Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy the Younger

Grave in the Hörnli cemetery , Riehen, Basel-Stadt

Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy the Younger (born July 18, 1879 in Charlottenburg near Berlin , † December 30, 1956 in Riehen , Switzerland ) was a German chemist and industrialist . He was director of the chemical company Agfa founded by his father , which was merged into IG Farben . At IG Farben, he was plant manager and director in the newly formed division III ( photo chemistry ). He was forced out of the company in 1933 by " Aryanization " and the persecution of the Jews and went into exile in England and Switzerland.

life and work

Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who came from the well-known, initially Jewish Mendelssohn family, was born in Charlottenburg, which was only incorporated into Berlin in 1920. He was the youngest of five children of his father of the same name, Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy the Elder. Ä. who died shortly after his birth on February 17, 1880. Paul was baptized and raised in the evangelical faith. His eldest brother from his father's first marriage, Otto Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1868–1949), was to become an influential banker and was ennobled in 1907 as Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy . Her paternal grandfather was the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . His mother was Enole Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1855-1939), née Oppenheim.

From 1889 until his Abitur in 1899, Mendelssohn Bartholdy attended the Friedrichwerdersche Gymnasium in Berlin. Like his father, he turned to chemistry and, like his father, received his doctorate in chemistry . The first two semesters 1899–1900 Mendelssohn Bartholdy the Elder studied. J. at the University of Heidelberg with Theodor Curtius , Emil Knoevenagel and the physicist Georg Hermann Quincke , only to return to Berlin in autumn 1900, where he studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University (today Humboldt University) with Emil Fischer , Siegmund Gabriel , Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Emil Warburg as well as at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg (today TU Berlin) with Otto Nikolaus Witt . In November 1904 he passed the exam at the I. Chemical Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelms University. In July 1907 he passed the doctoral examination .

In 1867 his father and Carl Alexander von Martius founded the Gesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation mbH in the Berlin suburb of Rummelsburg , which in 1873 became the Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication . Until her father's death, Agfa mainly produced aniline and aniline dyes. After 1880, Agfa's field of activity expanded to include photography under the direction of Carl Alexander von Martius and Franz Oppenheim . Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy became - like his father - director of Agfa, then from 1925 of IG Farben, and among other things led the production of photo plates in the Berlin Agfa plant. He worked for a long time in the Agfa Filmfabrik Wolfen , founded in 1909 , where he accompanied the start-up of production for roll film . His eldest brother, Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was the main shareholder of the Agfa supervisory board, first of Agfa, then of IG Farben. In December 1921 he married Johanna Nauheim (* 1891 in London ), an English citizen. In 1926 he acquired the property at Rauchstrasse 17 in Berlin-Tiergarten and had the "Villa Mendelssohn-Bartholdy" built on it, which the couple moved into in 1927.

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 Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, his brother Otto von Mendelssohn Bartholdy and other members of the Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Hensel families, the 31-member committee also included Adolf von Harnack , founder and president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (today the Max Planck Society ), the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the historian Heinrich Finke . The complete edition was completed in 1932 with the 20th volume.

Cécile, Paul and Johanna Mendelssohn Bartholdy's only child, was born in Berlin on June 8, 1933 - a good four months after the National Socialists came to power . In 1933 Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy was pushed out of the office of director at IG Farben. The brothers Paul and Otto went into exile together with their families in 1933 - initially to Switzerland . In 1938 the family was forced to sell the villa and property to the German Reich . The family's villa was demolished and the property was merged with two adjacent properties to build the Yugoslav Legation in Berlin . Paul's brother Otto, as the main shareholder, was only forced to resign from IG Farben's supervisory board in 1938. After emigrating, the family stayed temporarily in Switzerland before going to England. His wife Johanna died in London in 1948 . After the death of his wife, Mendelssohn Bartholdy settled in Switzerland, where he died in 1956 in the canton of Basel-Stadt .

literature

• Thomas Lackmann: The luck of the Mendelssohns - story of a German family. Structure, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-02600-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Arthur Prinz and Avraham Barkai: Jews in German Economic Life: Social and Economic Structure in Transition 1850–1914. Mohr Siebeck, 1984, ISBN 3-167-44825-3 , p. 90.
2. ^ ^{A b} Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Dissertation on derivatives of imides of dibasic acids . Friedrich Wilhelms University Berlin. Schade, Berlin 1907, p. 39.
3. ^ Lackmann: The luck of the Mendelssohns. P. 416
4. ↑ Jens Ulrich Heine: Mind and Fate. The men of IG Farben Industrie AG (1925–1945) in 161 short biographies . VCH, Weinheim 1990, pp. 217-219. ISBN 3-527-28144-4 .
5. ^ Lackmann: The luck of the Mendelssohns. P. 430
6. ^ Lackmann: The luck of the Mendelssohns. P. 452