Gemeinnützige Hertie-Stiftung

Gemeinnützige Hertie-Stiftung

Annette Schavan has chaired the Board of Directors since 2024, overseeing an entity created in 1974 by the Karg family — heirs to the Hertie department-store chain — to convert retail wealth into perpetual philanthropic capital. Hans-Georg Karg and his sister Brigitte Gräfin von Norman structured the foundation under German law with dual mandates: clinical and basic neuroscience, and democratic education. Today the foundation operates from Frankfurt and Berlin, carrying the legacy of one of postwar Germany’s most recognizable retail brands. Deployment spans three asset classes that mirror an endowment-style portfolio. Real estate holdings include Quartier 110 on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse and Burchard Hof in Hamburg’s commercial core. A global alternative-investment book covers buyout, distressed debt, secondaries, and special situations, while public-market allocations provide liquidity for grant-making. On the programmatic side, the foundation established and permanently funds the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research in Tübingen — Germany’s largest center dedicated to neurological disease — and launched the Hertie Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Brain Health, which applies machine learning to early neurodegeneration diagnosis. Democratic-strengthening vehicles include the Hertie School in Berlin, a graduate school for public policy; Jugend debattiert, the nationwide student debate program; and Jugend entscheidet, which places real municipal decisions in the hands of teenagers. Foundation governance reflects a deliberate postwar professionalization. Former executive-board chairman Frank-J. Weise led the Federal Employment Agency during the Hartz reforms before serving at Hertie; board member Frank Mattern is a former McKinsey Senior Partner and Karl von Rohr a former Deutsche Bank president. In June 2026 the foundation hosted the Hertie Summit, featuring former foreign minister Joschka Fischer in conversation with the youngest former Bundestag member, Emily Vontz, highlighting its role as a convenor of cross-generational policy dialogue. The 2025 annual report recorded approximately €50 million in project funding for the fiscal year. Hertie stands apart from conventional grant-makers through its operating-foundation structure: it does not merely write checks to third-party researchers. It creates and governs institutes — HIH Tübingen, Hertie AI, the Hertie School — that place foundation board members in fiduciary oversight roles, blurring the line between funder and operator. The endowment’s multi-asset investment program, run largely in-house, provides the permanent capital base that makes multi-decade commitments to these institutions viable.