Siegfried Bieber

Siegfried Bieber (born May 21, 1873 in Czersk / West Prussia , † November 25, 1960 in New York City ) was a German-Jewish banker and art collector .

Life

Until 1933

Czersk synagogue around 1910

Siegfried Bieber was born in 1873 in the small West Prussian town of Czersk, a remote, small village on the northern edge of the Tucheler Heide , a sparsely populated forest and hunting area. Around this time, Czersk received a train station on the Prussian Eastern Railway , which now opened the gateway to the world for the small town, heading west towards Berlin , east towards Königsberg (Prussia) . The economic upswing that followed was associated with rapid population growth. In 1887 the first (still existing) wood-processing industrial company was founded, and others soon followed. In Czersk there was a small synagogue community with 105 members in 1871, the number of which grew to 229 in 1885.

Siegfried Bieber's father, Isidor Bieber (1845–1919), ran a leather business, while his mother, Bertha, b. Crohn (1844–1900) was a housewife. Possible relatives to the family of the wealthy Jewish mill owner Jacob Bieber (whose first wife Johanna, née Federmann, came from Zehdenick ), who lived near Schwetz in Schönau , have not yet been proven. A daughter of Jacob Bieber was the archaeologist Margarete Bieber , who later became internationally known .

Siegfried Bieber probably came to Gdansk as a child , where he attended elementary and middle school. Bieber later referred to himself as Danziger. Paul Wallich and Otto Joel, founder of the Banca Commerciale Italiana (1894) and himself a Danziger, spoke of Siegfried Bieber as a “native Danziger” and “Danzig compatriot”. From 1896 Siegfried Bieber worked for a few years in London at the French bank Crédit Lyonnais . In 1897 in the British capital he married Josephine Postolka, a Czech (then Austrian) national. The marriage remained childless. Bieber went to New York with his wife in 1900. Paul Wallich , who began a six-month internship at Goldman, Sachs & Co. from September 1908 , met him there as head of the Foreign Exchange Department.

In the summer of 1911 Bieber returned to London and now worked at the local branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana founded by Otto Joel from Gdansk in 1894 . A few months after the beginning of the First World War , in early 1915, Siegfried Bieber was interned in a British assembly camp for "enemy foreigners", was released to Germany in June 1916 and worked from 1917 to October 1918 in the General Government of Belgium as "Imperial Bank Commissioner".

At the suggestion of Hans Fürstenberg , Siegfried Bieber joined the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft in 1919 as a personally liable partner , at that time a very influential credit institution in the field of large-volume banking transactions. In February 1923 Siegfried Bieber moved into a Grunewald villa at Nikischstrasse 4 , which had been built on his behalf by the architects Breslauer & Salinger . On the other side of Nikischstrasse, opposite the villa, was the spacious estate of the publisher Louis Ullstein . Well-known personalities such as the writer Lion Feuchtwanger and the critic and essayist Alfred Kerr lived just a few steps away .

Siegfried Bieber joined the Society of Friends on February 26, 1929 . When, in March of the same year, three business owners of the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft gave Nobel Prize laureate Albert Einstein a sailing boat as a present for his 50th birthday, the donors remained anonymous in public. It is therefore not certain whether Siegfried Bieber, who was one of five business owners at the time, was involved in this gift.

Dahmshöhe Castle (around 1987)

Also in 1929 Siegfried Bieber acquired the 235 hectare Dahmshöhe estate near Altthymen in the Templin district from Privy Councilor Richard Weber in Berlin . By far the largest part of the area consisted then as now of forest, 30 hectares were designated as arable land, 40 hectares as grassland. The livestock consisted of 5 horses and 22 cattle.

Bieber immediately set about creating an exclusive country estate here, some distance from the old manor complex with its simple farm buildings. The architect whom he entrusted with this task was Paul Schultze-Naumburg , at that time one of the most famous architects in Germany. Since Schultze-Naumburg mainly designed representative villas and mansions, builders from the circles of the Jewish upper class were of course among his customers. After the First World War, however, Schultze-Naumburg had increasingly moved towards racist and anti-Semitic positions. His book “Art and Race” was published in 1928, and two years later he became a member of the NSDAP . Siegfried Bieber's views of his architect cannot have remained unknown. Apparently, in his eyes, the racist attitude of Schultze-Naumburg towards the common preference for traditional, landscape-related building receded.

When Siegfried Bieber moved into the new house in 1930, he was 57 years old and at the height of his professional career. He and his wife Josephine were dedicated art collectors. She was particularly interested in 17th century Dutch painting. The rooms in Dahmshöhe Castle are also likely to have housed some of these treasures. Siegfried Bieber had the 56,000 m² park laid out according to his own detailed plans.

1933 to 1945

The Bieber couple left Germany in the first half of 1935 and chose Maroggia , a small town on Lake Lugano in Switzerland , as their exile . After losing German citizenship, however, a Swiss passport was only obtained after six years of residence in the country. One way out was to apply for citizenship in the neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein . The few emigrants who chose and were able to choose this route, which is very expensive because of the naturalization tax , included the Bieber couple, the brothers Georg and Martin Tietz , who until 1933 owned the largest German department store group, Hermann Tietz . Nevertheless, the Biebers were allowed to keep their residence in Switzerland.

After they had to pay a " Reich flight tax " of 670,000 RM when they emigrated from Germany , the Dahmshöhe estate was forcibly sold in 1939. The proceeds went to a Sperrmark account. Together with other assets that remained in Germany, the amount was later “confiscated in favor of the Reich”.

In 1940, when the war broke out, the Biebers left Europe and first went to Ecuador . In 1941 they were able to emigrate to the USA.

After 1945

Siegfried Bieber died in the United States in November 1960, his wife ten years later. Before that, they had set up a foundation dedicated, among other things, to promoting biomedical research. Josephine Bieber bequeathed a number of works of art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York that the Biebers had acquired in Berlin before 1933 .

• Works of art from the Bieber Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 

  Pieter Quast : A party of the happy.

• 

  Madonna and Child with Saints and Donors.

• 

  Aelbert Cuyp : Landscape with the flight to Egypt.

• 

  Grotto with Guanyin and twenty disciples.

• 

  Anthonis van Dyck : A man rides a horse.

• 

  Anthonis van Dyck : man who mounts a horse.

Although Dahmshöhe Castle can be considered an outstanding example of the country houses of the Berlin upper middle class due to its architectural quality and its historical background, it was not included in the state monument list for a long time.

literature

• Aurich, Hermann: Between the trading floor and the loneliness of the forest. Siegfried Bieber and Haus Dahmshöhe ( private website, accessed May 20, 2015 ).
• Erika Schwarz: "... at the expense of my account". Siegfried Bieber. Jew, banker, landowner, emigrant. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-942271-27-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ It is called "Siegfried and Josephine Bieber Foundation". However, a homepage of this foundation could not be found.