Ludwig Volkmann

Ludwig Volkmann around 1911

Ludwig Volkmann 1935

Ludwig Volkmann (born January 9, 1870 in Leipzig ; † February 10, 1947 ibid) was the first chairman of the German Book Trade Association and president of the International Exhibition for Book Trade and Graphics in Leipzig, which he organized .

Origin and family

Ludwig Volkmann was born in Leipzig in 1870 as the son of the bookseller and music dealer Wilhelm Volkmann and the grandson of the physiologist Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1801–1877).

Ludwig Volkmann married Henriette Ferdinande Luise Ida Maßmann on July 13, 1896, who was born on May 18, 1876 in Schwerin as the daughter of the Imperial Court Council and later Senate President Wilhelm Maßmann and his wife Clara. Burmeister was born. She died on August 1, 1938.

Education and professional activity

He first attended the Teichmann private school, then the Nikolai-Gymnasium in Leipzig and first learned the book trade from 1888 to 1889 in Bonn, also enrolled as a student of natural sciences. The following time he turned to the study of art history, archeology and economics in Munich , Leipzig , Florence and Rome . In 1892 he received his doctorate in Munich with a dissertation on "Pictorial representations of Dante's Divina Commedia up to the end of the Renaissance ". In 1892/93 he served as a one-year volunteer with the Jäger Battalion in Dresden, where he became a reserve officer in 1894. On October 16, 1893, he joined his parents' business at the Breitkopf & Härtel music publishing house , became a partner in the branch in Brussels on July 1, 1894, authorized officer of the company on December 1, 1895, and a partner in the Leipzig company in January 1897.

In 1901 Volkmann was elected first chairman of the German Book Trade Association, as which he was a judge at the World Exhibition from St. Louis in the United States of America in 1904 and in 1910 in the same capacity in Brussels . At the same time he cultivated his art-historical interests by traveling and a rich writing activity.

In 1914 Volkmann was president of the International Exhibition for Book Trade and Graphics in Leipzig ( Bugra ), which he organized.

His relationship with the employees of his company is remarkable in that no factory siren called to work in his company, no time clock was to be feared, that the employee “was not given a number that he had to give when entering the factory thereby being pressed down to the number ”, when it was customary elsewhere. As early as 1907 he announced to the members of the house that from now on they would be entitled to paid leave, which was something extraordinary under the circumstances at the time.

In September 1914 Volkmann became a go. Privy councilor appointed, various domestic and foreign societies made him an honorary member. During the First World War he was able to do all sorts of cultural work behind the front. In 1919 he founded a special book trade department at the Leipziger Messe , which gained permanent importance under the name "Bugra-Messe" and acquired its own exhibition center. At the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928 he headed the book trade department.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 , Ludwig Volkmann had to manage the large company alone under difficult circumstances, as the two co-owners, his cousins ​​von Haase, had been drafted into military service. On the side he continued to work in art history. When an accident struck him in 1940 that largely paralyzed him, he was only able to run the business under the most difficult of circumstances. During this time he wrote his last art- historical work on " Egyptian Romance in European Art", which was only able to appear posthumously in print in 2006.

Last years of life

On December 4, 1943, his house and the main Breitkopf & Härtel building along with the machine room and cellar fell victim to an air raid on Leipzig and burned down completely. A large number of works of art and family documents were destroyed in the process. Ludwig Volkmann first moved to his country house in Großbothen near Leipzig and last lived in a furnished room in Leipzig, where he died on February 10, 1947.

Publications

• Ludwig Volkmann: Illustrated Fonts of the Renaissance. Hieroglyphics and emblematics in their relationships and effects . Leipzig: Hiersemann 1923. (Reprint 1969)

• Ludwig Volkmann: Ars memorativa . In: Yearbook of the Art History Collections in Vienna , New Series, Volume 3, Vienna 1929.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ludwig Volkmann in the catalog of the German National Library