Germany: Making Money Is Fun

For generations, the German hausfrau who prides herself on her cakes and cookies has owed her reputation to Dr. August Oetker. Dr. Oetker’s baking powder has helped better her batter since the ’90s, and raised its price only once (by 2 pfennigs to 12 for a 17-gram packet). And Herr Doctor’s Baking Is Fun has sold 20 million copies—more than any other book in Germany save the Bible.

The name Oetker today is as potent in West Germany’s executive suites as it has ever been in the pantry. In a meteoric postwar career, Dr. Oetker’s grandson, Rudolph August, 46, has made himself the nation’s largest private shipowner, one of its biggest brewers, a major power in banking and insurance, and boss, in all, of more than 100 companies. Next week the baking powder baron is due in New York to inspect the Columbus Lines (18 cargo ships), which he bought from Du Pont five years ago.

No Movie Stars. A handsome, twice-divorced tycoon. Rudolph Oetker has built his huge empire on the modest baking powder fortune that he inherited in 1944.

With the country’s postwar prosperity, Oetker found himself swimming in profits as famished West Germans hurled themselves into what they called the “eating wave.” Trying to put his profits to work, he dropped $250,000 in an ill-starred try at moviemaking. “I didn’t even get to meet a beautiful movie star,” he recalls ruefully. He also branched into banking, partly to finance a chocolate stockpile for Oetker-packaged puddings, took over Hermann Lampe, a private bank, and Frankfurt’s Braubank. The latter’s big holdings in beer companies put Oetker in the front rank of West German brewers.

“Peculiar Group.” In an effort to duck taxes, he turned to building and refurbishing cargo ships, an operation which the West German government, eager to restore its war-torn merchant marine, made completely tax deductible. Oldtime Hamburg shipping men scornfully dubbed Oetker’s armada the “baking powder fleet,” but through astute management his fleet of 67 tankers and freighters has kept busy without resorting—as some German shipping companies have—to running Soviet-bloc cargoes for Castro. Characteristically, Oetker got into the insurance business to pare his premiums, built his Condor companies into one of Germany’s biggest full-line insurance firms.

While Oetker’s headlong growth is similar to that of the now bankrupt shipbuilder Willy Schlieker (TIME, Aug. 24), Oetker fully expects to avoid Schlieker’s errors (“He just lost his nerve”), operates on the principle that “you should have 10% more money available than you think you’ll need.” He also has a special Oetker recipe for handling financiers. “These bankers are a peculiar group,” he explains. “They come over for a surprise visit, hem and haw awhile, take a good look to see if all the pictures are still hanging on the walls and then go away happy.”

Rudolph Oetker has a lot to make the bankers happy; he collects pictures almost as avidly as companies, has a Frans Hals portrait in his library, and a striking charcoal sketch by Käthe Kollwitz in his headquarters office at Bielefeld. Its title is Aid the Starving, but it seems to reassure the moneymen.