Two Sprecher for One

In ten years as chief of the Deutsche Bank, West Germany's largest, Hermann Josef Abs became the most distinguished figure in German finance. Only last year, no less an authority than David Rockefeller, president of the U.S.'s globe-spanning Chase Manhattan Bank, called him "the leading banker in the world." Suave, witty and self-assured, Abs was more than a banker: a confidant and consultant to monarchs and politicians, he became an unofficial ambassador to the world's financial centers and the undisputed eminence grise of German business.

Now, in keeping with the Deutsche Bank's retirement age of 65, Abs has just stepped up to the elder-statesman role of chairman of its supervisory board. To succeed him as Sprecher des Vorstandes, or speaker for its ten-man executive board, the Frankfurt-based bank picked not one but two associates: Karl Klasen, 58, head of its Hamburg office, and Franz Heinrich Ulrich, 56, who will also continue to manage its Dusseldorf division. Though withdrawing from active banking, Abs remains one of his country's most powerful businessmen. A director of 29 large companies, he retains the chairmanship of 15, including Daimler-Benz, Lufthansa and the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the state-owned railway.

Financial Juggles. The son of a successful lawyer, Abs forsook law studies at Bonn University to learn banking in Cologne, Amsterdam, Paris, London and New York. At 36, his grasp of international finance led to his appointment as head of the Deutsche Bank's foreign department. Though inevitably involved in the financial juggles of the Hitler regime, Abs did not join the Nazi Party and at the end of World War II quietly retired to his Rhineland estate. Tapped in 1948 to run the agency that distributed Marshall Plan credit to German industry, Abs soon became a close adviser to fellow Catholic Konrad Adenauer, often attended Bonn Cabinet meetings at the Chancellor's request. "When the Chancellor has worries, he calls me," said Abs. Twice, Adenauer offered him the Foreign Ministry, but Abs declined. "My work," he explained, "lies in economics."

Abs became Sprecher of the Deutsche Bank, which had been broken up by the Allies at war's end, when it was re-established in 1957. By expanding the bank's services to small depositors, venturing into personal loans, setting up mutual funds, he soon made the bank more prosperous than ever. With assets more than doubled in a decade, to $4.5 billion, its earnings last year reached $40 million.

As in Solitaire. His prime concern was financing industry, and nobody wielded more authority in that field than Abs. Quite literally, his word could make or break both upstarts and industrial giants. It was Abs's refusal to advance a $25 million loan that early this year ended five generations of one-man rule at the Krupp industrial complex. "Our influence is one of order, not of power," insists Abs, "as in solitaire one tries to make everything come out even." In his busy retirement, Abs will try to make things come out even at ailing Krupp: among other jobs, he was recently named to the "administrative council" of non-Krupp businessmen who will oversee all major management decisions. Though the council has no formal chairman, Abs's prestige clearly makes him its key member.

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