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Farm to Table

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In the beginning, there was war. The Steinhoff story begins in November 1937, in a small town about an hour outside Münster in northern Germany called Herzebrock. It was there that Bruno Steinhoff was born, one of five boys in what was, for a short time at least, an idyllic life on the farm. At the time, only the eldest boy got to inherit the family farm. The others were left an inheritance which they were meant to use, in the German tradition, as seed capital for their own farms. This milieu is freeze-framed in a watercolour painting of the farm, as it was in the misty years before Adolf Hitler laid Germany to waste, that hangs outside Bruno Steinhoff’s fourth-floor office in Westerstede, next to the towering Steinhoff ware­house. In that painting, horses graze absent-mindedly next to a rambling double-storey farmhouse, with only the odd farm implement nearby to imply any technological context. The Steinhoff farm was the pre-war incar­nation of that modern corporate cliché: an end-to-end solution. It did everything – cows, maize, potatoes, hogs, whatever you needed. That was mostly the way it worked in the rural areas of Germany in the early twentieth century.

Then came Hitler, the Third Reich and the grainy years of mud and war. Bruno Steinhoff, now 80 years old, remembers it as a time of grim attrition. “I was very young, but I remember how terrible it was. I remember seeing the fighting, I remember seeing planes get shot down,” he says, recalling those early years from his office in Westerstede.1

What would ultimately shape Steinhoff’s future was Hitler’s miscalcu­lation in Operation Barbarossa, when he invaded Joseph Stalin’s Russia in June 1941. Ultimately, Hitler’s hypothermic Nazi soldiers failed to take Moscow, but as the offensive was continuing, the Germans took five and a half million Russian prisoners. This proved a headache for the Nazis: while they had 23 Russenlager prisoner-of-war camps and 12 concentration camps, they were all bursting at the seams. So, Hitler ordered that more than 130,000 Russians be repurposed as “forced labour” on German farms.

When the Russian prisoners first arrived at Steinhoff’s farm, Bruno was only 5 years old. It would be a formative experience for the youngster and instrumental in shaping a furniture empire that would straddle the Iron Curtain. But, as Bruno tells it, it was also an experience that taught the Steinhoff boys about fairness and how to treat others. “My parents insisted everyone got the same treatment,” he says. “Every day, the Russian pris­oners ate with us, and we all got the same food. During the day, they worked on the farm.” It would have been one of the more benign experiences for Russian prisoners of war in Germany. In what is widely credited today as one of the forgotten atrocities of a war that was renowned for its casual brutality, 3.5m of the 5.7m Russian prisoners died in Germany – 6,000 a day in some cases.2 A witness at one of the camps recorded: “The hunger is so terrible that a mile away, they can be heard groaning and shouting ‘food’. They eat grass. Dozens die from starvation.”3

But at Steinhoff’s farm, the prisoners not only survived but also began teaching Bruno their language. He was a quick learner too, picking up phrases and conventions that would come in useful later. Not that there was much else to do with his time. The nearest school had been converted into a Red Cross nursing station for wounded soldiers. “When the war ended, many of the Russian soldiers didn’t go back home. They’d seen another life and that we weren’t the crocodiles they’d been told about. And at home, Stalin was a dictator and they knew it,” he says. “Our Russian soldiers, the ones who’d lived on our farm, begged us to be safe when they left. My parents had been nice to them.”

After the war ended in 1945, Germany was just a husk. Rural Germany had been hollowed out even more, as the weary procession of troops across the shelled countryside had sunk their nails into whatever they could from the farms as they hauled their way back to the bombed-out cities.

The Steinhoffs wanted to send their children back to school, but they couldn’t. “At that stage, all the German families wanted to send their children to schools to learn . . . but for nearly a year going to school was not possible,” he says. There were too many children looking for schools, and far too few schools in total.

Within a few years, Bruno Steinhoff took an internship at a factory near Münster, about thirty kilometres from his parents’ house, which made upholstered furniture. “For many years after the war, there were no jobs, nothing. We were hungry, and just wanted to survive – nothing more, nothing less. So that factory was where I did my learning,” says Bruno today. But while the factories began churning out furniture, there weren’t many people who could afford to buy their products.

After he’d finished his internship, Bruno Steinhoff did a basic business course. Then, with a short CV consisting of his furniture experience, the young man made his way to Berlin. “There, I was able to get a job at a large furniture retailer, where I learnt retail. But this retailer, it had an import company, which was bringing furniture from the east. One of the jobs I had was to negotiate how to sell that furniture,” he explains.

Berlin, at the time, was the fulcrum of a wider geopolitical split in ideology. To the east, you had Stalin’s Soviet Union expanding its tentacles to encompass everything under the rubric of communism; to the west, you had countries aligned to the United States, governed typically by free-market democratic ideals. Berlin was split down the middle, with a 3.6-metre-high wall that stretched for 66 miles as a tangible symbol of the divide.

Bruno Steinhoff straddled both worlds. He’d arrived in Berlin before the wall was built, almost overnight, in 1961. But over the three years he worked in the divided city, he developed an enviable black book of contacts from both sides of this ideological wall.

From Berlin, he went to Bavaria, where he took the position of sales manager at the largest upholstery furniture producer in Germany. “I soon realised that I could do this all myself,” he says. “The East Germans knew me well, and they said to me, ‘Oh Bruno, welcome’. I know how to produce furniture, and I know how to do the marketing. The East Germans said, ‘Oh, this is better now with Bruno.’ ”

This is how the Steinhoff enterprise, the one that would meet its reckon­ing in a boardroom in Cape Town more than five decades later, was born in July 1964.

* * *

At first, Bruno Steinhoff Möbelvertretungen und -vertrieb was simply an importer. It didn’t make any furniture, but it was able to arbitrage through the Iron Curtain, buying a smorgasbord of products from East Germany, and hawking it on to the West. Furniture, of course, was Bruno’s first love, and would become the foundation on which Steinhoff’s fortunes were built. But back in 1964, he imported everything. Chances are, if you saw an advert for an umbrella or a clock in the pages of Die Welt, Steinhoff had imported it. “The first wristwatch that was advertised in Germany for 9.99 Deutschmarks was from me. I sold millions at the time. I was well known at the time,” he says.

In faded black-and-white photographs of Steinhoff at the time, he appears as the exemplar of the post-war German trader, with impeccably slicked-back hair, double-knotted tie, crisp and piercing brown eyes. It helped that for the thoroughly modern German entrepreneur, politics were considered to be something indulged in by people with too much time on their hands.

And, philosophically, it was clear there was no common water between him and the communist states, as he remained the embodiment of the hard-nosed, unrelenting capitalist. “I always had a rule: unless you’re going to make money, you won’t achieve anything. There’s no reason to get out of bed in the morning if you’re not going to turn a profit that day.” While this notion of individual incentives may have been antithetical to the East Germans, their country had teetered on bankruptcy from day one, so it needed the cash.

Where Steinhoff had the advantage over any prospective rivals was that he could speak Russian, thanks to the tutorials he’d received from the prisoners on his family’s farm. It provided a trade bridge for Steinhoff between the eastern and western bloc that not many people could hope to emulate. “At the time, the German companies had been too anxious about going to these crazy areas in Russia, and across the eastern bloc. Nobody wanted to do it. So, I was able to build great relationships with the government officials, who needed Deutschmarks.”

Initially, Steinhoff had the exclusive rights to import East German goods into only two states in the western part of Germany – Lower Saxony and Hesse. But the business began to thrive. Perhaps the major slice of luck that put Steinhoff on the map was a single piece of furniture: the Gabi chair. The Gabi, with a rounded cup back and thin tapering legs, had a strong, mid-century Scandinavian influence. If it was in dusty pink or mint green, you could imagine it being quite a drawcard, even today. Typically sold in red, and upholstered without armrests, it might well be the unobtrusive seat of an arch-villain, waiting in his minimalist under­ground lair to welcome a shackled Sean Connery.

But, back then, its patented design flew off the shelves faster than Steinhoff could get it shipped to his warehouse. Even today, Steinhoff attributes much of his early success to the Gabi. If you visit his office, next to his desk you’ll see a miniature model of the Gabi. “I saw this chair on one of my trips. The [East German] government couldn’t sell it, even though they had huge amounts in stock. So, I told them: ‘Give me the contract, I’ll do it.’ And I did. I became very famous in East Germany for it, and after a year the government gave me a contract to sell all the upholstered furniture they made,” he says.

Soon after, the East Germans approached Steinhoff and asked him if he’d help them develop their factories across the eastern bloc. “I said, ‘Sure’.” So, Steinhoff hit the road, travelling to Hungary, Romania, the old Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, building factories in those countries and swapping prized Deutschmarks for furniture made behind the Iron Curtain.

At the time, as a 27-year-old, Bruno built a head office for his new, expanding furniture enterprise in Westerstede, a sleepy German country­side town, criss-crossed by horse trails and bike tracks. It wasn’t exactly an obvious place as the base for a rapidly expanding European furniture empire, but Bruno was drawn to it, as much for the nearby lake, Zwi­schenahner Meer, where he could use the boat he’d bought, as for the fact that he’d made close friends nearby. It was the sort of place you could bring up children. His company, too, was a strictly family affair. His mother, who had spent decades working on the farm, took up the role of her son’s secretary. “I started with nothing. We built the warehouses from scratch, we built the logistics arms from scratch,” he says.

Most of the time, Bruno was on the road, if not doing deals, then staying up late drinking vodka and whisky with his business partners in smoky rooms in Sofia, Budapest or Moscow. He’d got married in 1970 and a few years later had two daughters, whom he rarely saw. Often, he’d land from one gruelling overseas trip, only to pick up his boarding pass for the next. “My wife accepted it, the fact that I was not much at home. But there was no choice for me. I was the frontman: if there was a problem, I went to settle it.”

Financially, the business provided Bruno with a windfall. The year before he started Bruno Steinhoff Möbelvertretungen und -vertrieb, he’d taken home a salary of 10,000 Deutschmarks a year. But in its first year his company made 500,000 Deutschmarks.

Bruno Steinhoff was also uncompromisingly strict. If a factory did not perform, Bruno was unsentimental about chopping it. “Obviously, I bought shit businesses. It is normal to make mistakes, even though you forget this when you look back. But the people who always go on about the mistakes forever – they’re not business people, they’re teachers. So, what I did was, I sold those shit businesses. You learn the first time when the bankers knock on your door not to wait around. You act fast.”

But Steinhoff’s ambition didn’t stop at Europe. In 1974 he decided to take his flirtation with communist commerce a step further and travelled to Mao Tse-tung’s China. There, he painstakingly built up a new net­work of traders. “I went to China, Thailand, the Philippines and I bought everything from the east: cane furniture, watches – everything. I imported whatever I could because these people here, in the west, they had too much money and were lazy, and were too anxious about dealing with foreign countries after the Second World War. So, I had no competition doing this,” he says.

Simultaneously, about twelve hundred kilometres north, there was another furniture company that had also been slowly expanding its way across various borders. Started in 1943 in Sweden, it took its name from the first initials of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad as well as those of the farm on which he grew up, Elmtaryd, and his home town, Agunnaryd: in a word, Ikea. Ikea would become the yardstick by which all Steinhoff’s victories were measured. It would be the Coca-Cola to Bruno’s Pepsi, the Nike to his Reebok. And it was Ikea that ultimately would push Bruno Steinhoff into doing business in South Africa.

The story is that in 1974 Ikea opened its doors in West Germany, sparking a craze for natural wood furniture that gained pace over the next decade. “Over the next few years, everyone wanted pine furniture,” says Steinhoff. “Of course, there are different qualities of pine, but I did some research and found that the best place to find really quick-growing pine was South Africa. So, I went to South Africa for the first time.” It was a decision that would entwine his company’s fate with a country thousands of kilometres away, at a point when most foreign businesses in South Africa were padlocking their shop doors and fleeing the country. It was 1985. The townships in South Africa, where black people were confined, were burning; Nelson Mandela, the putative leader of the African National Congress (ANC), had already been imprisoned on Robben Island for 23 years; and the ruling National Party had suspended what few rights existed in that country under a “state of emergency”. The year 1985 would be the singular turning point for grand apartheid.

President PW Botha, the brutish enforcer of the security state known as the “Groot Krokodil”, as much for his curled snarkish bottom lip as for his white-hot rage, had signalled in August that year that big changes were imminent, that the country was about to “cross the Rubicon”. Time magazine, in anticipation of the event, had even described the speech that Botha was expected to give as the “most important announcement since the Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa 300 years ago”.

Instead, people across the world watched Botha give a speech that flatly rejected reform and stubbornly recommitted the country to apartheid. And the prospects for commerce fell apart. “The rand fell sharply, capital flight accelerated and markets closed. South Africa faced an escalation of sanc­tions,” says Hermann Giliomee in his book The Last Afrikaner Leaders. “In late August 1985, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which banned new investment and loans, withdrew landing rights and severely curbed imports of coal, uranium, iron and steel. The European Community and the Commonwealth imposed a variety of milder sanctions.”4

But, as executives from multinationals like Barclays, General Motors and IBM were crowding aboard the packed Boeings at Joburg’s Jan Smuts Airport, Steinhoff was stepping off the plane for the first time. “South Africa was a very strong country then, and I was sometimes the biggest buyer there during apartheid,” says Steinhoff. “I was in all the factories here in 1985, so I got to know South Africa very well. I bought lots of furniture here.”

Culturally, Steinhoff felt good chemistry with South Africa. “There were other countries I went to, where I decided I’d never go again: people there, they’d steal your money.” But it still took no small amount of gumption to set up shop in a country that, at the time, had become the world’s number one pariah. It was this blindness for politics that mirrored Bruno Stein­hoff’s earlier decision to cosy up to the communists. “Politics, I don’t notice,” he says. “Business has nothing to do with politics. I’ve always gone where no one wants to go and then it’s easy: you have no competitors. It’s wonderful actually.”

Still, Steinhoff’s early South African venture wasn’t exactly a huge suc­cess. From the beginning, Steinhoff was attracted to the country’s thick-growing pine – Pinus radiata – which is similar to the pine you get in Chile and Brazil. However, while the pine that Ikea sold was clear white pine from Scandinavia, the South African pine was yellow – and the colour only deepened over time. “It was a big mistake. In the shops, people were ready to buy the Scandinavian pine at double the price and more, so I had to stop this business with South Africa.”

Then, a moment of global serendipity in South Africa and in Eastern Europe: glasnost and perestroika in Russia saw iron-fisted regimes in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia tumble. In 1989 the Germans began to chip away at the Berlin Wall. And in South Africa, FW de Klerk, a former hardliner, took over as president from the twitchy PW Botha. By Christ­mas, he’d decided “we’d have to make a 180-degree turn”, and so, on 2 February 1990, he told the white Parliament he was unbanning the ANC and releasing Mandela.

This synchronized unravelling of both totalitarian regimes, the Soviet Union and South Africa, was marvellous for millions of people. For Stein­hoff, however, it was an utter disaster. “When the Iron Curtain came down, my business went down too,” Steinhoff says. The closeted business model of buying furniture cheaply in tinpot dictatorships and flogging it to the cash-flush West had run its course. “I had to make a change,” he says. “I couldn’t continue to import furniture, so I took a decision to build my own factories, or buy them from my suppliers. So, we bought factories across the world, even in South Africa.” Steinhoff snapped up eight struggling factories in East Germany, owned by the government, built others in Hungary and Poland, and bought two existing manufacturers in the Ukraine. The company was no longer mainly an importer: it was going to make what it sold.

In all fundamental respects, this step marked the genesis of Steinhoff International.

* * *

Bruno Steinhoff’s second venture into South Africa was far more suc­cess­ful. It all happened thanks to a close friend of his, a textile mogul who’d begun his career as a tax lawyer named Claas Daun, who lived a short distance away in a town called Rastede. Both men, Bruno Steinhoff and Claas Daun, were the kings of their respective towns, the big swinging dicks of rural northern Germany. “Claas had become a director of one of my companies a few years before,” says Steinhoff. “The banks insisted. They said they’d lend me money, as much as I needed, but I had to put in place a proper board in case I got sick or whatever. So, we became good friends. He’s a clever man.”

Daun, speaking in an as-yet-unreleased tape recorded in 2013 to cele­brate Steinhoff’s fifteen years on the JSE, described how he’d first decided to invest in South Africa, setting in motion the Steinhoff journey.5 During the oppressive 1980s, he said, he visited South Africa and felt an over­whelming sense of the country’s potential – despite apartheid. “I was travelling this country, and every time I was there, I said: why is this world so negative? The country is far better and even black people I met at that time were friendly and were optimistic; the country was wonderful and I saw a gap between the perception of the world and my own experience travelling.”6 So, in the late 1980s, Daun bought a house in Cape Town. Thanks to the recent invention of the fax machine, he ran many of his German businesses remotely from the Cape. He was there, he said, when the Berlin Wall collapsed – something he never saw coming. “For me, being with my family in South Africa – being at heart a capitalist, an entre­preneur – I said: that’s paradise for South Africa that these communist systems have proven that they’re not working.”

Things moved quickly after that. In February 1990, when Mandela was released, Daun commented, “I was one of the very few white faces on the Parade in Cape Town. I don’t know how many – fifty thousand [people] or whatever. The excitement was there.” Daun says it was after hearing Mandela speak that day that he decided “now is the time to start. A few weeks later, I bought the Morkels chain from Federale – 75% or 76% of the shares.” Morkels had been a household name in South Africa, founded in the early part of the twentieth century by Philip William Morkel, who, famously, got the money to seed his early stores from a man he was chatting to at a pub, who took Morkel’s only form of security: his car. Daun not only bought the hundred Morkels furniture shops, he also got 50 Totalsports stores for less than 10 million Deutschmarks. “A comparable group of stores in Germany would be ten times or more,” he said.

After that, he travelled around the country to visit the stores, where he spoke to many South Africans who thought he was insane to be investing when “the blacks” would be taking over. “They had indoctrinated all of the white South Africans who’d heard all their lives about the swart gevaar. They were pessimistic . . . [but] I was getting more optimistic,” he says.

Daun hauled out the chequebook once more. In 1994, his company Daun & Cie bought a relatively anonymous furniture company situated south of Joburg near the township of Soweto called Victoria Lewis – which made its name building and selling discount bedroom suites to what was coyly described as “the mass market”.

But it was the following year that Daun made the decision that would lift him onto the road to the modern-day Steinhoff. In 1995, one of Daun’s colleagues came to him and told him about a commercially minded young accountant named Markus Jooste. “There’s an entrepreneurial guy, an Afrikaner. Young guy with a huge factory in Gomma Gomma,” this colleague said. In the landscape of the furniture industry at the time, Gomma Gomma was nowhere. It was just a speck, making unremarkable couches and lounge furniture from its base in Ga-Rankuwa, a dusty rural nowhereland north of Pretoria renowned for absolutely zero. Telling the story, Daun said at the time that he was understandably reluctant. Nonetheless, he went to meet Jooste for the first time in Joburg’s Carlton Hotel – then the tallest building in Africa, and the site where Mandela, in 1994, declared South Africa to be “free at last”.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon, but they chatted casually at the bar, with Daun stand-offish at first. “I was a little bit cautious, but then we set up a second meeting in May 1995. Beforehand, Markus had sent me figures and a balance sheet, and I remember, in this meeting, he showed me the factory in a photograph. It was massive – huge.”

Jooste told Daun he was having trouble with his bank, Absa, and needed an investor. Daun was hesitant, in part because “it was a big amount of money at that stage – I had to pay R20m in cash to the bank”. But over three or so meetings, Jooste sold him on the rationale. “In the end, I said: ‘Markus – handshake, you are my man. We’ll work together.’ It was a decision from my gut feeling, and I was not always right in my life – I got other experience very badly [wrong]. But with Markus, it was a very lucky and good decision.”

For Jooste, what stuck with him was the fact that Daun had done the deal – agreeing to repay the banks and settle the debt – based entirely on a handshake. In retrospect, a few years down the line, Daun would be jus­tified in feeling less unambiguously positive about that decision. But in 1995 it seemed like a good idea.

Today, Bruno Steinhoff says his initial decision to invest in Gomma Gomma came after he got a call from Daun, asking him to help save his South African factories, which were all struggling to turn a profit after interest rates had spiked to 25%. “Claas phoned me and said, ‘Bruno, I need your help, because all my factories, my supplier has gone bankrupt.’ He said, ‘I now have to buy these factories from bankruptcy, otherwise I have no suppliers.’ So, I said, ‘Claas, it is possible, but I’ll have to invest a lot of time.’ So, he said, ‘Let’s make this Steinhoff in Africa – and you’ll get half the shares in it.’ ” So in 1997 Bruno Steinhoff bought 35% of Gomma Gomma, and this became the foundation for the modern Steinhoff.

Already, Daun had been leaning heavily on Bruno’s expertise. He would regularly send his best furniture buyers over to Westerstede, to speak to Steinhoff about design and the new technology used to make furniture. “What Markus was lacking in Gomma Gomma was the latest technology in furniture production. And Bruno, with his factories, invested huge amounts of money into new equipment and technology . . . I said to Markus: ‘We must bring this together, try to form a partnership.’ ”

So one day in October 1995, a confident, good-looking man walked into Steinhoff’s Westerstede office as an emissary from Daun’s team in South Africa. Good afternoon, he told Bruno, I’m from Gomma Gomma – my name is Markus Jooste.

* * *

Today, it would seem an exaggeration, but not altogether untrue, to say that Bruno Steinhoff has been irretrievably shattered by what happened to the company that carries his name. But it’s clear the episode has clobbered him pretty badly. You sense he is not as certain as he once was, when he talks about certain deals Steinhoff made. At times, he seems to carry the hesitant humility of the recently divorced. Yet there is still that fierce competitiveness in his eyes that helped his company prosper. When trying to make a point, he doesn’t break eye contact or stare off into the distance. Steinhoff was all about attention to detail. “I am very ashamed of what has happened now, after my 80th birthday. All this also wounded me deeply and I am still not in a positive spirit,” he says.

It hasn’t helped that the volcano erupted around the weeks when Bruno Steinhoff was toasting his endurance. At the end of November 2017, he had travelled to South Africa for what was meant to be a triumphant 80th birthday party at Lanzerac. His 80th was an aptly lavish affair. The Stel­lenbosch City Orchestra played alongside guest soloists André Terblanche, Janel Speelman, Niel Rademan and Charity Leburu. An exorbitantly priced glass marquee was set up and the champagne flowed. Steinhoff revelled in it. A few days later, he returned to Westerstede, where he held his “German party” for his 80th – the event at which Markus Jooste gave a speech, over that fevered weekend in December when all hell was breaking loose in South Africa.

It helped Bruno Steinhoff that he wasn’t as involved in the business as he’d once been. In 2008, just after his 70th birthday, he’d resigned as Steinhoff’s chairman, and given up most of his executive duties. He remained a non-executive director at Steinhoff until February 2018, but he spent most days in Westerstede rather than Cape Town.

Today, during the week, Steinhoff wakes up and drives the kilometre or so up the road from his gated estate in Westerstede to his office on the fourth floor of Steinhoff’s European headquarters – adjacent to the immense 12-storey warehouse which squats over the town, branded Steinhoff Möbel. Outside that facebrick building, there are four flags that attest to the company’s roots: the German flag, the South African, the European Union, and the one bearing the Steinhoff emblem.

Walk inside the door of that building, and you’ll see it’s a monument to the passion that drove Bruno Steinhoff for the last six decades: building furniture. The books on the shelves include the 1976 edition of Möbel: Eine Stilgeschichte durch vier Jahrtausende – Mit über 1000 Abbildungen, a history of trade in Westerstede over two hundred years, and a coffee-table book history of the furniture company. Perhaps incongruously, there’s also My Book, the coffee-table book amalgamation of wildlife photography and “inspirational quotes” written by Brian Joffe, the founder of the industrial company Bidvest.

On one wall of his roomy office, on the fourth floor, there is a map of the world that Bruno Steinhoff is fond of using to illustrate Steinhoff’s expansion, across Germany, across the Far East, and down to South Africa. It underscores how tactile a person he is, and why he would be wrong-footed by abstract and labyrinthine accounting shenanigans.

“I just look after the family business now,” says Steinhoff. “It’s nothing to do with furniture really. It’s some property, some farms near where I grew up. Mostly, I come into the office to shout at Renata, and keep an eye on her boyfriend,” he says, winking at his assistant of eleven years, and the immense, stuffed polar bear positioned awkwardly right next to his desk. Steinhoff has always been an enthusiastic hunter and the bear was shot 45 years ago in Alaska. It has boxing gloves – a gift, it seems, from the German middleweight champion Arthur Abraham – hanging over its paws. Behind his desk, there are pictures of him with Jooste, Christo Wiese and other South Africans on a hunting trip somewhere in South Africa.

You can see why Westerstede, with its laid-back small-town character, would be a perfect refuge for Bruno Steinhoff. It’s a world away from the hysteria surrounding the company evident at the brasseries in Cape Town, the grillhouses of Sandton or the boutique art galleries of Stellenbosch. In Germany, you get the idea few people have any sense of the wildfire over­seas linked to the Steinhoff name. Ask anyone in any of Westerstede’s cottage stores, populated by the usual assortment of bicycles, carved wooden toys and picture books of rhododendrons, and they’ll gush about how Steinhoff has done so fantastically well, and remains the biggest employer in the area. Few people know of the explosion in December 2017. “I’m still a hero here in Germany,” says Steinhoff. “Here, nobody says shit about Bruno Steinhoff – they say I’m correct in what I did. I’m still an ambassador for Westerstede, and I’m very happy with that.”

He’s particularly proud of that accolade. Newspaper photographs in 2016 show a beaming Steinhoff, standing alongside Westerstede’s mayor Klaus Groß, holding up the certificate that mandates him to act as an “ambas­sador” for Westerstede’s business sector.7 Groß gushed at the time: “We wanted to give Westerstede a face and find someone who represents the city to the outside.”

Whether Bruno Steinhoff’s presence today, as a representative of the small town, would induce the same sort of confidence that Groß wanted at the time is unclear. He hasn’t been back to South Africa in months, though he says he plans to return soon with a small group of friends who together have become a crew of amateur cyclists. They plan to ride the Cape Argus tour, a 110-kilometre cycle event held in March each year. “Last year, I stopped because there was an awful storm. But my group of about ten people are all coming to do the Argus this year,” he says. Cycling is now one of Bruno’s big passions. In June 2018, his cycling crew rode more than 400 kilometres from Westerstede to the tiny island of Sylt in northern Germany, a stone’s throw from Denmark.8

Today, months after Steinhoff’s implosion, Bruno Steinhoff has made hardly any progress in understanding what had happened. In all his years, he says, he’s never seen such a level of duplicity. “For me, it was a big surprise. I had no sense that this was possible. But even Christo, who is a good man, he lost most of his money. Me as well.”

It is especially bruising since Steinhoff was perhaps the closest to Jooste of anyone outside Markus’s family. “From the beginning, I found him to be a wonderful man. Markus would also tell people: ‘This is my father.’ And to me, I thought of myself as his father.” Those close to Jooste say this is no misty-eyed exaggeration, softened by sentiment and time. “I’ve known them both for years,” says one veteran of the company, “and Markus really was his adopted son. The relationship was that strong. So, what happened in the end, you can imagine what that was like for Bruno.”

This is why the wound is so deep. Sitting in his office, where he’d spent many hours with Jooste, Steinhoff says, “I don’t understand how Markus did that.” But it probably helps that he’s been stepping back from the company for years. “I’m out of the business now. For me, Steinhoff is history. I hope this company survives. I’m not happy with what happened, but I can do nothing. But my thing is, I’m looking forward without Steinhoff.”

Perhaps, but it’s been a bruising way for him to mark his fifth decade with the company that bears his name. So, he remains hesitant about returning to South Africa. “Now, with my name, I’m not so interested in going to South Africa. I am Steinhoff, so . . .” He trails off, but it’s clear what he means.