the world of private banking

GERmAN PRIVAtE BANKS AND GERmAN INDUStRy, 1830–1938 167
Schaaffhausenscher Bankverein, the first Prussian joint-stock credit bank, was
founded in 1848 on the wrecked private bank Abraham Schaaffhausen, formerly
the leading bank in Cologne. Like the Oppenheims, Schaaffhausen had begun to
finance Rhenish industry during the 1830s, at first by short-term loans to textile
firms, but later also by long-term loans to shipping and railway companies,
insurances and coalmines. As outlined above, these activities involved substantial
risks, but Schaaffhausen was not as fortunate as Oppenheim ten years earlier and
had to suspend payments during the revolutionary weeks in March 1848. Luckily,
the revolution had brought liberal Rhenish railway entrepreneurs to power in
Berlin, who temporarily lifted the ban on joint-stock credit bank concessions and
approved the establishment of Schaaffhausenscher Bankverein by converting the
bank’s debts into stock. The continuity between the former private bank and the
new joint-stock bank was striking. Despite the bank’s failure the former partners,
Victor Wendelstadt and Wilhelm Deichmann, kept their positions and were elected
members of the executive board of the bank. 26
By this time a joint-stock bank was no ‘managerial enterprise’ in a modern
sense, but rather an enlarged private bank. The head of the bank as a particular
person was at least as important for the bank’s success as the enlarged resources.
Not surprisingly therefore, other joint-stock banks that were erected upon failed
private banks also resorted to former partners, as in the case of Gustav Adolf
Fischer, partner in the failed Barmen private bank Gebr. Fischer. He became a
member of the executive board when the Barmer Bankverein Hinsberg, Fischer &
Co. was founded on the remnants of the liquidated private bank in 1867. 27
It cannot be denied that the French Crédit Mobilier was seen as a model for the
German credit banks founded in succession to the Schaaffhausenscher Bankverein,
but it is also true that the mixed-banking experience gained by several private
bankers proved to be the decisive factor for the nascent universal banks’ success. 28
Thus, almost all successful joint-stock banks were founded by experienced private
bankers:
– Darmstädter Bank (by the Cologne banker Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. and
by the Frankfurt bankers Gebr. Bethmann and Goll & Söhne),
– Berliner Handelsgesellschaft (by the most important Berlin bankers
including S. Bleichröder, Mendelssohn & Co., Breest & Gelpcke and
Robert Warschauer, but also by Oppenheim again),
– Mitteldeutsche Kreditbank (by a group of less important Frankfurt
bankers consisting of R. Sulzbach, J.J. Weiller Söhne, S.M. Schwarzschild
and the Leipzig banker Becker & Co.),
26
Tilly, Financial Institutions, p. 112; Brophy, Capitalism, p. 91.
27
Hundert Jahre Commerzbank, 1870–1970 (Frankfurt/Main, 1970), pp. 109ff.
28
R. Tilly, ‘German Banking, 1850–1914: Development Assistance for the Strong’,
in Journal of European Economic History, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 113–52, here p. 118.