Hamburg, 1902 — London, 1982

 

Banker, financier, philanthropist

 

The descendent of one of the longest dynasties of German Jewish bankers, whose family tree goes back to the first decades of the 18th century, Siegmund intended to follow a political career and prepared for this, but the German reality and his DNA drove him back into the financial world when Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933. The following year he was in London and according to one legend – clearly embellished – he arrived with five thousand pounds and some decades later sold his empire for 860 million.

 

Thanks to family connections he created the New Trading Co. in the City (the revival of which he played a large part in), which later became S.G. Warburg. Considered the most cultured banker in the Western world, he had a profound knowledge of Central European literature and was a devoted admirer of Thomas Mann, whose works Buddenbrooks and Joseph and His Brothers he considered similar to his family history.

 

His two biographers, Jacques Attali (1987) and Nial Ferguson (2010), as well as essayist George Steiner (to whom he gave the longest interview of his life), showered him with praises and epithets, among them “the people’s banker”, because of his links to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, whom he greatly influenced in the inclusion of the United Kingdom as a full member of the Common European Market. He believed in the rebuilding of West Germany, tied the Japanese to western economy, helped salvage the tradition American investment bank Kuhn & Loeb (which belonged to his relations Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg) and, faithful to his Europeanist convictions, invented the Euro-Bonds which helped to develop and integrate the Old World (the first experiment was financing Italian motorways). His gifts as financier redoubled whenever he perceived opportunities to satisfy his ideals. He considered himself to be one of the last remnants of haute banque, a reference to haute-couture.  He was passionate about the cause of Zionism and became an ostensive critic of right-wing Israeli governments who denied the rights of Palestinians to create a state of their own.

 

Seduced by new management techniques, he was one of the first to adopt open plan offices and a democratic governance. He supervised the selection of the higher ranks by personal interviews to review candidates’ general culture. He read Freud and sought to achieve the recruitment of better talent through graphological analyses, not always with positive results.

 

The surname Warburg appeards just once in Zweig’s memoirs, a reference to Aby (Abraham Moritz), Siegmund’s maternal uncle, one of the most important art historians in Germany, whose formidable library served as nucleus for the Warburg Institute (transferred to London with the advent of Nazism and later reinstalled in Hamburg). In Stefan’s correspondence with Friderike, the financier appears as one of the best friends in London and as consultant for financial matters.

 

The epistolary relationship with Siegmund began in 1923 with galloping inflation as its theme (“it is impossible to estimate the values of life,” wrote Zweig). In the next letter (1926), about internationalism, Zweig recalled Walter Rathenau’s seminal role. In spite of the professional differences, they identified with each other in almost everything. 21 years younger, Siegmund saw in his friend the personification of humanist values.

 

Their relations became closer when Zweig settled in London and was included in the Warburg family circle. Possibly Friderike was too. Several letters from that period deal with the project being nurtured by the author to start an international cultural Jewish magazine in order to counterbalance the anti-Semite offensive being promoted by Hitler and Goebbels. When he visited New York in 1935, Siegmund open the doors of the American financial world to him through his cousin Felix (one of the supporters of the JTA, Jewish Telegraphic Agency – see entry) to finance the project.  They exchanged postcards and telegrams when Zweig went to Brazil for the first time. And when he tried to mobilize endorsements for the anti-Nazi manifesto, he again turned to his influential friend, who introduced him to the scientist Chaim Weitzman (later president of Israel).

 

After the start of the war, Warburg called on him to produce anti-Nazi propaganda for Germany, while Zweig considered this premature, and thought it would be more useful to target neutral countries where he enjoyed great popularity. He had one condition: to get rid of the humiliating statute of “enemy alien”.

 

Warburg was the only one of his friends present at the marriage to Lotte. They continued corresponding with considerable enthusiasm when he left England and went to Brazil. He was one of the few to receive the postcard with the melancholic verses of Camões (sent from Rio in December 1940).

 

He may have been the only person to send a telegram to Petrópolis congratulating him in his 60th birthday. The last letter from Stefan to Siegmund is dated 8th December 1941. One day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the USA’s entry into the war, he could not hide his pessimism: “My great despair is that now, unlike the first war, the intellectuals are absolutely impotents”.

 

In October 1943, twenty months after his friend’s suicide, Siegmund Warburg wrote a memorandum in his honour. As always with personal writings, he used the German language. It has never been published.

 

Address listed: Deerkaddun, Great Missenden, Bucks. [Buckinghamshire].