Fewer than 12,000 people live in the south German village of Blaubeuren, but only one of them ever made it onto Forbes list of the internationally wealthy: Adolf Merckle, the entrepreneuer who thrwew himself in front of a train just a few metres behind his local pub on Monday night.
The pub is called The Goods Station; it serves up lentils with noodles and the locals can while away their evenings playing cards. Adolf Merckle, the man who brought work to the village, is their hero.
"You have no idea what he created here in the past 40 years," a wizened drinker told reporters as they stampeded yesterday into The Goods Station:"Thousands of jobs."
Until now the global credit crisis had barely touched Blaubeuren, just down the line from Ulm in south-west Germany. True, Merckle had lived like a man trying to save his pennies. When it was fair weather he rode to his office on an ancient bike; when it rained he drove his four year old VW Golf. He was a woolly cardigan man, an off-the-peg suit kind of billionaire.
His lifestyle was not conditioned by the recession or the new austerity economics; it was the Swabian way. The Swabians of Baden-Wuerttemberg are legendary for being tight-fisted. The region is full of small companies that have edged their way to the top of world export leagues in niche markets by deploying some canniness and keeping a close eye on costs. Although Merckle was born in Dresden and grew up in Sudetenland, he was of Swabian ilk; a penny pincher who collected supermarket discount stamps and returned empty bottles for the deposit.
He was also a devout Lutheran. "I rang up Mrs Merckle when I wanted advice about whether to train as a care worker, and she invited me over, incredibly warm and right at the end she gave me a bible with pictures in it," says Elfriede Schmitz, who runs The Goods Station. Mr Merckle was persuaded by his wife Ruth to support a leukaemia charity. Office parties were paid for personally by Mr Merckle and workers were allowed to bring their whole families.
Yet there was another, hidden side to Mr Merckle: the risk-taker. He dropped over €200 million on short-selling VW shares last November. There was a constant, running battle with the tax authorities as he tried to unearth ever more imaginative loopholes. There was even an attempt to have a small north-east German fishing town--where he had a house--declared a tax-free zone. Prosecutors investigated claims that Ratiopharm reps were sugaring the lives of doctors who ordered large quantities of pharmaceuticals. But for the most part Merckle brushed off the problems and stayed true to his image as the local patriarch. Neighbourhood children playing football in his driveway? No problem. A few thousand euros to equip a new kindergarten? Sure, and a bit extra for the opening party.
The breaking point for Mr Merckle came when he realised that, to save the remnants of his fortune, he would have to sell Ratiopharm. For him, the drugs company was his family pledge. His grandfather had started the company in 1915, and it had then passed to Merckle's father, Ludwig, and had weathered the storms of the 20th century, including its requisitioning under Hitler to make field medical kits for the Wehrmacht. Adolf Merckle was 74, with three sons and a daughter: it was his sacred duty, as he saw it, to pass on the pharmaceuticals division to his children. He was so nervous that Ratiopharm might slip out of family control, he took the day-to-day management away from his son Philipp Daniel last March. This part of the fortune at least had to be kept intact.
It was a saga reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks which chronicles how generations build up family wealth, become increasingly respectable - and then lose their grip.
Crumpling under the burden of debt, written-down assets, the impatience of the banks and his own stock exchange gambling, Ratiopharm was clearly going to be the price of survival. While its sale might have helped the group survive, it was too much for Merckle who felt that he had disgraced the work of his father and grandfather.
His suicide note said simply:" I am sorry."
