The Early Years in Nuremberg

Flashback: In the Golden Twenties, which in reality were not so golden, the Nuremberg salesman Karl Amson Joel had a vision. He wanted to set up a mail-order business based on the American model, America being the ideal of progress and success. The young man had experience in the textile trade through his work for the Witt mail-order house in Weiden. Joel gathered all his savings together, totaling 10,000 Reichsmarks, and in 1927 founded the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company. This sounds impressive, but in the beginning it was a modest, one-man operation. The plain four-room apartment at Uhlandstrasse 9 served as office and storeroom. This art nouveau building still exists in the Nordstadt quarter of Nuremberg. The ground floor is now occupied by a trendy bar.

Karl Amson Joel and his wife Meta·© Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

Registration cards of Karl and Meta Joel·© Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

Karl Joel started his mail-order business in this house in Nuremberg·© Steffen Radlmaier

The range of articles offered mail order by this aspiring company, which was slowly but surely building up a clientele, was limited: mostly bed articles and material sold by the meter. Soon Meta Joel was needed to help her enterprising husband. During the day they put together the orders, and evenings they took the bound packages with the handcart to the post office. Their young son, Helmut, often sat on the cart, enjoying the vibrations on the cobblestone streets.

Helmut, who was given the middle name Julius after his grandfather, was born on June 12, 1923, in Nuremberg– the year during which the devastating inflation reached its peak in Germany, destroying an unimaginable amount of monetary value. It was also the year of the failed Hitler putsch in Munich, the first attempt of the National Socialists to seize power in the crisis-riddled German Reich.

Helmut remained the only child of Karl Amson und Meta Joel. The Jewish family on the father’s side, whose name derives from the“small prophet” from the Bible, came from the small city of Colmberg in Franconia, which like Nuremberg is dominated by a castle. One of the ancestors of the early 19thcentury was Faustus Joel, the great-grandfather, born in 1806. The maternal grandparents were named Fleischmann. They too had five children and came from Oberlangenstadt, near Bamberg, where they owned a tobacco shop.

The Joels had long been in the textile business. Grandfather Julius, who had married Sara Schwab from Ansbach, was a professional tailor. Together they had five children: Two sons and three daughters. Karl’s older brother was named Leon, and his favorite sister was Melitta, called Litti. Melitta Joel married Fred Fleischmann, her brother-in-law, which made the issue somewhat complex.“Yes, my father’s sister married my mother’s brother,” confirmed Helmut Joel.

Word of the quality of the wares and the favorable prices of Karl Amson Joel’s linen business soon got about. It was the rural clientele in particular who made use of the mail order service. An increasing number of parcels and packages needed to be packed, and eventually the Joels were no longer able to keep up. Since the apartment was bursting, the successful young entrepreneur, a well-dressed man who even in his younger years had thinning hair, searched for a new space for operations. By 1929, six young women were working for Joel at premises on a street named Kohlengasse. The enterprise quickly expanded, moving first to the Hansa-Haus at Plärrer, and then into a factory building at Landgrabenstrasse 46.

At six years of age Helmut Joel, a thin youth with dark hair, was sent to Uhland School, where he got to know Rudi Weber, a boy his age. This was the start of a lifelong friendship. As was common then, they were in an all-boys class. On Sundays they most often wore sailor’s suits, and on schooldays short lederhosen and knee socks. At recess they played tag. Only during religion lessons were the classes divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish pupils. No one had a problem with that arrangement.

The class of Helmut Joel and Rudi Weber at Uhlandschule, Nuremberg.

Helmut Joel (first row, second from left) and h