Zsigmond Cornfield

Zsigmond Kornfeld , also Sigmund von Kornfeld (born March 27, 1852 in Goltsch-Jenikau , † March 24, 1909 in Budapest ) was a Jewish banker and industrialist in Austria-Hungary .

Zsigmond Kornfeld (1902)

Life

The early death of his father, the local rabbi , prevented Kornfeld from taking up the desired course. Instead, he began working for various banking houses in Prague and eventually made a career for the local branch of the Österreichische Credit-Anstalt . Its head, Albert Rothschild , sent him to Hungary at the end of the 1870s , where Kornfeld expanded Magyar Általános Hitelbank ( Hungarian General Credit Bank ), which belonged to Credit-Anstalt until the turn of the century, to become the country's strongest banking house, and in 1895 also formally became its director.

The Hitelbank benefited from the economic boom at the end of the 19th century, as did other Budapest financial institutions. It invested in mining and in infrastructure projects such as railway construction , for example in Bosnia-Herzegovina , which was occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878 as an administrative area . Kornfeld himself became increasingly involved in industry. He was the (co-) founder and president of Magyar Folyam és Tengerhajózási Rt. ( Hungarian River and Maritime Shipping Company ) and Fiumei Kőolajfinomító Rt. ( Fiume Petroleum Refinery Company ). He also held a leading position at the mechanical engineering company Ganz .

Mausoleum of the Kornfeld family in the Jewish cemetery on Kozma Street in Budapest

Kornfeld was one of those mostly Jewish functional elites in the Habsburg Empire who went through a process of national assimilation at the end of the 19th century, especially in Hungary . In addition to language acquisition - Kornfeld learned Hungarian from 1885, which was not necessary for his class or profession - entry into politics and the acquisition of a nobility title. From 1902 he was a member of the Magnate House of the Hungarian Reichstag , and in 1909 he was awarded the title of baron .

Kornfeld had five children. His son Móric married a daughter of the industrialist Manfréd Weiss and continued his father's career in Budapest's industrial and financial sector.

literature

• Ágnes Széchenyi: "Introduction", in: Kornfeld, Móric: Reflections on Twentieth Century Hungary. A Hungarian Magnate's View. Social Science Monographs, Boulder 2007, ISBN 978-0-88033-614-7 , pp. 1-94.
• József Radnóti: Zsigmond Kornfeld . Budapest, Szerző 1931.
• Kornfeld, Zsigmond , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica . Volume 10, New York: Macmillan Pub Co, 1973, Sp. 1208-1209
• Kornfeld [family]. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980,ISBN 3-428-00193-1, p. 590 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Biography in the Magyar Életrajzi Lexicon 1000–1990 (Hungarian).