The company Beiersdorf is not nearly as well known as its global superbrand, NIVEA. That may soon change. In 2014, Beiersdorf began discussions with Geschichtsbüro Reder, Roeseling & Prüfer, a Cologne-based history consulting firm, to commission a corporate history. Geschichtbüro in turn approached academic historian Alfred Reckendrees. He eagerly signed on, realizing that “there has been no academic attempt to identify how Beiersdorf has managed to continue as a successful business, despite setbacks that have repeatedly endangered its existence” (p. 327). Among these setbacks were the two world wars, after which Beiersdorf was forced to rebuild both its domestic and international businesses.

The firm bears the name of founder Paul Beiersdorf, but it was his successor, Oscar Troplowitz, who took the company into branded household products at the beginning of the twentieth century. Troplowitz focused on skin care and dental hygiene. Under him, Beiersdorf began aiming its advertising at the end user rather than intermediaries such as pharmacists. The company launched Nivea Crème and other long-term successes like Leukoplast surgical tape and Labello lip balm. Other brands did not last as long. Pebeco, for example, was a hugely successful toothpaste brand for Beiersdorf and, at one point, the best-selling toothpaste in the United States; however, it fell behind its rivals and was discontinued in the 1930s.

Being a German company meant that Beiersdorf was intimately caught up in the dramatic events of the twentieth century. In addition to the world wars, the company endured Aryanization, hyperinflation, Germany's partition into East and West, and then the strains of reunification. Top executives made strategic decisions against this background of uncertainty and discontinuity. They also battled anti-German sentiment in many foreign markets. Questions such as where to develop new markets, how to structure the international businesses, and who should be on the company's executive board took on added layers of complexity as a result. The company had its successes: in the interwar period, Beiersdorf successfully transformed Nivea from a premium women's facial cream into a skin cream for the whole family. But over the course of Beiersdorf's history, the “strategic” decision-making of its executives was often in reaction to events rather than being driven by long-term vision.

That said, Beiersdorf did have one very long-term project: recovering its trademarks from hostile governments after both world wars. From the 1890s onward, the company had established foreign partnerships to get around high import duties, and many of its brands were produced under license. After the company lost many of its trademarks during World War I, Willy Jacobsohn, the company's Jewish chairman (from 1922 to 1933), made the foreign businesses financially independent, linked to the Hamburg parent company only through trust agreements. For decades afterwards, Beiersdorf continued to operate internationally via arm's-length subsidiaries. After once again losing its trademarks in World War II, the company persevered to recover them. Only in 1997 did it once again own all of the NIVEA trademarks. (By then, the name had come to be rendered in all capital letters.) One of the unexpected benefits of these long developments was that NIVEA came to be perceived as a local brand in nearly all of its foreign markets.

Beiersdorf weathered the vicissitudes of history partly through its stable shareholding, despite becoming a joint-stock corporation in 1922. Troplowitz's widow, Gertrud, appointed a trustee in the Warburg bank, and the bank ended up owning a significant minority of the shares upon her death. During the Nazi era, large blocks of the shares ended up with Warburg's “de-Aryanized” successor bank, Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co., and the German insurer Allianz. Until the early 1970s, they and a third shareholder group, the Claussen and Westberg families (both related to Gertrud and Oscar Troplowitz), supported management's priority of maintaining a strong balance sheet. Until 1979, Jacobsohn was the only executive board chairman who did not belong to the Troplowitz family.

Through much of its history, the company's businesses stood on four pillars: cosmetics, plasters, adhesive technology, and pharmaceuticals. For a time, this portfolio of products helped to spread the risks. During the 1960s, however, Beiersdorf struggled as markets became more competitive and consumers more demanding. The pharmaceutical business was by then the weakest pillar (Beiersdorf finally sold it in the 1990s). One bright spot was the early 1970s, when Beiersdorf triumphed over rival Henkel's challenge to Nivea Crème, a victory that is still celebrated within the company. Other highlights included Beiersdorf's 1971 entry into Japan, eventually one of its most important markets.

In 1974 Beiersdorf changed to a divisional structure: cosmetics, including plasters; pharmaceuticals; and adhesives. The structure proved ill suited to globalized markets and could not cope with the diverging interests of the divisions. In 2001, chairman Rolf Kunisch made the decision to transform them into separate subsidiaries. In the end it was NIVEA that proved to be the engine of growth and the platform for Beiersdorf's successful globalization. After 1990 the company focused its products and today concentrates on skin care and adhesives, the businesses that had fueled its early growth. Reckendrees ends the chronicle in 2004, when Beiersdorf fended off a number of buyers to achieve its independence, thanks to help from shareholders Tchibo Holding and the City of Hamburg.

As Reckendrees acknowledges, he could give only glancing attention to many facets of the Beiersdorf story, including its foreign subsidiaries and the strategic decisions made at the division level. Such omissions are to be expected. The larger problem is the lack of an overarching theme, which makes it difficult for readers to grasp the ultimate historical significance of Beiersdorf both in Germany and internationally. (To be fair, the company-biography form can make this kind of larger assessment very difficult.) Reckendrees also avoids judging Beiersdorf's performance during the most recent period. Commissioned histories present opportunities to gain access to the archives of companies that are secretive about their historical legacies, but the genre imposes limitations on the ability of the historian to render candid judgments. These are significant limitations. However, they do not detract from the importance of this much-needed and skillfully produced history of one of the world's oldest and largest consumer-products firms.