Leonhard Tietz (March 3 1849 - November 14 1914) was a German department store entrepreneur and art collector of

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

ish origin.

Biography

Born in Birnbaum an der Warthe, Province of Posen,

Prussia Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an ...

(today

Międzychód Międzychód (, german: Birnbaum) is a town in Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland, the administrative seat of Międzychód County. It is located on the southern shore of the Warta river, about west of Poznań. Population is 10,915 (2009). His ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

), Leonhard Tietz was the brother of Oskar Tietz and a founding member of the Tietz Department store dynasty. On 14 August 1879, he opened his first department store in Stralsund, with the idea of selling high quality products at fixed prices for cash. He was the first to introduce a money back guarantee. From 1891, a shop of his was to be found in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

. In 1905, his enterprise was transformed into a joint stock company.

Art collector

Tietz owned an art collection which included paintings by

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...

and

Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically d ...

. In 1912 he lent a self portrait by van Gogh and a still-life by Cézanne ("Stilleben, Früchte mit Glas und Porsellanschale") to the famous Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne ( Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln).

Legacy and Loss

After Tietz death, his son Alfred Leonhard Tietz led the Tietz firm. In 1933, the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

came to power in Germany and Jewish businesses were targeted. The Nazi policy of racial discrimination and anti-semitic harassment of Jewish-managed firms hurt the Tietz' department store and other businesses. The business was renamed ''Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG.'' In an " Aryanisation" (the obligatory transfer of Jewish businesses to non-Jewish owners), the Tietz family was forced to sell their shares under market value . They fled Nazi Germany. After the Allied victory, they received some compensation estimated at 5 million DM. Today, the department store chain Galeria Kaufhof is the direct descendant of the tiny shop opened in 1879.

Literature

Discrimination, Managers, and Firm Performance: Evidence from “Aryanizations” in Nazi Germany
Kilian Huber, Volker Lindenthal, and Fabian Waldinger NOVEMBER 2020

References

External links

* * 1849 births 1914 deaths 19th-century German Jews German economists German businesspeople in retailing 19th-century German businesspeople 20th-century German businesspeople People from the Province of Posen Businesspeople from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania People from Międzychód {{Germany-economist-stub