Jan Philipp Reemtsma is not only a millionaire, professor, literary expert, author and founder of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research - but also the victim of one of the most spectacular kidnappings in Germany.
Jan Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma was born on November 26, 1952 in Bonn as a scion of the Reemtsma tobacco dynasty. But Reemtsma does not see his future as the legacy of the successful family business. He is studying German and philosophy. When he inherited shares in the tobacco company worth millions at the age of only 26, he sold them immediately.
Millionaire with a passion for literature
The acquaintance with the writer Arno Schmidt in 1977 is formative for the young Reemtsma. Reemtsma offers the seriously ill author 350,000 marks so that he can lead a carefree life - a sum that corresponds to what a Nobel Prize winner in literature received at the time. When Schmidt dies two years later, Reemtsma enables the Arno Schmidt Foundation to be established and becomes co-editor of Schmidt's complete works.
Promoters of science and culture
In 1984 Reemtsma founded the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS), which he headed from 1990 to 2015. The Institute's exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht caused a sensation in 1995. Opponents of the exhibition complain about an inadmissible denigration of the Wehrmacht. Proponents see it as a contribution to the unsparing clarification of the role of the Wehrmacht. Errors in the assignment of photos also make headlines. The exhibition then had to be revised.
In action for Hamburg
Reemtsma gained a good reputation as a researcher and teacher. From 1996 to 2007 he worked as a professor for modern German literature at the University of Hamburg.
He is also involved in the Hanseatic city outside of the university:For example, Reemtsma agrees to buy eight formerly squatted houses in Hamburg's Hafenstrasse for a symbolic price and to transfer them to a cooperative administration. He also advocates that Hamburg companies that benefited from the forced labor of the prisoners of the Neuengamme concentration camp during the Nazi era should pay financial support to the memorial.
One of the most spectacular kidnappings in Germany
Possibly the darkest chapter in Reemtsma's life is his kidnapping in 1996:the then 43-year-old was held captive in a basement for 33 days and nights.
It all begins on the evening of March 25, 1996, when he is attacked on his property in the Hamburg district of Blankenese. The perpetrators beat him down, blindfold him with tape and take him to a house in Garlstedt in the district of Osterholz that was specially rented for the kidnapping. In the basement dungeon, Reemtsma is in mortal fear. Two ransom handovers fail, only the third attempt succeeds. Reemtsma's family pays 30 million Deutschmarks. Two days later, Reemtsma is released. Only then will the public find out about the kidnapping. The media did not report this, in order not to endanger the life of the hostage.
The search for the man behind the kidnapping, Thomas Drach, has been unsuccessful for a long time. In 1998 he was arrested in Argentina. Two years later he was extradited to Germany and in 2001 sentenced to fourteen and a half years in prison. His two accomplices are caught soon after the end of the kidnapping in Spain. You have five and ten and a half years in prison. A third accomplice turned himself in in 1998 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
In the trial against his kidnappers, Reemtsma appears as a joint plaintiff. He also processed his kidnapping, being held hostage and being freed in his book "Im Keller". On the last pages he writes:"The basement stays alive."