Biography | Friedrich Joussen — The Gymnasium on Mainstraße Where He Took the Abitur

People treat Fritz Joussen as a travel-industry operator who arrived fully formed at TUI.

The first public building that can be named is a municipal grammar school on Mainstraße in Duisburg's Altstadt.

Friedrich Peter Johannes Joussen was born in this port city on 19 April 1963.

Munzinger's biographical file and the German biographical record both place his Abitur here in 1982.

The school is the Landfermann-Gymnasium, Mainstraße 10.

The city still lists that address as the main site.

The institution traces a Latin-school founding to 1559 and took the name of Dietrich Wilhelm Landfermann in 1925.

He had been head of the school from 1835 to 1841.

An English-language profile in the Financial Times later described the school as one of Germany's oldest, with origins more than four and a half centuries back.

Joussen grew up in a household of five.

His father, Peter Joussen (1933–2014), worked as a legal counsel in the steel industry at Thyssen, after earlier work at Klöckner.

His mother was Elma, née Flüge.

One of his three siblings, Jacob Joussen, later took the same school's Abitur and became a labour-law professor.

Later profiles place that childhood in Duisburg's coal and steel economy rather than in a boardroom.

This is not a private house.

It is a municipal grammar school that still teaches on the same street.

From this building he went to RWTH Aachen to study electrical engineering.

A TUI listing prospectus later recorded the Diplom-Ingenieur in 1988.

The first paid work after that degree was not in tourism.

It was a short software stint at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon, then Mannesmann in Düsseldorf in 1988.

The pin is the school entrance on Mainstraße.

A visitor finds a working city gymnasium, not a museum.

The date on this memory is the Abitur year, 1982, not the birth year.

Photo: Oceancetaceen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons