Home / Culture & Society

By: Jay Watts on Thu Mar 13, 2008

The story of the condom may begin in the late 19th century, when Charles Goodyear invents a bulky (1-2mm thick!), seamed and re-usable condom using a process with de-vulcanized rubber that proves understandably unpopular, but the true revolution happens with Julius Fromm’s remarkable contribution to contraceptives. It’s a story with all of the swirling currents, tragic and not, of the 20th century: mass production, liberation from sexual reproduction, totalitarian movements, war, and state terror.

Julius Fromm was born Israel Fromm in 1883 in Konin, a town located on the Warta River in Central Poland that was, at that point, in Russia. As a child, he moved from the shtetl to Berlin with his parents, seeking to improve their fortunes, and like many Eastern European Jews in Berlin, the Fromm family found work as cigarette rollers.

Fromm’s parents died young, and as the mechanization of cigarette production took over, Fromm decided to attend college, studying chemistry. By 1914, Fromm has established a one-man company, manufacturing rubber goods in Berlin.

With World War I came changing sexual mores – the combination of earthy, folk attitudes towards sex, an activist class of medical professionals, the rapid spread of STDs throughout the military, and state wariness of a growing birth rate in uncertain times, combined to create a social setting in Germany uniquely responsive to a convenient and popular form of contraception.
By 1916, Fromm had developed and patented a product he labels “Fromms Act” – a latex condom manufactured using his own process – by dipping glass molds into raw rubber, he created a thinner, seamless condom, on sale by 1919. Inside every packet of Fromms Act, there was a slip of paper on which was printed “Please discreetly hand me a packet of three Fromms Act,” which went a long way for Germans in avoiding the sort of embarrassing situations that would become teenage comedy fodder in North America.

By 1922, Fromm was mass producing condoms, the name “Fromms” itself synonymous with condom in Germany, and his business was thriving in another good time to be manufacturing condoms: the most licentious and lewd period in German history – that of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. (Although, at this point, the government wasn’t as receptive to a message of birth control as it had been during World War I – fearing a decrease in the birth rate, it disallowed Fromm to advertise the contraceptive qualities of his product on his vending machines in 1928, instead forcing him to tout the hygienic qualities.) International expansion for Fromm followed, as he set up branches across the world, in places like Denmark, the UK, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Australia.
In 1930, Fromm commissions a factory from architects Arthur Korn and Siegfried Weitzman, which is built in Berlin’s Kopenick suburb. The two were leading practitioners of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style, a Weimar-specific art movement which arose in response to the excesses of expressionism, and emphasized the clean and subdued.

With the ascension of the Nazi party to power in Germany, life became increasingly difficult for German Jewish citizens, and in 1938, Fromm was forced by the state to sell his business at the extremely reduced price of 116,000 Reichsmark to Herman Goring’s godmother, the Baroness Elizabeth von Epenstein, who re-paid the “kindness” by building two castles for the Nazi commander. This dubious transaction was part of a larger process of the Aryanization of the German economy by the Nazis, who used the expropriation of the property of German Jewish citizens, from businessmen to families to workers, to finance the build-up of the German state and the war effort before and during World War II. The rotten legacy of this is today a vacuum in the economic historical record of pre-World War II Germany where a substantial record of the Jewish contribution and involvement in the economy should exist.

The process of Aryanization continued, and Fromm’s bank assets were incorporated as war bonds, declared the “assets of a war criminal” by the state. Fromm was classified as a “capitalist exploiter,” and emigrated to London, England in 1939. After his last remaining relatives were deported or murdered, the household furnishings were publicly auctioned off on May 17, 1943 for a total of 2,225 Reichsmark, and the house (located in the Rolandstrasse in Berlin) was awarded to a recipient of the King’s cross. The total estimate of the worth of Fromm’s expropriated property is today valued at 30 million Euros.

Fromm lived in London, but sadly succumbed to a heart-attack on May 12, 1945, a mere 4 days after Allied victory over Germany, his dream of returning to his business and Germany never realized.
Continuing the humiliation of the Fromm family, after the war, Julius Fromm’s son Herbert must pay Herman Goring’s cousin 174,000 Marks in order to secure the rights to the family name; the GDR (East German communist government) expropriated property from the Fromms, and in 1962, West Germany refused to compensate the Fromm family for the expropriation, declaring at the time, that they would not compensate anyone for what they considered to be “leaving furniture behind.” Finally, in 2005, the Fromm family received a pittance of restitution from the German government – about 10% of the stolen property’s total worth.

Herbert Fromm carried the business on, licensing the production of latter-day Fromms Acts to a company called Mapa, who still manufacture the remarkable product under the name of Fromms.