Louis Fréderic Jacques Ravené
Louis Fréderic Jacques Ravené (born June 1, 1823 in Stettin ; † May 28, 1879 Marienbad , also Ludwig Friedrich Jacob Ravené ) was a steel and iron wholesaler and art patron in Berlin .
Life
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Louis Jacques was a descendant of Huguenot refugees from France. He took over the Jacob Ravené Söhne iron shop from his family . His father was Pierre Louis Ravené . While he was running the parent company on Wallstrasse in Berlin-Mitte, his son opened a branch in the immediate vicinity at Neue Grünstrasse 17. After his father's death in 1861, Louis Jacques took over management of the entire company.
Louis Jacques Ravené married Therese von Kusserow (1845–1912), 22 years his junior, in 1864. Her brother was Heinrich von Kusserow , her sister Ottilie von Hansemann - so there were also family ties to the powerful banking family of Adolph von Hansemann .
One of the three children of the Ravenés was Louis Auguste in 1866 . After the very early death of the father, the now very influential Hansemann became their guardian.
Louis Jacques built a large villa in Werftstrasse in the then almost rural Moabit near the Tiergarten . In the area in the north-west of Berlin he made a contribution to the municipalities through several charitable foundations. That is why Ravenéstraße in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen was named after him in 1895 , before the company had a storage space on this street. In 1968 the commercial school on Ravenéstraße was also named after him. In 1981 the school moved to a new building on Alt-Moabit 10 - more by chance in the immediate vicinity of the now defunct villa. The meanwhile Ravené-Gymnasium was merged in 1996 in the upper school center for banks and insurance companies .
Like his father, Louis Jacques Ravené was interested in art. Together with the painter Ernst Ewald and the architect Hermann Ende , he founded a faience workshop . He was also a board member of the Kunstgewerbemuseum . The collection of paintings taken over from his father remained open to the public.
Louis Jacques was left in 1874 by his wife Therese for the house guest, banker Gustav Simon, whom they then married in 1876. This caused a sensation in Berlin society. Theodor Fontane later used the affair as a template for the van der Straaten couple in the novel L'Adultera - more on this below .
Ravené spent his spa stay in Ilmenau six times between 1852 and 1861 and had rendered outstanding services to the city “through charity on a large scale”, which is why he had become an honorary citizen on January 3, 1854. In 1854 he was awarded the Red Eagle Order, 4th class. In 1862 he received the title of Kommerzienrat .
In 1868 Ravené bought the ruins of the Reichsburg near Cochem on the Moselle from the Prussian domain treasury. His friend, the architect Hermann Ende, drew up the plans for the reconstruction, which was completed from 1874 to 1877 by Julius Carl Raschdorff , who later designed the Berlin Cathedral . Louis Jacques Ravené now also became an honorary citizen of the city of Cochem. He did not experience the complete interior construction of the castle. This was later taken care of by his son Louis Auguste, who then married the daughter of the architect Ende. The castle remained in the family until 1942 and was used as a summer residence.
Ravené's wealth and benefits earned him great prestige in various German cities and in society.
In the year of his death, probably not until after his death, in 1879 the palm Ravenea, which was introduced from the Comoros island of Johanna , was named after him. The director of the Royal Botanical Garden in Berlin, Carl David Bouché , made this honor . Like the Ravené family, he was of Huguenot origin; At the beginning of the 18th century, both families in Berlin were still active in horticulture.
In family tradition, he often only kept Louis Ravené of his first names, like his father, the company and, after him, his son; he called himself Jacques Ravené like his grandfather and the name of the company at the time of the takeover. Later on, this repeatedly led to confusion. The first names were also used in the German form.
Louis Fréderic Jacques Ravené was buried in the cemetery of the French community in Berlin. The hall-like tomb, built according to plans by Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böckmann, which contained a marble seated figure of the deceased, created by Heinz Hoffmeister , was demolished in the 1960s. The grave site was marked on the foundation walls by a brick layer of limestone. It is located roughly in the middle of the main path of the cemetery and will in future be adorned with a replica of the Cochem Ravené bust.
Theodor Fontane
One month after Ravené's death, Theodor Fontane read in the Vossische Zeitung (for which he was writing himself at the time) about the auction of the plant collection from the estate - and wrote a novel: L'Adultera . As with Effi Briest and Mrs. Jenny Treibel , the model was taken from real Berlin society.
The real life circumstances of the Ravené couple can be found in the van der Straaten couple:
- Kommerzienrat, important financier in Berlin (Chapter 1)
- City apartment near Petrikirche (Chapter 1): Wallstraße / Neue Grünstraße around 200 m away
- Villa on the edge of the zoo (Chapter 1)
- Plants (Chapter 7) - at Fontane plants are regularly an important motif.
- Palm (Chapter 12) see Ravenea. A key scene takes place in the palm house on van der Straaten.
- Immigrant family - Dutch instead of Huguenots (Chapter 1)
- Ten Years of Marriage (Chapter 1)
- Age difference (instead of 22) 25 years (Chapter 1)
- Banker's son as a houseguest (Chapter 3)
- Marital conflict (title of the novel) - only vaguely indicated according to the moral of the time
- Image Collector (Chapter 7)
- “The Mohr Wash” (Chapter 3) - a (then) very well-known painting (1843) by Carl Joseph Begas to illustrate the old saying; was already in the father's collection.
In addition to these key data, from which Fontane was inspired, the entire story, which dates back five years, is fictitious.
Fontane did not know the family members personally. However, the upbringing of the Ravené children was largely taken over by the company's authorized signatory, Paul Harder, whose wife was a friend of Fontane's wife and through whom some details and suggestions probably flowed.
literature
- Felix Escher : The Ravené family. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 220 f. ( Digitized version ).
- Konrad Beck: The Ravenés . In: Communications from the Association for the History of Berlin . Volume 81, Issue 3. Berlin 1985, p. 310-313 .
- Garden monuments in Berlin: cemeteries . Edited by Jörg Haspel and Klaus von Krosigk (Landesdenkmalamt Berlin), edited by Katrin Lesser, Jörg Kuhn and Detlev Pietzsch (contributions to the preservation of monuments in Berlin 27), Petersberg 2008, p. 125 (with a picture of the grave)
Web links
- Ravené on reichsburg-cochem.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ravenéstrasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near Kaupert )
- ^ Ravené high school
- ^ Theodor Fontane: works, writings and letters . Ed .: Walter Keitel, Helmuth Nürnberger . 3rd edition expanded in the appendix. tape 1 part 2. Hanser, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-446-11429-7 , p. 827 ( Google.Books - first edition: 1971).
- ↑ Ilmenau honorary citizen on ilmenau.com
- ^ Willi Wohlberedt : Directory of the graves of well-known and famous personalities in Greater Berlin, Potsdam and the surrounding area . tape 1 . Self-published, Berlin 1932.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ravené, Louis Fréderic Jacques |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ravené, Louis; Ravené, Ludwig Friedrich Jacob; Ravené, Jacob |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German industrialist, patron |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 1, 1823 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Szczecin |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 28, 1879 |
| Place of death | Marienbad ( Mariánské Lázně ) |