The family is never far from Thomas Rabe, even at weekends. When the Bertelsmann chief executive looks out from his company-owned house in Gütersloh, it is into the garden of his neighbour Liz Mohn, the matriarch of the dynasty that controls Europe’s biggest media group.
In good times and bad, the Mohns and their ancestral home of Gütersloh, an unassuming town in the rural flatlands of east Westphalia, have been the fixed anchor of this sprawling corporate empire that began printing bibles here in 1835.
Today the biggest decisions are not taken in the Manhattan headquarters of Penguin Random House, the world’s biggest book publisher, or in the boardrooms of RTL, Europe’s largest television group. It is in Gütersloh, where Bertelsmann’s workforce is roughly a tenth the size of the 100,000 population. Horses roam the fields beside its headquarters; Rupert Murdoch once scoffed that it was “not far from Harsewinkel”.