Deutsche Version

The Gesellschaft der Freunde - Society of friends (1792-1935).
A centre of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Berlin

The Gesellschaft der Freunde shaped and reflected one and a half centuries of German-Jewish history. Founded in 1792 by young enlightened Jews in Berlin, it became it a prototype of modern Jewish associations. Aims of the organisation were on the one hand the achievement of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the emancipation of the Prussian Jews, on the other hand the mutual support of the members in cases of illness, poverty, unemployment and death. In the first decades of its existence the Society exerted itself intensively within the Jewish municipality for reforms in the sense of the Enlightenment and thus became politically active.

In the years after the Prussian Judenemanzipationsedikt 1812 the weight shifted on the social area. The house of the Gesellschaft der Freunde near Alexanderplatz became a centre of Jewish Berlin, with cultural, entertainment- and educational meetings, a place, at that also different associations with similar targets of charity or culture work met. Thereby a place was created for the profoundly changing Jewish identity - both organisationally and topographically.

In the years up to the formation of the German empire 1871 a constant social ascent of the membership of the association took place. The Society had been founded by enlightened bachelors, who lived economically in unsecured or dependent conditions but soon the proportion of young bankers, traders and industrialists, who founded and successfully led own enterprises, increased. This development continued over several generations and finally led to the third phase of the Society’s work. During the time of the Empire and the Weimar Republic this association was the unofficial centre of the highest representatives of German-Jewish banking and economy, resident in Berlin. The executives of large-scale enterprises such as Ullstein, AEG, Deutsche Bank or Agfa, families like the Mendelssohns, the Rathenaus and the Mosses – they all met here. Besides rose, although slowly, the proportion of the members, that did not have any Jewish background: Hjalmar Schacht, Hans Luther, Friedrich Reinhart and Carl Friedrich von Siemens are the most prominent examples of this distinct step into the direction of a German-Jewish integration in the area of the economy.

The prohibition of the Society by the national socialists 1935 reflects destruction of the economic bourgeoisie of Jewish origin. It is an aim of the thesis to reconstruct the fate of the former members after 1933: Apart from emigration and new start abroad there were death in prisons and concentration camps as well as the - always threatened - survival in the German Reich.

The history of the Society ends with the unsuccessful attempt of former members of the board to regain the association’s assets during the 1950ies.

Like no other organisation the Gesellschaft der Freunde embodies the entire process of emancipation, acculturation and destruction of the German Jewry. The thesis will compile new important new knowledge especially in the fields of the early history of Jewish associations and societies, of the topography of Berlin Jewry in 19^th century and of the unofficial self organisation of the German-Jewish economic elite.