Wilhelm Kuczynski

Wilhelm Kuczynski (born May 31, 1842 in Posen ; † November 28, 1918 ) was a German banker and entrepreneur .

Life

His parents, the merchant Abraham Nachman Kuczynski (1803–1862) and Emilie Cohn († 1860), were of Jewish faith. Abraham Nachman Kuczynski came from Witkowo and had a colonial business in the city of Poznan, where Wilhelm Kuczynski was born in 1842. After the death of his parents, he came to Berlin around 1868. There Kuczynski worked as a banker in the Wolff und Kuczynski bank, founded in 1869, of which he became sole owner in 1879. The company was economically stable and existed after Kuczynski's death until it was dissolved in 1938.

Kuczynski was a co-founder of the Handelshochschule Berlin and a member of the council of elders of the Berlin merchant class. He was involved in various organizations such as the Society of Friends (member from 1891), the aid association for Jewish students and the Berlin child protection association, on whose board he was.

Wilhelm Kuczynski married Lucy Brandeis (1855–1913), who grew up in Paris in 1873. She came from a family of left-wing intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany to France and returned temporarily in 1870 with the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War . The marriage resulted in three daughters and a son, the economist Robert René Kuczynski . Wilhelm Kuczynski's grandchildren included Jürgen Kuczynski and Ruth Werner . Jürgen Kuczynski later judged his grandfather that he was “an average, but extremely successful banker” and “a black sheep in the family, petty bourgeois, decent personal and millionaire”.

Web links

• Wilhelm Kuczynski entry in the German biography.
• Wilhelm Kuczynski tombstone in the Weissensee Jewish cemetery.
• Obituary Vossische Zeitung v. November 30, 1918.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Agnieszka Brockmann: The Kuczynski estate in the Central and State Library Berlin. Central and State Library Berlin, 2011, p. 14.