Schultze-Delitzsch Gesellschaft supports nomination Dutch National Inventory

The Hermann Schultze-Delitzsch Gesellschaft supports the nomination of the Governors’ and Memento Mori Associations of Nieuwendam. They regard the co-operative movement as elementary for the Dutch Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The Schultze-Delitzsch Gesellschaft is one of the two organisations that has put forward an application for the Genossenschaften on the Word Heritage List of UNESCO. The nomination will be discussed in the week of 28 november 2016 in Addis Abeba on a UNESCO convention.

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(Following: an excerpt from Wikipedia 11-’16)

Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (29 August 1808 – 29 April 1883) was a German politician and economist. He was responsible for the organizing of the world’s first credit unions. He was also co-founder of the German Progress Party.

Schultze-Delitzsch devoted himself to the organization and development of co-operation in Germany, and to the foundation of Vorschussvereine(peoples’ banks), of which he had established the first at Delitzsch in 1850. In 1859 the more than 200 such banks were centrally organized under the direction of Schulze-Delitzsch. He promoted the first Genossenschaftstag, a co-operative meeting, in Weimar, and founded a central bureau of co-operative societies. In 1861 he again entered the Prussian Chamber, and became a prominent member of the Progressist party.

The spread of these co-operative organizations naturally led to legislation on the subject, and this too was chiefly the work of Schulze-Delitzsch. As a member of the Chamber in 1867 he was mainly instrumental in passing the Prussian law of association, which was extended to the North German Confederation in 1868, and later to the empire. Schulze-Delitzsch also contributed to uniformity of legislation throughout the states of Germany, in 1869, by the publication of Die Gesetzgebung über die privatrechtliche Stellung der Erwerbs- und Wirthschaftsgenossenschaften, etc.[1]

Both as a writer and a member of the Reichstag his industry was incessant, and he died in harness on 29 April 1883 at Potsdam, leaving the reputation of a benefactor to the smaller tradesmen and artisans. At the time of his death, there were in Germany alone 3,500 co-operative banking branches with more than $100,000,000 in deposits, while the system had been extended to Austria, Italy, Belgium and Russia.[2] His work was noteworthy enough to attain mention in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina.