Arms of Krupp, The: 1587 – 1968

Small library stamp, FLEP, Private Temple Name & Presentation Plate FLEP , else content appears as, unread and unblemished with black cloth covered boards displaying no significant, minor, minimal, surface/edge wear. DJ displaying moderate surface/edge wear as shown. Vinyl cover appears very good. Heavy Book

The late William Manchester, master of twentieth century popular history, made his reputation with this book, published in 1968. There will never be another book on the Krupp family like it, and not just because it's so long, nearly half a million words and a thousand pages. It is also because the Krupps are largely forgotten today, fifty years later—and because Manchester personally talked to nearly everyone in, and connected to, the Krupp family at its height, and those people are all dead. Just as dead is the firm itself, since the sole proprietorship that was "Krupp" no longer exists in that form or has any connection to the Krupp family. Sic transit Gloria Mundi, if "Gloria" is the right word.

Manchester's goal in writing this book was to combine an account of Germany's military and industrial rise with a longitudinal view of the Krupp family. The traceable history of the Krupp family began in 1587, with the arrival of Arndt Krupp in Essen, the heart of Germany's Ruhr region. The five generations after Arndt Krupp receive only skeletal mention in a handful of pages; the only family head who rates even a minor mention, at least in Manchester's eyes, is Anton Krupp, who was recorded as selling musket barrels during the Thirty Years War, around 1640. Still, the family was very prominent and successful in Essen, with the usual ups and downs of early modern merchants, and by the late 1700s had moved into iron and coal. But the book really begins with the accession of Friedrich Krupp, nineteen years old, as manager of the works owned by his grandmother, in 1807. Friedrich died in 1826, and there were only four more heads thereafter. Alfred, Friedrich's son, ran the firm until 1887. Friedrich Alfred ran it until 1902. His daughter, Bertha, inherited the firm (he had no sons), but the firm was headed by her husband, Gustav; they ran the firm until the 1940s. Their son, Alfried, ran the firm until 1967. And his son, called Arndt just as had been the first Krupp, renounced his inheritance without reluctance—and so the firm passed, due to insolvency, out of family hands in 1967, just before Alfried's death.

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