Exhibition to Carl Melchior: In the service of the Republic of

In an ideal world, would be in Hamburg, where he lived and died a monument for Carl Melchior, in Berlin, would be awarded in his name an annual award for financial diplomacy, and at least, a large German publisher would have a detailed biography about him in the program. Because Melchior has done more for this country deserves as many politicians or Industrial, to which streets and squares in German cities are named – while there is still no Carl-Melchior-street.

Andreas Kilb

feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

F. A. Z.

in 1871, to a Jewish merchant, and taught the family to be born in to, and since 1917, a partner in the Hamburg banking house of Warburg, took Melchior in a managerial function at the historical development that led to the Versailles peace conference of 1919 on the abolition of the German reparations at the Lausanne conference in 1932.

He was, if you will, the strategic Mastermind of the external financial policy of the Weimar Republic and as a German member of the financial Committee of the League of Nations is their main speaker.

The fighter for the new Republic

he also had a winning charisma, you can read the British Economist John Maynard Keynes, who in his memoirs, “friend and foe” is a glowing portrait of Melchior.

“A very small man of exquisite cleanliness, very well and carefully dressed, the round head of grey mottled hair covered with eyes, looked at us, shiny and in an unusual mourning”, the German economic expert, joined in January 1919, when a delegation meeting in Trier in front of his British partners in the negotiations. Soon, Keynes and Melchior were friends.

In March they acted fleet in Brussels in a four-to-one conversation, the Handing over of the German trade and the beginning of the allied food deliveries, a measure which contributed in the face of the famine in Germany is crucial to the Survival of the fragile Republic.

It was Melchior’s historic moment, and one may imagine with what feelings he thought back in may 1933, to him, than he enjoyed in a letter to Paul von Hindenburg, “the against my faith, as well as other descendants of Jewish ancestors, the measures taken … as a large, complain denounced value is wrong”.

A small spot in the culture of remembrance

The President has never responded. Melchior, already in the Weimar Republic as the “November criminals” reviled and now of Hitler’s Executors from the Board of Directors of the Bank for International settlements urged the engagements the end of the German reparations, and died at the end of in 1933 of a stroke.