Freedom, prosperity, democracy - this European self-image could not prevent new wars from flaring up in Europe. The questions remain pressing as to whether peace can be achieved and what kind of personality is needed to negotiate it. One of the "pioneers of a European peace" is Carl Melchior. Coming from a family of rabbis in Altona, he was co-owner of the Hamburg banking house M. M. Warburg & Co and a founding member of the German Democratic Party in 1918. As a member of the German delegation and head of the financial delegation at the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, he campaigned for fair reparation conditions and a settlement with France and Great Britain. He earned a high international reputation, also as a member of the League of Nations, whose Finance Committee he chaired from 1930. Forced out of all public office from 1933, he stood up for the interests of Jews in Germany at the beginning of 1933 and thus became a co-founder of the "Central Committee of German Jews for Aid and Reconstruction". Melchior was married to the French writer Marie de Molènes, whose novel "Fortunade à Berlin" is a monument to Franco-German reconciliation. The couple lived in his Hamburg villa at Heimhuder Strasse 55, which today houses the French Consulate General and the Institut français. Highly respected in his day, there are few reminders of him today. This makes it all the more important for us to give him and his wife a place in Hamburg's memorial landscape.

A lecture by Dorothea Hauser, historian, director of the Warburg Archive Hamburg Foundation, co-curator of the exhibition "Carl Melchior. Jewish pioneer of a European peace" at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

In cooperation with the Verein TempelForum, the Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte, arabesques-hamburg e.V. and the Patriotische Gesellschaft von 1765 e.V. - Hamburgische Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Künste und nützlichen Gewerbe.