The Walter Mangold Trust Fund
The Walter Mangold Trust
Fund was established
in 2006 in accordance with the terms of the Will of the late
Anne Marie Herzenberg, the only child of Walter Mangold. The
preamble to the will reads as follows:
" I desire to place on
record that a substantial portion of the assets available to me
came from the estate of Walter Mangold. My late father, having experienced
the devastations and hardships which the First World War, the
Depression and the subsequent Second World War wrought on mankind,
gave a great deal of thought to the causes of such upheavals.
During the second half of his life he devoted his energies to the
teaching of languages. He came to the conclusion that better
understanding between peoples, and consequently lessening of
conflict, could be achieved by improving communication between
them."
Walter Mangold was born in Brunswick,
Germany in 1892 into an upper middle class Jewish family.
Walter Mangold began his working life in Hannover where he became a
successful businessman, acting as an agent for Lyons teas and other
large international companies. His business was known as
Mangold GMBH, and involved a great deal of travel. He married
Irma Wolff and they had one daughter, Anne Marie, born in
1920. The family moved to Hamburg where the family business
was based. In 1933 Walter Mangold and his wife were divorced,
and Walter Mangold, who was described by his daughter as ‘very
eccentric’, continued to live and work in Hamburg. The family
was not religious, and considered themselves as Germans who were
Jewish, rather than the reverse.
Despite this belief,
conditions for Jews in Germany during the 1930’s deteriorated
rapidly, and by 1935 when race laws were introduced in Germany,
Walter Mangold was taken to a concentration camp. He remained
there for several years. Although knowledge of the details of
his wartime history are vague, at some point he must have left or
escaped from the German concentration camp, because it is known
that he joined the French resistance movement, spent time in a
French concentration camp from which he escaped, and made his way
through the Pyrenees in winter to Spain, where he lived for the
rest of his life.
Walter Mangold had strong
intellectual abilities combined with a good business acumen, and he
embraced many interests throughout his life. He had the
ability to communicate and be at ease in any company, and spoke
several languages. For a man of wealth, he lived
modestly. When he was imprisoned in concentration camps, he
was able to organise reading and discussion groups for his fellow
prisoners, and was, like many people of his generation, extremely
well educated in German classic literature. He had a
reputation as a charming and very perceptive man, but one who could
at times be difficult. He was also, through the power of his
personality and his ability, able to make many contacts with
influential people in Spain and elsewhere.
After the conclusion of the
war, having no money, Walter Mangold rented a small room in Madrid,
and began teaching English and other languages. At that time
there was a strong demand for language teaching, and the school,
known as the Mangold Institute, developed and expanded
quickly. Teachers were brought in from other countries to
meet the demand. At its peak the school had over 3,000
pupils. Walter Mangold had firm ideas about the teaching of
language, and wrote his own textbooks, which led to establishment
of his publishing firm, Editorial Mangold. The philosophy and
aim of the school was to use the teaching of modern languages to
improve communication between people and bring about better
understanding between them.
Both businesses were very
successful, but were eventually sold as Walter Mangold became
older. He continued to be active in his retirement, and died
on 18 October 1983, aged 91, a Spanish citizen.
Walter Mangold’s daughter,
Anne Marie, followed a different path to her father. Because
of the restrictions on Jews in the 1930’s, she was unable to
continue her schooling, and worked for a time in a dress
shop. She married her first husband, Hans Bergheim, in
Germany in 1938 when she was 18, and they immediately left to live
in Shanghai, escaping from Germany whilst they could still do
so. They remained in Shanghai throughout World War 2, but in
1945 they decided to move to Australia. Hans Bergheim had a
cousin living in Melbourne, and initially they planned to stay with
them. However, Hans Bergheim became ill with heart disease
whilst still in Shanghai, and he died three months after arriving
in Sydney. Anne Marie, on her own, moved to Melbourne to stay
with her first husband’s cousins, and settled in Melbourne for the
rest of her life. She met and married Erwin Herzenberg, a
fellow German and Jew, who had, like her, fled Germany before the
war, and come to Australia.
In 1952, when Anne Marie
Herzenberg learned, quite by coincidence, that her father was still
alive she contacted him in Spain and after that time they met
frequently. In Melbourne, Anne Marie completed a Bachelor of
Arts degree at The University of Melbourne, and a Diploma of
Education at Monash University, and became a secondary school
teacher until her retirement. Her husband Erwin was a
chemical engineer, and together they maintained an active social
life in Melbourne and made many friends. They had no
children, and both Erwin and Anne Marie were only children
themselves, so they had no immediate family at all. Erwin’s
parents had died in the Holocaust, along with other family
members.
Erwin Herzenberg died on 21
October 2002, and Anne Marie Herzenberg died on 13 April
2004.
The Walter Mangold Trust
commenced operation in January 2006, and has seven basic objects,
summarised as follows:
the provision of educational
scholarships to enable young Australians to spend a period of time
in a foreign country;
- the provision of
scholarships to overseas students who apply to come to Australia to
advance their knowledge of English and to gain an understanding in
one or more areas of Australian culture;
- the appointment of a
visiting Scholar or Fellow to the University of
Melbourne;
- the encouragement of
inter-disciplinary studies, which involve the study of a
language;
- the support of a vacation
school in a foreign language conducted in Australia;
- the awarding of grants or
scholarships to the Australian Institute of International Affairs
(Victorian Branch)or for its purposes; and
- the support of a published
work of education merit which makes a contribution to the aims of
the Trust.
All these objects broadly
follow the terms of Anne Marie Herzenberg’s Will, and now form the
basis of the Walter Mangold Trust Fund in accordance with her
wishes, and, no doubt, the wishes of Walter Mangold
himself.
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