Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy

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Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy -Bartholdy (1868–1949) banker, industrialist, Agfa aniline and aniline paints, IG Farben, grave at the Hörnli cemetery, Riehen, Basel-Stadt
Grave in the Hörnli cemetery , Riehen, Basel-Stadt

Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy (born March 2, 1868 in Berlin , † July 26, 1949 in Basel ) was a German banker and industrialist . As the main shareholder in Agfa , which his father founded and which became part of IG Farben , he was a member of the supervisory board of both companies. He was forced out of his company by " Aryanization " and the persecution of the Jews and only barely survived the persecution of the Jews in Germany.

life and work

Otto Felix Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy was the oldest child of Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy the Elder. Ä. and his first wife, Else Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1845–1868), née Oppenheim - the parents were distantly related to each other as direct descendants of Moses Mendelssohn in the third and fourth generation. His mother died of typhus five months after Otto was born. Five years after the death of his first wife, his father married her younger sister Enole Oppenheim (1855–1939) in 1873, with whom he had four more children. Otto's youngest brother from his father's second marriage was Paul (1879–1956), who, as a doctor of chemistry and Agfa director, was to follow in his father's footsteps. Her two paternal grandfathers were the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy .

On April 8, 1893, Otto Mendelssohn Bartholdy married his two years younger cousin Cécile (1870–1943), née Mendelssohn Bartholdy , in Baden-Baden at the age of 25 . The two had two children, the son Hugo Mendelssohn Bartholdy and the daughter Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy, born in Berlin in 1894 and 1898 respectively. Otto Mendelssohn was an influential banker, first as officer and later as a partner in the Berlin private bank Robert Warschauer & Co . In 1905 Robert Warschauer & Co was taken over by the Darmstädter Bank , and Mendelssohn Bartholdy was able to live on the purchase price as a rentier . In 1907 he was ennobled on his own initiative and from then on bore the name Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy. His ennoblement was viewed critically by some relatives and found unsuitable for a citizen from a respected bourgeois family. In a letter to his brother-in-law and cousin Albrecht, he justifies his ennoblement:

“The peculiarity of life in Potsdam, from which, since we feel at home here, to withdraw completely, which I cannot consider right in the interests of my wife and the future of my children, means that our intercourse is almost exclusively plays with officers and officials; these have more or less prejudices, which are always indifferent to my no longer existing ambitions, but someone who, like z. B. my wife too, who thinks differently about this, may appear desirable. In any case, it is, in my opinion, certainly wrongly, the fact that, like the situation in Germany and especially with us, certain circles and professions, which I personally would not take on, are only accessible to commoners with great difficulty. "

- Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy 

In 1908 he became a member of the Agfa supervisory board , from 1926 after the merger with Bayer and BASF he was on the supervisory board of IG Farben . Between 1919 and 1925 he also ran his own small private bank. Between 1906 and 1908 he had the villa “Casa Bartholdy” in Potsdamer Bertinistraße expanded and converted by the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg .

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Moses Mendelssohn in 1929 , the Berlin “Society for the Science of Judaism” founded a committee to prepare a complete edition of the writings of the philosopher and enlightener for the anniversary. In addition to Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy, his brother Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and other members of the Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Hensel families, the 31-person committee also included Adolf von Harnack , founder and president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (today Max-Planck- Society), the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the historian Heinrich Finke . The complete edition was completed in 1932 with the 20th volume.

Memorial plaque on the Bornstedt cemetery

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in January 1933, Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy stayed in Potsdam. As the main shareholder of IG Farben, he was forced to resign from his supervisory board mandate in 1938 by subsequent ordinances to the Nuremberg Race Laws . After the death of his second-degree half- breed wife Cecile, he had to move into the gardener's house in his villa in 1943 and was threatened with deportation , as he was considered a “Jew” himself. After he had already been arrested, he was released again on the intervention of the Potsdam District President, Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen . He himself was arrested a year later in connection with the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 . Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy survived the end of the Second World War in Potsdam. After it became clear that he would not get back his possessions expropriated by the National Socialists, but that they were subject to nationalization by the Soviet occupying power , he emigrated to Switzerland , where he died four years after the end of the war and was buried on the Hörnli in Basel .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Lecture by Sebastian Panwitz, research associate at the Moses Mendelssohn Center (Potsdam) on November 11, 2007 at the Potsdam - Berlin conference . Entrepreneurship, cultures, lifestyles . Conference report on HSozKult. (Accessed September 9, 2008).
  2. ↑ Lackmann: Das Glück der Mendelssohns , p. 416
  3. ↑ Morten Reitmayer: Bankers in the Empire: Social profile and habitus of German high finance . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999, p. 156. ISBN 3-525-35799-0 .
  4. ^ A b John E. Lesch: The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century . Springer, 2000, p. 128. ISBN 0-792-36487-2 .
  5. ^ Lackmann: Das Glück der Mendelssohns , p. 430
personal data
SURNAME Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Otto von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Otto Felix Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German banker and industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1949
Place of death Basel