Abraham Frowein (industrialist)

Abraham Frowein

Abraham Frowein (born September 19, 1878 in Elberfeld , † July 12, 1957 in Wuppertal ) was a German textile manufacturer .

Life

Family and partners

The former silk weaving mill Frowein & Co. GmbH

Frowein comes from a family that has been in Lennep since 1500 and in Elberfeld since 1600. As the son of the lawyer and factory owner Abraham Frowein (* February 20, 1847 - August 26, 1893) and his wife Luise aus'm Weerth (* March 25, 1856 - September 4, 1916) from the house of Ahr near Wesel , he visited a humanistic high school. From 1897 to 1901 he made a trip to Geneva, London and New York. He then went on a trip around the world for a year.

Since 1902 he has worked as a secretary, from 1904 as a partner in the Abraham & Gebrüder Frowein company , which was later converted into a stock corporation. The factory produced lace , braid , cord and ribbon . The production facility was in Elberfeld at Uellendahler Strasse 70/71.

Public offices

He was involved in the commercial associations of the textile industry , for example as chairman of the Krefeld Association of German Silk Weavers and the Association of the Silk Ribbon Industry in Germany . After the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (RDI) was founded on February 4, 1919 , he occupied the post of deputy chairman of this organization. On June 12, 1919, he chaired a meeting of the RDI in Berlin, which dealt with the problem of socialization. He commented on the planned self-governing corporations of the industry and referred to them only as apparent self-government .

In 1920 the RDI founded a cartel office . where he was chairman. He had shown himself to be extraordinarily skilful in meetings and negotiations and had shown great experience in dealing with problems in the markets, which obviously was not often the case with manufacturers and industrialists at the time. When a conference between the RDI and the British Federation of British Industries was held in London in December 1926 , Frowein was one of the five-member German delegation.

President of the International Chamber of Commerce

When the German Group of the International Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1925 , he was nominated as Deputy President, while Franz von Mendelssohn served as President. After he became president of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1931, he was unable to perform this office for the usual two years due to illness, so that Frowein succeeded him until 1933 on March 10, 1932. Then Frowein was made honorary president.

Withdrawal in 1933 and abandonment after the war

On January 6, 1928, he had signed the call to found the Federation for the Renewal of the Reich (BER). After the NSDAP came to power, he was forced to resign from the RDI and so he withdrew from his previous public offices. But in 1946 he took over the office of President of the German Economic Council in the British zone of occupation .

Frowein was politically involved in the German National People's Party (DNVP). In Elberfeld he was a member of the city council for a period before 1914 and after the war. From March 16, 1903, he was married to Eva Cohnitz, daughter of Eugen Cohnitz, partner in Gebhard & Co. , and his wife Emma Schlieper. In Elberfeld he lived at the address Am Buschhäuschen 11.

Memberships and offices

• Provisional Reich Economic Council
• Advisory Board in the Federation for Colonial Renewal (BKE)
• Donors' Association of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (NdW)
• Association to safeguard common economic interests in Rhineland and Westphalia , Düsseldorf (as deputy chairman)
• Chamber of Commerce and Industry for the Wuppertal industrial district
• Board member of the Association of German Employers' Associations
• Member of the Board of Trustees for the German-Dutch Financial Agreement GmbH (Tredefina) , Berlin
• Commercial statistical advisory board of the Statistisches Reichsamt , Berlin
• Board member of the branches of the Foreign Office for Foreign Trade and the Reich news offices, Berlin
• Supervisory Board of JP Bemberg AG, Barmen
• Supervisory Board of Frowein & Co. KG on shares (as chairman)
• Supervisory board of Walter Leberecht Stein AG, Osterrath (as chairman)
• Vice President of Continental Bandweberei AG, Budapest
• Supervisory Board of Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken AG , Elberfeld
• Supervisory board of Vereinigte Bandfabriken AG, Vienna
• Supervisory board of Vereinigte Bandfabriken AG, Dobruska
• Supervisory board of Silesia Allgemeine Versicherungs AG, Breslau
• Supervisory board of Nordstern Lebensversicherungs-Bank AG, Berlin

Awards

• War Merit Cross
• Iron Cross 2nd class on a white and black ribbon
• Red Cross 1st class
• Large Federal Cross of Merit with Star (1953)

literature

• Herrmann AL Degener , who is it? , Berlin 1935
• Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatic Publishing House , Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 .
• Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. German business publisher, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 .
• DBE, Volume 3, Munich 1996
• The way to the top industrial association , Darmstadt 1956
• Manual of the construction of the commercial economy , Volume III, Leipzig 1937
• Dieter Fricke et al., Lexicon of Party History , Volumes I, III, and IV, Leipzig 1983

Web links

• Newspaper article about Abraham Frowein in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .