the world of private banking

PRIVAtE BANKS AND INDUStRy 211
Social studies
Finally, research may benefit from the Oppenheim records concerning the wide
field of social studies. One important topic is certainly that of social rise and social
mobility: the founder of the bank grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Bonn while his
heirs rose to the ranks of nobility in the 1860s. Another subject comprises the history
of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in the nineteenth century. The archive also
provides us with records that may help to assess the mentality and lifestyle of the
bourgeois class, its charitable commitments and its political attitudes.
For a business in family ownership like the Oppenheim Bank, the whole
sphere of family relations is an important topic. Did the Oppenheims pursue any
marriage strategies? To what extent were family ties inside and outside Cologne
used for business purposes? This leads on to the subject of personal networks in
general. Who were the persons the Oppenheims cooperated with regularly, and on
which projects? It is known, for instance, that they used their influence to have
business friends voted into the management of industrial companies which would
give them access to insider information. 10
Personal networks also played a decisive role in risk management, as a
forthcoming dissertation based to some extent on the records of the Oppenheim
Archive will show. 11 Hence the assessment of risks did not, in the end, rest on
rational analysis of the market, of technologies etc., but on a common code of
bourgeois values shared by the decision-makers in banking and industry. The
trustworthiness of potential partners did not necessarily depend on their wealth but
on their connection with or recommendation by the right kind of people. 12 Thus,
the assessment of character plays an ever-recurring role in the correspondence of
the Oppenheim bankers. Crucial business situations were also often assessed from
a psychological point of view. For example, just after the establishment of a new
company the Oppenheim bankers wrote to other shareholders that it should be
their first and foremost aim to create public trust in the new firm and therefore cut
down on their expectations of quick profits for a while. 13
We have attempted to show that the Oppenheim Archive is a valuable source of
information on the industrialization of western Germany, on the interplay between
the emergence of industries and the development of financing tools and strategies
and on the history of the upper bourgeois class in the nineteenth century. Access
policy is handled liberally.
10
Tilly, Financial Institutions, p. 107.
11
Monika Pohle, author of the dissertation, has already dealt with this problem in her
article ‘Risk, Onformation and Noise: Risk Perception and Risk Management of French
and German Banks during the Nineteenth Century’, in Financial History Review, vol. 2, 1,
1995, pp. 25–39.
12
Tilly, Financial Institutions, p. 85.
13
Oppenheim Archives, Nr 194, letter by Abraham Oppenheim to Regierungsrat Ritz,
15 October 1839.