Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis

T
WO
P
ATHS TO THE
S
UBJECT OF
“F
ROMMS
A
CT”

GÖTZ ALY: SEX PLUS JEWS

IN THE FALL OF
2004, two colleagues and I were planning to give a reading of unpublished texts. We chose the Sunday Club in the Prenzlauer Berg section of Berlin as our venue. The Sunday Club had been the first gay club to open in the German Democratic Republic, and was now, according to its Web site, a “meeting place for lesbians, gays, and trans-, bi- and heterosexuals.”

When it came time to send out announcements, the person in charge of cultural programming asked me whether I really wanted to read the same old “run-of-the-mill hetero claptrap.” “Excuse me?” I asked, somewhat taken aback. After all, I had a reputation to uphold. I thought it over for a minute, then remembered that there was a file—hidden away in the vault of the German Democratic Republic Central Bank for decades—that documented the
Entjudung
(“dejudaization,” or exclusion of the Jews by the Nazis) at Fromms Act, the condom company in Berlin-Köpenick that had once enjoyed international renown.

I had requested this file several months earlier at the German Federal Archives while investigating another subject. After sifting
through it for no more than a few minutes, I realized that it was not pertinent to the topic I was researching, so I returned it to the stacks—quite reluctantly, I might add. The intriguing side issues that emerge by happenstance, the ones archivists gloss over when focusing on what they deem to be the major themes in cataloguing their holdings, are what make historiography such a captivating pursuit. Of course, these side issues, with their many enticing twists and turns, make it nearly impossible for researchers to stay on track. There is no escaping this dilemma. Historians who immerse themselves in source material are bound to veer from their self-prescribed paths.

The staff at the Sunday Club was intrigued by the combination of National Socialism, condoms, sex, and Judaism, and we agreed on the topic. But apart from my chance discovery, I was unable to obtain any other expropriation or restitution files pertaining to Julius Fromm, the founder of the company; the archives in Potsdam and Berlin would not release them. Evidently there was still pending litigation. But I did find the address of Edgar Fromm in London, an heir of the late condom manufacturer. I wrote to him requesting permission to examine the files. As it turned out, the addressee had been dead for the past five years.

This is how I launched my research on a topic that until recently I had deemed immaterial and far too specialized. My thanks go to my coreaders at the event, Martin Z. Schröder and Gustav Seibt, and especially to Pedro at the Sunday Club. It was his provocative intervention that sent me on a rewarding byway, a byway that would shed new light on the events of the twentieth century.

It led me to one of the many Jewish businesses that went under during the National Socialist era and are almost universally ignored by historians. It is not hard to figure out why: because these companies
were unceremoniously destroyed, they cannot sponsor business historians, who prefer to follow the money. Over the past twenty years, scholarly interest guided by this monetary inequity has produced a peculiar asymmetry, with the perpetrators and profiteers dominating historical inquiry. The companies’ legal successors have supported research because their professed interest in “coming to terms with” an unappealing past fosters their image and thus the marketing of their brands; among the many cases in point are Volkswagen, Krupp, Allianz, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Degussa, Dresdner Bank, Flick, and Bertelsmann. Because business history functions in this manner, a giant of the twentieth century like Julius Fromm, the creator of the world’s first brand-name condom, seemed destined for oblivion.

Julius Fromm has not even found a place in the lexicon of emigration from German-speaking countries. This book is dedicated to his life’s work, his talent, his creative spirit, and his zest for modernity.

Julius Fromm, mid-1920s

MICHAEL SONTHEIMER: EDDIE’S MISSION

S
OMETIME EARLY IN
1996, I happened to watch a talk show that featured a captivating elderly gentleman named Edgar Fromm, who was describing how his father, Julius, had made condoms the most popular form of contraception in Germany in the 1920s.

When I was growing up in West Berlin in the 1960s, I learned most of what I knew about the facts of life on the streets. I knew what a “Fromms” was, of course—that was what you called condoms back then. The plural form was Frommse (or, as some people said, Frommser or Frömmser). Just as Kleenex has come to be synonymous with tissues, the brand name Fromms stood for condoms. What I didn’t know then was that the term had originated with a man named Julius Fromm, a German Jew who had to flee Berlin in 1938 and emigrate to England.

One of the perks of professional journalism is getting paid to follow leads of your own choosing. I pitched the topic of the history of the Berlin condom manufacturer for a special issue of
Der Spiegel
magazine we were putting together on the theme of love. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the living room of a small house in London, in upscale Hampstead Garden Suburb in North West London, where many Jews who had fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s had settled. It was here that Edgar Fromm was living with his partner, Lisa Abramson. She had emigrated to London from Danzig in 1937. Both were widowed, and were happily devoted to each other.

Over a good whiskey, Edgar Fromm recounted what he knew about his father and the Fromms Act company. He spoke in an elegant German that sounded somewhat old-fashioned. He regarded my article about his father, Julius, to whom he owed so
much, as a belated means of setting the record straight. He told me, in English, what he hoped to achieve: “To put him back on the map.” More documents turned up in archives than could be accommodated in a magazine piece, and so a plan to write a book about the history of Fromms Act began to evolve.

It is quite unusual for journalists to strike up a friendship with their sources, but I continued to visit Eddie and Lisa in London at least once a year, and we got together whenever they came to Berlin. Here, in Edgar’s hometown, we sought and found the grave of his grandparents and of a cousin at the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee.

When Edgar Fromm died unexpectedly in Baden-Baden in the summer of 1999, I had a guilty conscience. Now he would no longer be able to experience public recognition of his father’s achievements, and my motivation to work on the book was gone. The files gathered dust in a corner.

When I visited Lisa Abramson in London six years later, in February 2005, she told me that she had received a letter addressed to Eddie from a historian in Berlin requesting information about Fromms Act. The sender was Götz Aly, with whom I had worked in the early 1980s at the
Tageszeitung
newspaper. We spoke on the phone and decided to write the book together.

Neither Fromm’s personal papers nor his company’s archives survived the upheavals of emigration, bombing attacks, and the postwar period of psychological and physical rebuilding with its propensity for tossing things away. Among the few documents to surface were two wills Julius Fromm had drawn up, two brief personal letters, two applications to the Potsdam chief administrative officer in his—initially unsuccessful—quest for German citizenship, and, finally, a businesslike letter to the police commissioner in Berlin that kept his denaturalization as an
Ostjude
(Eastern European Jew) at bay in 1934. We managed, in addition,
to obtain certificates, marketing materials, and photographs that helped us construct a picture of Julius Fromm, and we spoke to the few remaining people who could give us information about him. We compiled these fragments to reconstruct his profile—to put him back on the map.

Frankfurt and Berlin, October 2006