Carl Fürstenberg was one of the most prominent German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 bankers of the late nineteenth and early twenteeth century, and was responsible for the revival of the German mining

Mining

Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

 industry during his era.
Fürstenberg was born to Jewish parents in Danzig

Gdansk

Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

 (Gdańsk). While working at a West Prussia

West Prussia

West Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773–1824 and 1878–1919/20 which was created out of the earlier Polish province of Royal Prussia...

n textile

Textile

A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...

 mill throughout his childhood, he apprenticed

Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...

 under local banker R. Damme. At the age of seventeen, he moved to Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

.

At first, Fürstenberg worked for the textile company of Gebr. Simon (Simon Bros.). Two years later, he became an employee at the Disconto-Gesellschaft, one of the leading German joint-stock banks. In 1871, he defected to aristocrat Gerson von Bleichröder

Gerson von Bleichröder

Gerson von Bleichröder was a Jewish German banker.Bleichröder was born in Berlin. He was the eldest son of Samuel Bleichröder, who founded the banking firm of S. Bleichröder in 1803 in Berlin...

's well-known S. Bleichröder Bank, working in the firm as a départemental manager. In 1883, he became first director of the joint-stock bank Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft (B. G.-H.) and dominated it during the next decades in a way, that the bank was often regarded as Fürstenberg's bank. In 1884 he was accepted into the Gesellschaft der Freunde society. Under Fürstenberg, the B. G.-H. became the house bank of Emil Rathenau

Emil Rathenau

Emil Moritz Rathenau was a German entrepreneur and industrialist, a leading figure in the early European electrical industry.- Biography :...

's AEG

AEG

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft was a German producer of electrical equipment founded in 1883 by Emil Rathenau....

. 1902, Fürstenberg made Emil Rathenau's son, Walther Rathenau

Walther Rathenau

Walther Rathenau was a German Jewish industrialist, politician, writer, and statesman who served as Foreign Minister of Germany during the Weimar Republic...

a co-director of the B. G.-H. which he remained until 1907.