Carl Duisberg was considered the most significant industrialist of his time. Werner Plumpe explores his secret to success and paints an impressive portrait of this founder of the modern chemical industry and his era. Based on a unique source base of over 25,000 preserved letters, Werner Plumpe reconstructs the career of an educational climber from a home-working background, whose path took him from the dye factories of Bayer to the top of German industry and into the highest circles of German society. He also describes the political transformations of Carl Duisberg, who, as the founder of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG, created one of the most controversial entities in German corporate history, and whose life is so deeply intertwined with the German history of his time that his person allows for the panorama of an entire era to unfold.