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News from yesterday - the history newsletter: The brownish shadows of the past

2022-08-11T15:14:43.148Z


Many German companies remain silent about where they once got their wealth from and how they benefited from »Aryanization«. The Hertie Foundation also ignored the Nazi period for a long time - that and more in the history newsletter.


Dear reader,

the heyday of German department stores began in the 19th century.

From humble beginnings, the Hermann Tietz company, named after its financier, built up a flourishing chain of department stores.

After their first store in Gera, branches soon opened in large German cities and offered customers a completely new shopping experience with a lavish range on enormous sales areas.

The department stores were also called »consumer cathedrals« at the time.

Some of the magnificent buildings that shaped the cityscape have survived to this day, such as the KaDeWe in Berlin or the Alsterhaus in Hamburg.

For decades, Hermann Tietz was a giant among Europe's department store companies - until the rise of the National Socialists to power hit the group hard.

The Tietz family was Jewish and was forced out of the company in 1933/34, their property was »Aryanised«, and the company was renamed »Hertie«.

The new managing director Georg Karg dismissed all Jewish employees, became the sole owner and rebuilt the department stores after the Second World War.

Karg's heirs founded the non-profit Hertie Foundation in 1974, which has been doing good deeds ever since and is happy to talk about it.

She doesn't like to talk about the roots of her wealth.

The foundation behaves in a very similar way to countless German companies, which for decades ignored how much they once benefited from National Socialism and on which foundations they built their empires.

The fixed assets of the Hertie Foundation amount to 1.2 billion euros, a gigantic capital.

For a long time she hardly bothered where it came from and what shadows her past casts – until a student group at the Hertie School in Berlin became active.

»Her.Tietz« is the name of the initiative after the name of the company's ancestor.

She urged the foundation to finally shed light on the history of department store "Aryanization" after almost 90 years.

repressed past

"That happens very late," says our author Elias Dehnen, "at first the Hertie Foundation hardly took the students and alumni seriously and then had to admit its mistake." For weeks he immersed himself in the past of the Hertie Foundation and the company , spoke to the authors of two failed preliminary studies – and to Larry Tietz.

The grandson of the department store partner Georg Tietz, who was expropriated during the Nazi era, now lives in Florida and was surprised at how little interest the Hertie Foundation had shown in contacts with the family after which it was named: »They should recognize where the name comes from .« The whole story about the Nazi heritage of the department store group can be found here.

The new issue: now everywhere there are good magazines, digitally here

If you're more in the mood for some light summer reading, be sure to read the post about sex in ancient Rome.

History editor Katja Iken looks at how, on the one hand, prudery and modesty determined the moral code of antiquity.

And on the other hand, extremely explicit erotic art and crude graffiti (»I got it for the landlady«) give the image of a much more vicious sexual morality: did all of Rome drive completely unleashed?

Katja's text is part of the current issue of SPIEGEL HISTORY »The Last Days of Pompeii« – ask your trusted magazine dealer about it, or simply continue reading here.

You can send us praise, criticism or holiday greetings at any time at spiegelgeschichte@spiegel.de.

And if you want to subscribe to our newsletter, just click here.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-08-11

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