the Belgian king had also been brought there to safety when, after the German occupation of France in 1940, the Wehrmacht's military archives had the archives returned to Paris. The archivist and senior war administrator Georg Winter referred Gerhard Utikal from the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to the Fürstenberg library, which was then apparently largely transferred from the ERR to the central library of the NSDAP High School (ZBHS), with the provenance being hushed up. In 1950, the librarian Walter Grothe published a work on cradle prints from the turn of the century , which primarily discussed Fürstenberg collection items without revealing their origin. After the liberation in 1945, part of the Fürstenberg collection disappeared from the holdings of the ZBHS in Annenheim and Tanzenberg Castle . Fürstenberg later commented that “a knowledgeable book thief must have been at work who picked out several of the actual“ pearls ””. Fürstenberg's donation of books to the Bibliothèque nationale de France was successfully concealed from the research carried out by Hermann Fuchs , who was head of the library protection department at the military commander in France from 1940 to 1944.

Fürstenberg was persecuted by the Gestapo in France, fled to Switzerland in 1940 and thus escaped the Holocaust. He returned to Beaumesnil in 1945, where he began to fill in the gaps in the collections. He was a member of the Society of Bibliophiles , the Grolier Club and the Maximilian Society . He published a number of philosophical and art historical writings.

Fürstenberg was again a member of the administrative board of BHG in Germany in 1948 and its chairman in 1952. In 1954 he switched to the BHG supervisory board as chairman and was honorary chairman there from 1972 until his death.

Fonts (selection)

  • Introduction to aesthetics. Reflections on the art of painting . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1978
  • La gravure originale dans l'illustration du livre français au dixhuitième siècle . Hauswedell, Hamburg 1975
  • Le Grand Siècle en France et ses bibliophiles. Volumes à provenance, manuscrits et documents de la Fondation Furstenberg-Beaumesnil et de la Collection Jean et Eugénie Furstenberg . Hauswedell, Hamburg 1972
  • Dialectic of the XXI. Century. A discourse. The new way of thinking from atomic physics to the sciences of humans . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1972
  • Memories. My path as a banker and Carl Fürstenberg's age . Rheinische Verlags-Anstalt, Wiesbaden 1961.
  • Dialectique du XXe siècle. Essai pour une logique du réel . Plon, Paris 1956
  • Carl Furstenberg. The life story of a German banker 1870–1914 . Ullstein, Berlin 1931
  • Napoleon as a book collector. Illustrated by examples from the author's collection . Printed by J. Beltz in Langensalza, Berlin 1931
  • The French Book in the Eighteenth Century and the Empire . Society of Bibliophiles, Weimar 1929
  • Life in Germany . In: Jahrbuch der Einbandkunst , Vol. 3/4, 1929/30, pp. 90–96.
  • Three years of gold standard . Julius Springer, Berlin 1927.
  • A country without resources - considerations on the economic situation in Germany. Liebheit & Thiesen, Berlin 1925

literature

  • Sem C. Sutter: Looting of Jewish Collections in France by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg . In: Regine Dehnel (Hrsg.): Jewish book possession as looted property (= magazine for libraries and bibliography , special issues 88). Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 120-134.
  • Sotheby's London: The collection of Otto Schäfer. Part 4: The Hans Fürstenberg Collection of eighteenth-century French books . London 1995.
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 Vol. 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life , Munich 1980, pp. 208f.
  • Collection of Hans Fürstenberg. German literature of the 19th century . Catalog, 2 parts. Fritz Eggert antiquarian bookshop, Stuttgart 1966/67
  • The Italian Renaissance bindings of the Fürstenberg library . Maximilian Society, Hamburg 1966
  • Rudolf Adolph: Hans Fürstenberg (= Bibliophile Profile Vol. 3). P. Pattloch, Aschaffenburg 1960.
  • Rolf E. Lüke: The Berlin trading company in a century of German economy 1856-1956 . Berlin 1956.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Sem C. Sutter: Looting of Jewish Collections in France by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg . 2006, p. 126 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Fürstenberg, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Furstenberg, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-German banker and bibliophile
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 1982
Place of death Beaumesnil (Eure) , France