the world of private banking

GERmAN PRIVAtE BANKS AND GERmAN INDUStRy, 1830–1938 173
bank-industry network constituted by interlocking directorships. In 1927 their preeminence
had even increased, since Louis Hagen, Simon Alfred v. Oppenheim,
Heinrich v. Stein (I.H. Stein, Cologne) and Johann Friedrich Schröder (Schröder
Bank KGaA, Bremen) held between 41 and 58 supervisory-board seats each. Only
the former private banker Jacob Goldschmidt (Darmstädter und Nationalbank)
and Curt Sobernheim (Commerz- und Privatbank), descendant of a former Breslau
private-banking dynasty, had accumulated more seats. 44
It is a significant contrast to their relatively small capital resources that about
one third of all bank representatives among those persons with more than 15
supervisory-board seats were private bankers. While the presence of great bank
directors and ‘big’ industrialists can be explained by the importance of the financial
resources they commanded, the private bankers were ‘outsiders’ having few
financial resources, but were qualified by their capability to coordinate business
policies beyond the scope of an individual company.
In addition to the number of supervisory-board seats occupied by private
bankers, a second indicator, being named as dividend payment office for jointstock
companies, also proves the bankers’ growing involvement in the financing
of industry and commerce during the 1910s and 1920s. Between 1906 and 1927
the average number of namings of the leading houses had increased by about
20 per cent. This held for the leading private bankers of the Kaiserreich such
as Delbrück, Schickler & Co., which increased its number of namings from 76
(combined Delbrück, Leo & Co. and Gebr. Schickler) in 1906 to 98 in 1927, and
Gebr. Arnhold (from 78 to 96 namings), but in particular for the ‘newcomers’ in
industrial finance such as M.M. Warburg & Co. (from 7 to 61 namings) and S.
Hirschland (no namings in 1906, but 36 in 1927). 45
The number of namings as dividend payment office is not only instructive as
regards the importance of private bankers as a component of the financial market
as such, but also proves the continuing success of the leading houses during the
first three decades of the twentieth century. None of the twenty most important
banking houses of 1906 (defined by this indicator) had failed by 1927, and only
two of these banks had been taken over by a great bank. Those which disappeared
between 1906 and 1927 had merged with another private bank and reappeared
as a ‘new’ bank. Mergers between private banks were no common feature of the
amalgamation movement of German banking in this period, but at times important
provincial private bankers attempted to merge with a Berlin bank in order to get
their foot in the door of the Reich’s most important financial market. The two
outstanding cases are the mergers of the leading Frankfurt private banks of Dreyfus
& Co. and Lazard, Speyer-Ellissen with the Berlin banks of S.L. Landsberger
44
D. Ziegler, ‘Geschäftliche Spezialisierungen deutscher Privatbankiers in der
Zwischenkriegszeit: Ein vergeblicher Überlebenskampf?‘, in idem, Der Privatbankier:
Nischenstrategien in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2003a), table 5, p. 221.
45
H. Wixforth and D. Ziegler, ‘Deutsche Privatbanken und Privatbankiers im 20.
Jahrhundert‘, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 23, 1997, pp. 205–35, here table 4, p. 220.