Obituary Hans Middelmann ; Sunday Times 17-03-2002

Hans Middelmann: Obituary Published Sunday 17 Mar 2002 in the Sunday Times (sundaytimes.co.za) HANS Middelmann, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 89, was a prominent member of the local business establishment who publicly championed the cause of an open society and one-man-one-vote when such notions were anathema to it. A banker by profession, Middelmann was conservative and discreet in his business dealings, and indeed in the understated way he went about the rest of his life. But there was nothing conservative or understated about his belief in justice. While much of the business community fell in line readily enough behind the National Party government, both from conviction and to protect the government contracts it lived off, Middelmann spoke out loudly and frequently. As president of the Association of Chambers of Commerce of South Africa in the early 1960s, he led deputations to Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd after the Sharpeville massacre plunged the country into crisis and asked him to repeal apartheid legislation. In 1976, just after the Soweto uprising and when Transkei was about to be given its independence, he warned that the government's homelands policy was "the ultimate folly". The kind of society the government was trying to create through apartheid was "an unrealisable dream" that would lead to disaster. Instead of decreasing friction between races apartheid had "created more friction than we ever had before", he wrote. He called for unqualified universal franchise before even the Progressive Party was ready to entertain that idea. Middelmann expressed his outspoken views in the Cape Times in leader page articles that he wrote regularly for at least 10 years. The constitution that he urged foreshadowed to a remarkable degree the country's present Constitution. He was an administrator of the Abe Bailey estate, which was a majority shareholder of South African Associated Newspapers and part-owner of the Cape Times. When his fellow administrators and particularly the chairman, Clive Corder, tried to sell SAAN to the Argus Group, Middelmann fought hard to ensure that the independence of the Cape Times would not be jeopardised. Unlike Corder, who ousted the editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Laurence Gandar, when his opposition to apartheid damaged profits, Middelmann saw that newspapers in South Africa had a role to play that went far beyond securing a healthy bottom line. He had powerful contacts in the business world, not least his friend Gavin Relly, who in the 1980s was boss of Anglo American and whom Middelmann wouldn't hesitate to call. Middelmann frequently used this considerable behind-the-scenes influence to come to the rescue of the Cape Times and its oft-embattled editor Tony Heard. Heard was constantly alienating the business community on which his newspaper relied, not to mention PW Botha, who began gunning for him when he was the defence minister and, as prime minister, called for his scalp. Without Middelmann's timely interventions, Heard might well have been fired years before he eventually was in 1987. Middelmann was born in Berlin on August 30 1912, the son of a successful property developer. When he was about six the family moved to Leipzig, where his father had been commissioned by a Jewish property magnate and banker to manage the development of an enormous apartment block. Most of central Leipzig was owned and controlled by Jews, and the most horrifyingly formative experience of Middelmann's life was seeing Jews being beaten up in the streets by gangs of Nazi stormtroopers. At school he came under pressure to join the Hitler Youth, but was one of only four in his class of 24 to refuse. When he matriculated his father sent him to study at the London School of Economics for a year. As well as learning to speak English he heard the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who were in London attending a political conference, and the literary great George Bernard Shaw. He also came under the spell of the free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek. Although a liberal, Middelmann was never a leftist. He was deeply committed to capitalism and the free market all his life. On his return to Leipzig he was apprenticed to the bank of Hans Kroch, his father's friend and employer, as a clerk. He watched Hitler's pre-war rallies from an upper window in the Bankhaus Kroch. On one occasion the bank's employees were subjected to a lecture, by a strutting Nazi, on their duty to Germany. It ended with them being taught to yell "Heil Hitler" and give the Nazi salute. The atmosphere of intimidation was enhanced by the presence in the office of a Gestapo plant. By this time, Middelmann's brother Walter had left for South Africa and sent back glowing reports about Cape Town. In 1937 Middelmann decided he could no longer bear what was happening in Germany and left. He always remembered his boss saying: "You're one of the lucky ones. We're too old to go." He wasn't allowed to take out any money so his father gave him a little Ford 10 instead. He bought a slow boat ticket around Africa. When the boat docked in Cape Town he thought he'd arrived in paradise and quickly decided to put his roots down. When war started he was threatened with internment, the fate of many other German immigrants, but managed to talk his way out of it by stressing his opposition to Nazism. The fact that he'd already found a job with Inter-Union Finance also helped his cause. Starting at the bottom, he worked his way up until he became managing director in 1959. Soon after his arrival in Cape Town, Middelmann decided to further his studies in economics, but the dean of the commerce faculty at the University of Cape Town, Professor W H Hutt, advised him not to waste his time doing a Bachelor of Commerce degree. "Look," he told him, "here are four tickets to the university library. Take them and go and read everything you can." Middelmann did just that, and was impressively well read as a result. He was particularly inspired by the work of the great philosopher on liberalism and the open society, Karl Popper. Popper became the greatest influence in his life and later the two corresponded. Another regular correspondent was George Soros, the financier and philanthropist. They became friends and would meet when Middelmann visited the US. It was thanks mainly to Middelmann's persistent lobbying that Soros backed the establishment of an Open Society Foundation in South Africa in 1993. In 1973 Middelmann was elected to the council of the University of Cape Town. He was a member of the governing board of the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch and became chairman in 1980. He is survived by his wife, Jessie, whom he met at a meeting of the Cape Town Debating Society in the mid-1940s, and four children. - Chris Barron

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