Gustav Strupp

Gustav Strupp entered the Gymnasium Bernhardinum in 1861, at the age of ten. Founded in 1510, the Gymnasium (today it houses the Volkshochschule; the school, known as Henfling Gymnasium from 1945, moved to Moritz-Seebeck-Allee 1 in 1997) is one of the oldest higher schools still in existence in Thuringia. Numerous Jewish boys attended the humanistic grammar school from 1856 onwards, where Latin and Greek were part of the subject canon; the girls attended private secondary schools.

Of the 391 boys who attended the Gymnasium and Realschule in Meiningen in 1874, 51 were children of the Jewish faith. Jewish pupils thus accounted for 13% of all pupils; the proportion of Jewish women*Jews in the population, on the other hand, was only about 5%. This is a clear sign of the great importance of higher education in Jewish culture, as well as the significance of education in connection with social advancement.

Gustav Strupp, fellow students reported, was a personality who knew how to make an impression not through scholastic excellence but through his appearance. In 1869 he left school after the Sekunda. He completed the one-year voluntary military service and volunteered at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1970, but was not drafted. In 1872/73 he worked in Berlin for the banker Rudolf Molenaar and enjoyed this time very much. He received his further education as a banker in his parents' company.

When his father died in 1873, formally his brother Anselm took over the management of the family business together with Gustav's mother. After Anselm's death in 1877, his widow Thekla became co-owner. However, Gustav was always involved in the business. He received procuration for the bank from his father shortly before his death. In a retrospective, he emphasized that, in principle, he had managed the company after his father's death. At that time, he was 23 years old. In 1879 or 1890, Gustav married Fanny Bloch (1861-1931), who came from a Frankfurt banking family. The love marriage also had a very favorable effect on business relations, as Strupp's bank was able to share Bloch's branch network.

Since 1711 at the earliest, there is evidence of a Strupp company in the neighboring village of Dreißigacker, which was active in the grain trade, among other things. During the Napoleonic wars, Gustav's grandfather, Bernard Meyer Strupp, traded grain very successfully, benefiting from trade relations with his brothers who had emigrated to St. Petersburg. In addition, he began to advertise his trade in cotton, linen and silk fabrics intensively with newspaper ads. In Dreißigacker, he acquired a two-story house with a garden and rose to become the doyen of the local Jews.

If in the 18th century other Jewish families from Dreißigacker (such as the Rombergs and Kaysers) had taken on the role of court bankers to the duke, there is now evidence of credit transactions with the ducal house for the Strupps from 1825. The family had been active in banking since 1742, in addition to the general commercial business. In 1833, the B. M. Strupp banking house took up residence in the newly built Jewish department store at Bernhardstrasse 3.

The state government and city administration of Meiningen had advocated a department store in the city in order to stop Jewish trade from door to door. The building, which opened in 1833, was largely financed by Jewish community members from Dreißigacker. The shopkeepers, including Strupp, offered their range of goods in newspaper advertisements and met with good approval from shoppers, but also growing resistance from Christian competitors.

The Jewish inhabitants played an important role in the economic and industrial development of Meiningen. However, despite their profitable activities and growing prosperity, they were not yet full citizens of the duchy and were not allowed to live in the town. When the Strupps' application for citizenship in the course of the 1848 revolution was rejected after their failure, they were, as the folklore reports, "coached six-horse from Dreißigacker to Meiningen".

The classicist building in Bernhardstraße 3 later underwent several extensions, today it is home to the theater's Kammerspiele, a gallery and an educational center.

The palatial residence was built by architect Karl Behlert in 1909 for Gustav Strupp, who lived here until his death in 1918. Behlert had also designed the neighboring theater. The building replaced the neoclassical palace from 1823, which Gustav's father had acquired in 1861. On the ground floor resided the private bank B.M. Strupp until 1905. When it was transferred to the joint-stock company Bank für Thüringen in 1905, the business premises were abandoned and the new construction of the villa, which cost half a million marks, was initiated.

Since 1861, the threads of Strupp's business had run together at this location. Under Gustav's father, the company increasingly pursued the banking business in addition to trading in high-quality textiles. In 1856 Meyer Strupp was appointed court banker to the duke and from 1862 the B. M. Strupp company was exclusively engaged in banking. From 1863 it opened bank branches outside Meiningen, including in Gotha and Salzungen. In 1862, the bank was one of the co-founders of the Werra-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft and the Deutsche Hypothekenbank Meiningen. As early as 1856, Strupp'sche Bank had participated in the founding of Mitteldeutsche Creditbank, which quickly became one of the largest German private banks and later merged into Commerzbank.

In 1880, the three Strupp brothers, Gustav, Meinhold (1853-1912) and Louis (1854-1914) officially became partners. Meinhold managed the parent company in Meiningen, Louis the branch in Gotha and Gustav the operational business. He financed companies and assisted them in their transformation into stock corporations. Bankhaus Strupp participated in breweries and textile companies, in railroad construction, and especially in the Thuringian procelain industry, which Gustav Strupp dominated around 1900. Gustav Strupp represented the bank as a member of the board of management or chairman of the supervisory board in numerous stock corporations. Over time, this gave rise to the "Strupp Group" with up to 20,000 employees. Gustav Strupp also campaigned for the establishment of a chamber of industry and commerce in the Meiningen district, which he presided over from 1883 to 1918. He often worked from eight in the morning until late at night and was often on business trips to Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and other cities. He also liked to visit the theater or galleries during these business trips.

The villa and its predecessor building were also a place of lively cultural exchange. At a monthly jour fixe, the brothers and their families hosted artistically sophisticated events. Guests included actors from the nearby theater, the conductors and musicians of the court orchestra, friendly bankers from all over Germany, and the Meiningen state ministers. Gustav and his brother Meinhold established collections of important paintings.

In 1939, Gustav Strupp's heirs were forced to sell the villa. During the GDR period, it housed a district cultural center and a popular discotheque. In 1990, the community of heirs filed claims for repatriation. Since then, the house has stood empty. In 2014, the heirs agreed to convert the building into a music school.

Gustav and Fanny Strupp had no children of their own, nor did Gustav's unmarried brother Meinhold. The only son of the third brother Louis pursued an academic career as a lawyer. Thus, the brothers involved their two brothers-in-law as well as the sisters' children and their married partners in their business ventures at an early stage.

Gustav Strupp's childlessness was one reason for the founding of the Bank für Thüringen. This 1905 bank start-up marked an important turning point in his life. The Strupp brothers contributed their own company, B.M. Strupp, with a share capital of 10 million marks to the new bank and converted the whole entity into a joint stock company with the participation of additional major banks (including Diskonto-Gesellschaft Berlin, Deutsche Boden-Kredit-Anstalt). Other reasons were that larger stock corporations were better able than small private banks to meet the growing demand for money from the rapidly expanding industry, and at the same time personal risk was minimized in this way. In addition, there was the brothers' advanced age and Gustav's many political obligations as a city councilor and member of the state parliament, which demanded a lot of time and manpower. In personal conversations, Gustav Strupp repeatedly emphasized that this step had not been easy for him, since the business had been in the family for 165 years and was doing very well at the moment of conversion.

Gustav Strupp took over the chairmanship of the supervisory board when the Bank für Thüringen was founded and thus kept all the strings in his hands. The bank was initially located in a predecessor building, the headquarters of Mitteldeutsche Creditbank. From 1906-1909, the architect Karl Behlert erected the representative new building in neo-Baroque style. Above the windows of the second floor, coats of arms of some towns where bank branches were located were placed. The bank became the leading institution in the dukedoms and principalities of Thuringia. In 1929, it was absorbed into Deutsche Bank. From 1946 to 2001, the building housed the Meiningen Regional Court. Today it is an office building.

Gustav Strupp was involved in numerous cultural, artistic and social projects from the 1880s onwards and set up several foundations, partly together with his wife Fanny. These included a wood and coal foundation for the poorer people in 1885, the Fanny Strupp Foundation for the benefit of the Georgen Hospital in Meiningen in 1904, and a foundation for public libraries in 1907. He made sizable contributions to the purchase of the organ for the synagogue, which was newly built in 1883, sponsored the Meiningen Music Festival, and supported the construction of the Meiningen indoor swimming pool, the Schützenhaus, and the remodeling of the "Sächsischer Hof" hotel. He participated in many monument erections.

In 1899 he was treasurer of the monument committee for the erection of the Brahms monument. The Brahms Monument erected in the same year in the English Garden, one of the oldest inner-city landscape parks in Germany, is the first memorial dedicated to the famous composer after his death in 1897.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) often stayed in Meiningen. He was well acquainted with the ducal couple Georg II and Helene and was friends with the Meiningen court conductor Hans von Bülow. In honor of Brahms, the 2nd Meiningen Music Festival was organized in 1899 with the active and financial help of Gustav Strupp. Gustav Strupp not only sponsored social and cultural institutions but also supported individuals. During the First World War, his donations and grants, which not only flowed into the official funds but also reached many people in his constituency and beyond, ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Gustav Strupp was active in numerous political commissions and maintained lively and constant contact with the government representatives of the duchy as well as regional entrepreneurs and bankers active throughout Germany. So it was only natural that he himself also became politically active from the 1890s. In 1897, he stood for election as a municipal councilor, was elected and, on the basis of his professional expertise, took over the chairmanship of the Finance Commission. He belonged to this body with short interruptions until his death.

In 1903, he participated in the state elections to the Saxony-Meining state parliament and successfully won one of 16 seats in the Schalkau-Rauenstein constituency. Here, too, he successfully contributed his expertise and skills: In the 1st World War he advanced to the vice-president of the state parliament.

In the state parliament, Gustav Strupp had to make a stronger political commitment than in the city council, where consensus was sought for the good of the residential city. As a banker, he represented liberal positions. As of 1909, he was the last Freemason in the state parliament - also as an entrepreneur - and was in a state of tension with the now largest faction of Social Democrats. But even though he assessed new railroad routes from an economic point of view and promoted them as a politician, he did not close his mind to social positions. In 1911, he initiated a voluntary taxation of princes, which was widely supported by the state parliament but clearly rejected by the duke. A strong social sense was also expressed in his commitment to a renewed elementary school law as well as the numerous foundations for the employees of his own companies, the local hospital or the financing of the first ambulance for Meinigen in 1911.

The state parliament building was erected in 1880/81 in Italian Neo-Renaissance style. In 1931, the building was taken over by the German Reichspost, in 1945 by the German Post of the GDR and in 1990 by Deutsche Telekom. Privately owned since 2011, it is now used as an office building after renovation.

From 1906, after the founding of the Bank für Thüringen, Gustav Strupp began to take longer periods of time off several times a year between phases of intensive work. He suffered from gout and bladder diseases. The business trips to Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden, Munich, the regular inspection trips to all the porcelain factories, the chairing of two or three general meetings of stock corporations, the meetings of the state parliament and the Meiningen municipal council now took turns with trips and cures in Bolzano, Carlsbad, Switzerland or the south of France. His brother Meinhold held the position in Meiningen during this time and in turn went on trips when Gustav returned.

When Meinhold died unexpectedly in 1912, the question of continuing the business, and thus of an heir, arose in pressing fashion. The nephews became more involved. When Gustav's health problems increased in 1913 and he had to undergo a gall bladder operation in 1914, the family council decided to entrust Ludwig Fuld, a nephew by marriage (husband of Helene Hoffmann, the youngest daughter of Gustav's sister Mathilde), with the administration of the Bank für Thüringen and the entire stock business.

Gustav Strupp recovered quickly, but the death of his third brother Louis in 1914, as well as the death of Duke Georg II, whom he held in high esteem, in the same year, made him realize "that even now one is at an age when one cannot count on too many more years of activity," as he wrote in a letter. He continued to pursue his business and political commitments, devoting himself to his collection of paintings and his social foundations. As a loyal German patriot, he followed the course of the First World War and supported the organization of an efficient German war economy. In November 1918 he had to undergo another operation. He died in Meiningen on December 4, 1918. His wife Fanny Strupp, ten years his junior, survived him by 14 years. She died in 1931. Both were buried in the Jewish cemetery, which is located on the north side of the Christian cemetery on Berliner Straße. In 1870, the Jewish community of Meiningen had acquired the land and established the cemetery in 1873. Today it contains 150 gravestones, many inscribed in Hebrew. The oldest dates from 1889, the last was erected in 1944.

The gravesite of Gustav and Fanny Strupp-Bloch, significantly larger than many of the other gravestones, is in the form of a plain stone altar. Below the top edge runs a meandering decoration. Engraved are only the names and dates of life of the couple.