Reinhard Mohn

Childhood, Youth, Military Service, POW Years: Early Influences

Reinhard Mohn was born into a traditional, middle-class publishing family. The Bertelsmanns, rooted in Gütersloh in eastern Westphalia, were shaped by the proverbial spirit of a pastor's household strongly influenced by the Minden-Ravensberg revivalist movement. Founded in 1835, the publishing company C. Bertelsmann served as the publishing home of this devout lay movement, to which future generations of publishers remained committed well into the 20th century. In 1881, the granddaughter of company founder Carl Bertelsmann, Friederike, married Johannes Mohn, also from a pastoral family, who took over the publishing house in 1887 after the death of his father-in-law. Reinhard Mohn's father, the publisher Heinrich Mohn, in turn married a pastor's daughter, Agnes Seippel, in 1912. Except for a four-year period in Braunlage, where the family lived in »a simple townhouse made of plain bricks,« the small town of Gütersloh remained the real center of their home lives.11 The home Heinrich Mohn built there in 1928 on Kurfürstenstrasse had a five-hectare garden, but otherwise it lacked the luxuries that characterized other industrialists' mansions. According to Reinhard Mohn, his parents »brought him up to be thrifty,« and there were no »Persian carpets.«12

The children of Agnes and Heinrich Mohn around 1928: Ursula, Sigbert, Gerd, Hans Heinrich, Reinhard and Annegret (from left). There were large age gaps between the six Mohn siblings, who were born between 1913 and 1926. As the firstborn, Hans Heinrich (»Hanger«) played a special role in the family structure and with a view to his later management of Bertelsmann. There was nothing to indicate that Reinhard, the second-youngest, would in the future be entrusted with the task of steering the company's fortunes.

Reinhard Mohn was born on June 29, 1921, the fifth of six children and the third-eldest son. He first went to Gütersloh's Protestant elementary school before transferring to the local Evangelisch-Stiftisches Gymnasium (Protestant high school) in 1931, in keeping with family tradition. Looking back, he always emphasized that he was the second youngest: his siblings had set the standard at school, which had »rather negative consequences« for him because he felt he was by no means as gifted as they were.13 Throughout his life, he considered his admired eldest brother Hans Heinrich, older by eight years, to be particularly capable. In interviews, Reinhard occasionally mentioned his brother's outstanding talents and intellectual esprit. On the other hand, Reinhard »demanded a lot of himself.«14 While his school performance wasn't bad, he remembered throughout his life his mother's discreet suggestion that he become a carpenter. In retrospect, school was an »arduous path« for Mohn.15 This statement probably wasn't simple coquetry on the part of a man looking back on a successful life.

Engagement photo of Agnes Seippel and Heinrich Mohn, Reinhard Mohn's parents, dated 1911. A year after he joined his father's publishing company, Heinrich Mohn and Agnes Seippel - a friend of his sister Sophie - who was four years younger, announced their engagement. Agnes was the eldest of six children of a Gütersloh pastor and his wife, who came from a merchant family in the city. The couple celebrated their wedding in June 1912.

The »spirit of a Protestant parsonage« in a rural region dominated his years growing up.16 The developments in a disunited church, whose imperial head, the Kaiser, had abdicated in 1918, influenced the home, too. Economically, things were looking rather good for the publishing house, because its characteristic mixture of theological literature and - since the late 1920s - popular folk fiction was in demand during the Weimar Republic. Politically, after the fall of the Empire, the father Heinrich Mohn remained committed to the typical national Protestantism, in which people voted for the DNVP and read the conservative »Kreuz-Zeitung.«17 Although his father left his mark on the family home as publisher and master of the house, Reinhard Mohn has always gratefully remembered his mother, who was forced to assume responsibility for the children at an early age: »Growing up in a parsonage and later marrying my father, who came from a very religious/church-oriented publishing house,« were as important to her as »regular attendance at church services, morning and evening devotional prayers at home, grace at table, evening prayers at the children's bedside.«18 In keeping with the times, his mother remained in the background and was responsible for the family, especially since - at least as her children tell it - she was not a particularly sociable person. In her down-to-earth demeanor, luxury, unnecessary expense, and striving for recognition were »completely alien« to her.19 Asked about his mother's influence, Reinhard Mohn's answer was: »Religiousness, strict morality, orderliness, punctuality, cleanliness, accuracy, and a sense of duty definitely characterized my mother. She loved her family and was always helpful and caring.«20 These were values, enriched by organized thinking and analytical aptitude, that were also to define his own life, even if, in the conflicting priorities of business and morality, the concept of »Protestant ethics«21 increasingly faded into the background. Nevertheless, Mohn, a »Westphalian with Prussian virtues,«22 would later recall an upbringing that was both loving and strict: his mother would look over his shoulder while he was doing his homework, and she would grumble when his school performance was poor and his report cards less than stellar. Then she would float the subtle question about whether he wouldn't rather learn a »practical profession.«23 Nevertheless, from the age of 16, he no longer had to attend the usual prayers and devotions, having distanced himself from the church and from ecclesiastical beliefs. Although he did undergo a process of secularization, he never managed or wanted to shake off his religious side, asking questions of morality and the need for corporate values. Mohn was part of the Protestant educated middle-class milieu, in which economic profit-seeking was traditionally associated with a social and civilizing consciousness. The role of religion and the church was largely limited to formal aspects, and the Bible, which he was obviously familiar with since childhood, remained a decorum of his life and world, so that it is difficult to construct a Protestant business spirit from Mohn's religious references.24 And yet he was a modern man of business in the sense of Max Weber, if one uses as a reference his model of a Protestant work ethic: a certain bourgeois structure, a rational and process-oriented business organization and a strict separation of business and personal life as its essential characteristics.25

Reinhard Mohn's memories of his mother Agnes, written in 1984 (excerpt). As part of the preparations for Bertelsmann's 150th anniversary celebration, Reinhard Mohn recorded sections of his family's history for the author Walter Kempowski. He characterized the personality of his mother Agnes in particular detail. Her life was shaped by her religious anchoring in Protestantism, self-discipline, and familial duty - »My mother lived in the world of her family.«

Group picture of the Mohn family in 1933 in front of grandmother Friederike Mohn's (née Bertelsmann) »Ivy House« in Gütersloh with (from left) parents Heinrich and Agnes with his brother Gerd, grandmother Friederike, siblings Hans Heinrich, Ursula, Sigbert and Annegret, and Reinhard Mohn on the far right.

He cherished the church's message for society, even if he had little time for everyday Protestantism. In 1966, he wrote: »Form of leadership of the church not adequate. Unsatisfactory effect, overworked pastors, declining influence.«26 And when asked much later, in an interview with the Austrian journalist Peter Schier-Gribowsky, whether he was a »devout man,« he evaded the question with the partial answer that religion had always been a component with the Bertelsmanns.27

The family's lifestyle was spartan. There was no smoking and no drinking, he later reported.28 The family didn't purchase its first car, a modest small vehicle from the now forgotten manufacturer AGA, until 1927.29 The emphasis was not on flaunting luxury, but on conveying inner values. In a school essay from January 1938 on the subject of »My Thoughts in Choosing a Career,« 16-year-old Reinhard wrote with astonishing circumspection about responsibility and a sense of duty, without naming a specific career goal: »For I would rather take upon myself all the doubts and questions that will come to one otherwise, and struggle to solve them, than to merely be a dead tool while I am alive.«30 Mohn added in his essay, which was completely free of National Socialist rhetoric: »I have resolved to always be ready to learn and to acknowledge when something is better, even if I would have to give up everything I have believed up to now and see it as wrong.«31

Reinhard Mohn's homework...