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Ferdinand Valentin was born in Sarstedt in 1859. He was the first child of banker Jacob Valentin and his wife Friederike, née Jacobsohn. In the following years, three younger siblings were born with whom Ferdinand grew up.
In 1872, the whole family moved to Lüneburg. There, Jacob Valentin ran the private bank W. H. Michaels Nachfolger together with his brother-in-law Moritz Jacobsohn. The bank and the Valentins" living quarters were located in an old Lüneburg house at Große Bäckerstraße 25, not far from the market square.
Like his father, Ferdinand Valentin became a banker. While his three siblings Albert, Richard, and Anna left the town early on, Ferdinand remained in Lüneburg and joined the family banking business. In 1903, his father Jacob Valentin died. Senior partner Moritz Jacobsohn now hoped that the next generation of Jacobsohns and Valentins would soon take over the management of the bank. However, Albert Jacobsohn died of a brain tumor in 1912, followed by his brother Adolf Jacobsohn at the front in World War I in early 1918.
Shortly thereafter, their cousin Ferdinand Valentin became mentally ill. Moritz Jacobsohn decided to transfer the bank to Barmer Bankverein, a much larger company. Looking back, he wrote about this hard decision: “It was also very difficult for my partner and nephew, Ferdinand Valentin, to agree to the sale; since he had been suffering from a serious mental illness since the fall of 1918, I had reason to sell the business, but I had many struggles and disagreements with him because of this.”
After the sale of the bank in 1920, Ferdinand Valentin appears to have ceased working as a banker. In 1921, his mother Friederike, with whom he had lived in Große Bäckerstraße, died. Seriously ill, Ferdinand Valentin died in Lüneburg in 1925 and was buried in the town"s Jewish cemetery.
Sources and information:
Eva Valtin: Unimportant Memoirs of a very Unimportant Woman. Manuscript, Athens, March 1964; private collection of Marianne Wakeling
Moritz Jacobsohn, Mein Lebenslauf, Manuscript, Lüneburg 1924 (Leo Baeck Institute New York). Digital copy available online
Ursula Büttner, Fritz Valentin. Jüdischer Verfolgter, Richter und Christ 1897-1984. Eine Biografie, Göttingen 2017, pp. 9-10, 12
