Robert Warschauer junior

Markus Robert Alexander Warschauer (born August 9, 1860 in Berlin ; † May 30, 1918 there ) was a German private banker .

Life

Robert Warsaw was the son of Robert Warsaw senior , who in 1849 together with the banker Eduard Veit Berlin bank (1824-1901) Robert Warschauer & Co. was founded. The banking house had its roots in the trading and banking business Oppenheim & Warschauer , founded in Königsberg in 1803 , which had been managed by his grandfather Marcus Warschauer since 1805 and in which his father was also a manager from 1839 to 1849. His mother was Marie Josephine (1822-1891), the eldest daughter of the Berlin banker and partner in the Mendelssohn & Co. bank , Alexander Mendelssohn . His sister Marie, in turn, married Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy , who had been a partner in the aforementioned Mendelssohn banking house since 1871.

The banking company Robert Warschauer & Co. was based in Berlin's banking district in house number 48 on Behrenstrasse , which runs parallel to Unter den Linden. The business premises were located on the ground floor of the two-story house, the upper floor served as a private apartment for the Warschauer family.

At the age of 22, Robert Warschauer entered the management of the bank as a partner in 1882, in which his father had not been able to take on a management position since 1878 due to a stroke. Robert Warschauer followed his father's wish and succeeded him in the bank, after having studied law and biology at various universities for a few semesters after his Abitur exam . During a one-year stay in Great Britain at the London bank C. H. Hambro & Son , the young man from Warsaw acquired his banking skills.

In connection with the rise of Berlin to a banking and stock exchange center, the Robert Warschauer & Co. bank soon developed into one of the most renowned and financially strong banks in Prussia . In the time of growing international economic and financial relations, the banking house under the direction of Robert Warsaw became increasingly involved in foreign business. In 1889 Robert Warschauer sat together with " Bankhaus S. Bleichröder ", "Mendelssohn & Co.", " Bankhaus Jacob S. H. Stern ", " M. A. von Rothschild & Sons " and several major banks in the founding consortium of shareholders of the German-Asian Bank . A few years later, the bank co-founded Credito Italiano in Milan and Genoa. The intensive and expanding business activity of the bank made it necessary to hire new staff, which in turn led to a considerable increase in staff. In addition to Robert Warschauer and the co-founder and senior partner Eduard Veit, Warsaw's cousin Hugo Oppenheim (1847–1921) was also part of the bank since 1871 . In 1898 Robert Warschauer left the bank for health reasons. A year later, the senior boss Eduard Veit also resigned. In their place were two individual authorized signatories of the bank, Alfred Cohn and Otto Mendelssohn Bartholdy , as partners. In 1905, the Robert Warschauer & Co. banking house was taken over by the Darmstädter Bank for Trade and Industry . The major bank had to pay the three partners Cohn, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Oppenheim a total of 29,375,000 marks .

After leaving the bank, Robert Warschauer relocated to Charlottenburg , to the villa designed by Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden for his father at Berliner Straße 31/32, today's Otto-Suhr-Allee . With the retirement from professional life, the Charlottenburg house became the center of life of the 38-year-old Warsaw resident.

Robert Warschauer suffered a major setback in his private life. After only 10 years of marriage, his wife Katharina (* 1864), a daughter of the Berlin court music director Karl Anton Eckert (1820–1879), died in 1900 . Robert Warschauer married a second time in August 1905. The marriage with Adèle Thévoz (1877–1941) resulted in three children, of whom the two daughters later emigrated to the USA , while the son Robert Warschauer (1911–1982, from 1938: Thévoz) stayed in Berlin and after the Second World War worked as a PhD historian at the Secret Prussian State Archives Berlin-Dahlem .

From then on, Warschauer became involved as a private individual in charity projects. He had been a member of the Society of Friends since 1885 . Together with his wife, he supported the city's social and cultural life as a patron . Robert Warschauer a. a. as curator of the Mariannenstift named after his grandmother Marianne Mendelssohn. He was a member of the Association of Patrons for the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Haus to combat infant mortality in Germany. He also contributed financially to the construction of the Kaiser Friedrich souvenir of the Association for Poor, Sick and Child Care, which was completed in 1904 on Guerickestrasse. The Warsawers were particularly committed to the care of war-wounded German soldiers during the First World War . Warschauer set up a hospital for wounded soldiers from the front in a building on the Berliner Strasse property . As a board member, his wife Adéle supported the corresponding work of the Vaterländischer Frauenverein Charlottenburg, a Red Cross organization based in the “ Cecilienhaus ” on the opposite side of Berliner Strasse from the Warsaw estate (today: Otto-Suhr-Allee 59) . In the cultural field, the construction of the German Opera House, which opened in 1912, received financial support from Warsaw.

Warsaw / Thévoz burial site; 1899/1900 by Ernst von Ihne

Robert Warschauer died on May 30, 1918, shortly before the end of the First World War. He and his wife Adéle, who died in 1941, were buried in the Charlottenburg Luisenfriedhof I and thus in the immediate vicinity of their former property. Robert Warschauer had the facility built after the early death of his first wife Katharina, designed by Ernst von Ihne .

The villa on Berliner Straße remained in the family's possession until 1922 and was finally demolished in 1939. In 1922, Adéle Warschauer and her children moved into a villa in Berlin-Grunewald that had been converted by the architect Otto Bartning . Fearing National Socialist reprisals, she and her son gave up the name Warschauer in 1938 , and from then on they used the family name Thevoz .

literature

• A. Cohn: History of the banking house Robert Warschauer & Co. Berlin 1919
• Laura Herr: Work is a citizen's adornment. The private banking house Robert Warschauer & Co. Publications of the Eugen Gutmann Society, Volume 8, 2014, ISBN 978-3-9812511-6-6

Web links

• Thomas Lackmann: Historical paintings from Ernst-Reuter-Platz discovered This is where the Jewish banking family from Warsaw lived and celebrated. Der Tagesspiegel , April 2013; Retrieved July 3, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Monika Richard: Jewish life in Germany. Volume 1: Personal reports on social history 1780-1871 . Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-421-01769-7 .
2. ^ Villa Warsaw front view, Berlin-Charlottenburg. Gropius & Schmieden. From: Architectural Sketchbook, H. 134/5, 1875, Technische Universität Berlin: Architekturmuseum, accessed July 3, 2015.
3. ↑ Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin, Konsistorium Rep. 14/4278, administrative report of the association from 1904.
4. ↑ Jürgen Bredow, Helmut Lerch: Materials on the work of the architect Otto Bartning. Verlag Das Example, Darmstadt 1983, ISBN 3-923974-00-0 , p. 138.