Parents and family

Herbert Falk was born as the first of four children on 20 July 1924 in Müllheim in the Baden region of Germany. His parents met each other in the Stadt-Apotheke pharmacy in Müllheim. His father Emil had leased the business, while his mother Elisabeth worked at the pharmacy to complete the mandatory traineeship that was an entrance requirement for a pharmacy degree course at the time. However, despite being exceptionally talented and finishing top of her year at school, her plans of going to university had to be shelved when the couple decided to start a family. After the birth of their first son, Herbert, she devoted herself to the family and assisted her husband Emil in the pharmacy. 

Early childhood and school days

His mother Elisabeth would later recall how happy Herbert Falk was during his early years in the small town of Müllheim. However, to his mother Elisabeth’s great disappointment, Herbert displayed far less enthusiasm for lessons at the local primary school in Müllheim. He was actually a rather mediocre pupil, something that did not change a great deal even when he moved up to secondary school. Nonetheless, he did display an exceptional talent for organization from an early age. For example, he would set up downhill races with his friends on soapbox carts in the neighbouring village of Badenweiler, which he also took part in himself.

Departure from Müllheim

In 1934 Herbert moved away from his beloved hometown with his parents Elisabeth and Emil and his brother Reinhold. Father Emil had managed to purchase the Herdern-Apotheke pharmacy in Freiburg. As his mother Elisabeth reported later on, leaving the idyllic setting of Müllheim hit the 10-year-old Herbert particularly hard. It meant that he lost his network of playmates and school friends, who he greatly missed for a long time. This close connection to people from his childhood was highlighted – among other things – by the fact that he maintained close contact to three former schoolmates from primary school well into his old age. 

School days in Freiburg

When Herbert Falk moved with his family to Freiburg, he was sent to the grammar school Rotteck Oberschule für Jungen (known today as the Rotteck-Gymnasium). 

When his class at the time (7c) played a prank on their physics teacher Rudolf Laval in 1941, everyone in the class took responsibility when questioned, leading the teacher to note the “solidarity” of the class and send them all to detention together. This was the birth of the “solidarians”, as the class community referred to itself from this point on.

The “solidarians” became a permanent group for life, far beyond just the school years. The former classmates continued to meet up regularly until the ends of their lives, even bringing along their whole families later on. 

Military training

Just like all his other classmates, Herbert Falk reported for voluntary military service in 1942. He was trained as a radio operator for armoured vehicles. In November, his unit was given its marching orders and sent to war. 

Deployment in Tunisia

At the end of 1942, Herbert Falk then set off by train to Italy aged 18. Together with his unit, he made his way on an Italian destroyer to Tunisia. 

One year later, Herbert Falk was captured and handed over to American troops 

Prisoner of war

Herbert Falk and his comrades were sent across the Atlantic to North America in the hold of a cargo ship. Here, for the next two and a half years he was assigned different labour tasks, such as picking cotton in Louisiana, harvesting potatoes in Idaho, draining swamps in Florida and filling food cans in a factory in Toronto.  In the Spring of 1946, he was then able to return to Europe, initially for another year of labour to the UK. The respect, open-mindedness and kindness shown to him as a war opponent there by the people he met went some way to softening his increasing homesickness.

Return to Freiburg and Pharmacy studies

After five years of war and captivity, Herbert Falk returned home to Freiburg in April 1947 which had seen such destruction during the war. 

Driven by a combination of the economic pressures of the time and more or less gentle pressure from his parents, he eventually decided to start his pharmaceutical education. After completion of a two-year work placement in the Herdern-Apotheke pharmacy, in 1949 he enrolled on a pharmacy degree course at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, his home city, from which he graduated successfully in 1952 when he passed the second state exam. 

He was happy to spend a lot of his free time with former schoolmates, the “solidarians” as they continued to refer to themselves for the rest of their lives. 

During the university holidays, he went on two big tours with his motorcycle. In 1950 he travelled from Freiburg via Marseille and Monte Carlo to Rome. He followed this with a road trip in 1951 over partly unsurfaced roads to the North Cape at the northern tip of Norway.

PhD in pharmacy and degree in medicine

After the second state exam, Herbert Falk did his doctorate with Prof. Kurt Walter Merz, Director of the Pharmaceutical Institute in Freiburg. In his doctorate thesis, he determined the glycine content of spinach and its impact on the human organism. At the same time he studied human medicine up to the second state exam. He also completed his degree course in human medicine with a dissertation in internal medicine for Prof. Ludwig Heilmeyer. While he was working on his medical doctorate thesis, he got to know the then assistant physician Kurt Beck, with whom he subsequently developed therapeutic agents for chronic liver diseases and with whom he forged a long-lasting friendship. At the end of 1959, Herbert Falk had graduated twice in both Pharmacy and Medicine, and he also had two PhD qualifications.

First steps as an entrepreneur

After successfully graduating from university with a degree in pharmacy, Herbert Falk started working in the Herdern-Apotheke pharmacy from 1955 while studying medicine at the same time. But for him, the work in the community pharmacy under the supervision of his father Emil was more a matter of duty than a source of happiness. 
He enjoyed the process of manufacturing heart drops from hawthorn and mistletoe extract in the pharmacy’s laboratory much more. But he found the greatest joy of all in selling and discussing this mixture of extracts, which he marketed under the name “Crataeviscum”, initially among doctors and pharmacists in Freiburg but soon also across the entire state of Baden-Württemberg. For his visits, he borrowed his father Emil’s car.

Herbert Falk founds his own company

Initial, tentative successes with the sales of “Crataeviscum” motivated Herbert Falk to think bigger, and in 1960 he founded the company “Remefa Arzneimittel GmbH & Co. KG”.  Just three years later, the company was renamed “Dr. Falk Arzneimittel GmbH & Co. KG”. 1960 was also the year in which the medicinal product “Hepatofalk” was born – an orally administered therapeutic drug for the liver containing 12 mostly plant-based ingredients that were described as effective in the literature. In the development of this medicinal product, Herbert Falk was assisted by two companions from his university days – assistant physician Kurt Beck and Norbert Otterbeck, a pharmacist and specialist in Galenic formulation. However, most of the lozenges in the first sales batch passed through the gastrointestinal passage intact, without dissolving. “Hepatofalk” was reformulated and soon became an important revenue driver.

Marriage and starting a family

In 1963 wedding bells rang for Herbert and Ursula Falk, née Fritsch, in the Adelhauser Church in Freiburg. They had met two years before via a friend and colleague of Ursula when she was working as an MTA (Medical/Technical Assistant) in the university hospital after moving to Freiburg in 1959 at the age of 19 to train and study. 
Just over a year after Herbert and Ursula got married, their daughter Carola was born in 1964, followed by their son Martin a year and a half later in 1966. During the week, the young mum was left almost entirely to her own devices with the small children while the father of the family was out and about with the car, which he subsequently replaced with two Citroën DS vehicles and then, even later still, an Opel Diplomat, visiting doctors in almost all clinics and hospitals across West Germany – from Flensburg right in the north to Passau on the border to Austria in the south. 

Organisation of the first international symposium

A year after the death of his father Emil, the man who – up until then – had been both his most important supporter and his most outspoken critic, Herbert Falk launched his next major project in 1967. At the 3rd World Congress of Gastroenterology in Tokyo in 1966, together with his friend Kurt Beck and Prof Hans Popper from New York, who at the time was a leading pathology specialist for liver disease, he took the decision to organise and host an international congress for “icterus” (jaundice caused by hepatitis) in Freiburg the following year. From this point onward and for the next two decades, Hans Popper became an important colleague who helped with the organisation of scientific symposiums as well as a close personal friend of Herbert Falk.

However, it was not only the attendance figures for the first symposium that exceeded original expectations – the costs did as well. The event was attended by nearly 800 delegates from 17 countries. 

New homes for the company, pharmacy and family

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Herbert Falk, the company Falk enjoyed continuous growth throughout its first decade. Revenue rose from nearly DM 40,000 (equivalent to € 20,000) in the first year of business to DM 1.75 million (€ 877,000) in 1969. Herbert Falk purchased the residential building right next door to the pharmacy, which he – with great optimism and modest funds of his own – then had converted into an office building. In 1970, 12 employees moved into the new rooms in Habsburgerstraße 79.

In the same year, he rented new business premises for the Herdern-Apotheke pharmacy – which he had taken over from his mother Elisabeth initially as a leaseholder in 1960 and then as the owner in 1970 – and moved the business there.

Introduction of bile acid preparations

Due to the large amounts spent on the symposiums and building projects, at the start of the 1970s there was huge economic pressure on the shoulders of Herbert Falk – but he tackled this pressure head-on, full of optimism and with even more personal commitment and new ideas. His strength of always being able to look ahead positively into the future and take things into his own hands, without hesitation yet with great energy, helped him not only to successfully market his products that were already well-established by this point, such as “Hepatofalk”, “Orotofalk” or “ADEK-Falk”, but also enabled him to work on new product ideas for his company together with his growing team of experts in hepatology. For example, he established a new drug based on the bile acids chenodeoxycholic acid and ursodeoxycholic acid that could break up gallstones. 
Together with his partners, he also used this new therapeutic approach to target first markets outside of Germany, starting in 1974 with the Netherlands and Israel. All the debts were paid off by the end of the decade, with the company’s revenue already reaching DM 10.67 million in 1979 (equivalent to € 5.45 million) with a respectable foreign share of over 22%.

Foundation of Falk Foundation e.V.

During the 1960s, Herbert Falk’s sales force consisted of just himself – rather limited resources for the whole of West Germany. Instead of hiring several sales representatives, as was the norm at the time, Herbert Falk decided on a new approach to raising the profile of his company. In 1974 he started to build up a literature service that sent out summaries of selected professional and scientific articles to interested doctors free of charge – initially in the field of hepatology, but subsequently also in the general field of gastroenterology. To start with, he was still personally involved in choosing the articles. In addition, he used his experience gained from the international symposiums to develop the concept of regional further training events where medical professionals and subsequently also patients could meet up, learn and share knowledge. In order to establish a clearer distinction between these services on offer and the actual products marketed by the company Falk, together with his wife Ursula and a group of allied doctors and scientists Herbert Falk founded the Falk Foundation as a registered association in 1978. From this point on, the newly founded association also hosted the international symposiums. Although the Falk Foundation has always been funded by the revenue of the company, in all other respects it has remained independent.

Award of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Herbert Falk’s tremendous personal commitment to medical further training did not go unnoticed by interested circles, not least also because of events like “Basler Leberwoche” (Basel Liver Week), a week-long hepatology event attended at its peak by up to 2,000 people from 60 different countries. With just one exception, the event was held every three years from 1976 to 1995. In 1978, Herbert Falk was recognized for this commitment with the award of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (at “on-ribbon” level), which he received from the hands of the then-Lord Mayor of the City of Freiburg, Eugen Keidel.

For Herbert Falk, it was especially important that this day was not just about his personal award, but that it should also be a celebration of the contributions and achievements of all his employees. 

Success and growth with Salofalk®

For the first 20 years after founding his company, Herbert Falk’s products focused on treatments for diseases of the liver and bile tracts. This changed in 1979 with the launch of “Mucofalk®”, a product that regulates the digestive process to counter the effects of chronic constipation, and again in 1984 with the release of “Salofalk®” for treatment of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases. The Salofalk® products in particular delivered a level of business growth not seen up to this point. While revenue was still at DM 17.42 million (€ 8.91 million) in 1984, by 1995 – i.e. just 11 years later – this had risen to DM 103.36 million (€ 52.85 million), marking the first time the company had broken through the ceiling of DM 100 million. But the development of Salofalk® also required hitherto unseen levels of financial investment and clinical/technological research and development work. While Salofalk® suppositories and the associated marketing licences were initially acquired from outside the company, the 250 mg tablet was developed in-house.

Dependability and trust

For Herbert Falk, dependability and mutual trust were hugely important – both at a private level and in terms of commercial relationships. He would quickly draw a line under any disappointments in this regard, not just personally but also when it came to business. With assistance from a business consultant and under the involvement of local partners, “Interfalk Canada” and “Interfalk Italia” were founded as overseas sales subsidiaries. Unfortunately the external business consultant and the partners took advantage of poorly negotiated contracts. Instead of renegotiating or even mounting a legal challenge, Herbert Falk sold the subsidiary in Canada and closed down the business in Italy. Peace of mind was more important to him than just making more money.

By contrast, the acquisition of a stake in Losan Pharma in 1992, which was founded at the time by Dr. Peter Sandmeier, Dr. Peter Gruber and Winfried Siegl on a greenfield site in Neuenburg, turned out a much happier affair. This stake provided the strategic backing needed for the production of Salofalk®, Ursofalk® and subsequently also Budenofalk®, allowing for stable growth of Herbert Falk’s own company as a result. 

Move to the new company headquarters

The successful launch of Salofalk® helped the company grow to new heights. 1989 saw the renaming of “Dr. Falk Arzneimittel GmbH & Co. KG” as “Dr. Falk Pharma GmbH”, and 60 employees were relocated from the Habsburgerstraße address to a new company building in Freiburg-Hochdorf. Planning of the new build was overseen by Ursula Falk, who was steadily taking on more responsibility within the company, resulting in her being appointed a fellow managing director alongside Herbert Falk in 1995. 

Turning a passion for hiking into a new career path

This enlarged management board provided Herbert Falk with more support, giving him the space to devote more time to what had, by this point, become his biggest hobby – mapping out hiking routes through the Black Forest. The hobby originally came about when Dr. Falk Pharma started publishing a Black Forest calendar, which the company sent out every year as a gift to up to 60,000 doctors and pharmacies. The front of these calendars initially showed scenic photographs of the Black Forest, which were later replaced with paintings made by local artists. The rear contained descriptions of a number of hiking trails, which came from third parties to start with. However, at the end of the 1970s Herbert Falk was so unimpressed with these descriptions that he decided to take matters into his own hands. Together with graphic artist and friend Sepp Wurster, a dictating machine and a stopwatch, he hiked across the northern and southern regions of the Black Forest and documented 180 different hiking routes by the end of the 1990s. Adorned with sketches drawn by Sepp Wurster, these descriptions were subsequently published independently of the calendars in 12 separate volumes of Black Forest hiking guides.

100th Falk Symposium

There can be no doubt that the 100th Falk Symposium, which was given the title “Gut and the Liver” and took place from 29–31 May 1997 in Freiburg, was a really special event in the life of Herbert Falk. 1,100 attendees came together from 50 countries to take part in a series of talks and discussions on interactions between the metabolic processes that take place in the liver and the gut and the associated diseases. 

To mark the anniversary of the 100th Symposium, Herbert Falk wanted to add something really special. He did this with a big walk through the Black Forest. Once arrived in St. Märgen, the walkers all met up in a large marquee on the playing field for a rousing closing celebration, where they enjoyed a brilliant atmosphere with musical accompaniment from several bands, including a traditional band in costume. The highlight of the evening was when Herbert Falk climbed onto the stage to thunderous applause and called upon everyone present to join in and sing the “Badnerlied”, which was an established ritual for this type of event. This deep pride in his home region, which was reflected in everything Herbert Falk did, was on full display in his impassioned singing – and even if he perhaps missed one or two notes, the words certainly all rang true and most definitely came from the heart.

Friends and family

Herbert Falk was extremely dependable when it came to friends and family, and he was unfailingly there for them when called upon. Right until the end he stayed in touch with former schoolmates, friends he made at university, and people he met along the way later on in life. He was particularly fond of writing postcards from his travels or for people’s birthdays – he would send many of these, usually with lines of poetry he had written himself. 

As just one example of his many friends and companions, Dr. Maria and Prof. Ulrich Leuschner from Frankfurt University Hospital are to be mentioned. 

In Herbert Falk’s later years, Prof. Michael Manns and Prof. Jürgen Schölmerich, professors in Hanover and Regensburg respectively, often provided him with a valuable source of advice and personal points of reference and support.

Family life tended to follow the rhythm defined by the company and all the activities that surrounded it. He was also fortunate enough to become a grandfather to his daughter Carola’s three children Adrian, Elena and Julius, who were born in 1998, 2000 and 2001. He was delighted to see his grandchildren on a regular basis.

Reaping the rewards

In his eventful life, the real commercial and economic breakthrough for Herbert Falk’s company came relatively late, almost at the age of 70 – after nearly 40 years of huge entrepreneurial effort and great personal risk. At the start of the 1990s, revenue really started to take off thanks to growing sales in Germany and abroad, helping Dr. Falk Pharma to achieve outstanding results. At this point, his wife Ursula and his children Carola and Martin were also partners in the company. Up to the end of his life, Herbert Falk received many honours and accolades for his generous work with the Falk Foundation, which he set up to support and promote medical education and training. To the surprise of many contemporaries, he set up this foundation without any commercial or financial motivation, and instead ran it purely driven by his passion and enthusiasm. 

In 2004, the American Gastroenterological Association under the leadership of President Prof. Daniel Podolsky awarded him its “AGA Lifetime Distinguished Service Award”. Herbert Falk was delighted about all the honours he received in his life. But to be the first recipient of the AGA award was something of which he was particularly proud.

Withdrawal and farewell

At the end of 2003, Herbert Falk decided that the following year, in which he was to turn 80, would be the right time for him to resign from both the Executive Board of Dr. Falk Pharma and as Chairman of the Falk Foundation. The latter in particular was an exceedingly difficult decision for him to take, but unfortunately his deteriorating physical condition left him no other option. He handed over the running of the company to his wife Ursula, who had already been working alongside him on the Management Board since 1995, and to the authorized signatories Dr. Roland Greinwald, Head of Product Development and Regulatory Affairs, and Rolf Stöcklin, Commercial Director. Peter Braun, who headed up the increasingly important international business division and was the son of one of Herbert Falk’s former classmates, was also a dependable, safe pair of hands who could be trusted to safeguard the further success of the company. 

In 2004, the year in which Herbert Falk handed over the management of his lifework, Dr. Falk Pharma generated nearly € 125 million, with a foreign share of over 50% and more than 80 employees. Although he had hoped to transfer responsibility for the day-to-day running of the company to the second generation, i.e. to his children, he no longer had the strength to do this himself. In 2006 Herbert Falk required further surgery, this time to replace a heart valve. He died at home on 8/8/2008 aged 84 – a date easy to remember and a date he would have probably appreciated as a lover of nice numbers and special dates.

His legacy

What remains of the man, of the exceptional personality of Herbert Falk? To a large extent, he lives on through his lifework, which took the shape of a medium-sized, family-run company that remains successful to this day – Dr. Falk Pharma. But his presence also continues in the form of the Falk Foundation, a unique, internationally established and highly valued platform for the sharing and exchange of medical knowledge in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology. Undoubtedly, the values he lived his life by and his commitment to promoting cooperation between people from different countries will also continue to be felt. He provided motivation and space for wide-ranging efforts, paired with the necessary generosity of spirit and cultural tolerance. Although he certainly appreciated some of the finer benefits of a good, comfortable life, Herbert Falk was never driven by a desire to accumulate personal financial wealth. For him, money was a means to an end, one that allowed him to achieve the goals he pursued in the way he wanted to. He was a “doer” who approached life with plentiful optimism, always driven to move things forward, yet never overestimating his own capabilities. Despite his success and the numerous awards and recognitions that came his way from near and far, he always kept his feet on the ground, right till the end. When asked towards the end of his life what he thought the reasons were for his personal and business success, he answered with his usual modesty: “I had a lot of good fortune.” Whilst this was undoubtedly true in many episodes of his fulfilling life, Herbert Falk also demonstrated that he really knew how to make the most of this good fortune – not only for himself, but also for many other people, whether close friends and family or people from a wider circle.