Adolf Höper

Adolf Höper (born October 19, 1894 in Celle ; † April 2, 1971 there ) was a German master furrier , politician and association official .

Life

Interior of a Chapeau Claque - cylinder with the proprietary trademarks Ideal , including the initials "TK" for the musician Theodor Kruger

The Höper family was one of the established businessmen in the city of Celle for decades. Adolf Höper's father was a merchant who expanded his initial hat and cap trade to include fur goods.

After the founding of the district handicrafts association, Höper junior initiated the establishment of the district handicrafts association in Celle together with other Celle craftsmen in 1920 as part of the Northwest German craft association. In 1925 he was elected chairman of the association. Together with Hartwig Bock from Westerceller Strasse, he was a simple member of the Reichsbund deutscher Kürschner in 1928 . Towards the end of the Weimar Republic , he was elected to the Hanover Provincial Parliament in 1932 .

At the time of National Socialism , Adolf Höper, along with other citizens of Celle, was one of the registered persons of the Reichsführer SS security service according to an index card . Birgit Puck assessed his association activities during this time:

“The meetings of the Celle handicrafts, originally intended as informational events, were drawn in by National Socialist propaganda events under the chairmanship of master furrier Adolf Höper. [...]

Höper's interest in improving the situation for the furriers and his expectations, which he presumably linked to the National Socialist regime, encouraged him to hold the post of head master of the furriers' guild from 1934 to 1946 and the post of district master from 1937 to 1946. "

- Birgit Puck, 1991

After the dissolution of earlier furrier organizations at the time of the British occupation zone on May 28, 1946 , Höper invited various representatives of the furrier trade to an initial meeting, during the subsequent event on July 31 of the year, together with Erich Levermann from Hamburg, Carl Scherer from Hanover, Wilhelm Gosekuhl from Cologne, Franz Häupler from Düsseldorf and Heinz Thiemeyer , Münster to found the Zone Guild Association for the furrier trade of the British zone , the forerunner organization of the Central Association of the German furrier trade .

Skinning Adolf Höper

Hat box with the imprint “Hut-Fabrik Ad. Höper, Celle, Great Plan 29 "

Until the Second World War, six to seven master furriers were resident in Celle, with short-term fluctuations due to the introduction of the freedom of trade in 1877 and due to the two world wars. In 1982 there were then only three, in 1991 two more. Often the profession was inherited through the sons of several generations.

The Höper family has been one of the city's established businessmen since the 19th century. Adolf Höper , who was born in Westercelle in 1858, worked after his apprenticeship in the food retail trade as a traveler for the Celler hat factory Bosse in Schuhstrasse and certainly also supplied many furriers, which at the time, at least in small and medium-sized towns, were always selling or even selling hats and caps made themselves. In 1885 he founded his own hat and cap shop in the Großer Plan 8. He was so successful with it that eight years later he was able to move the business into his own house, Großer Plan 28. With the sale of fur goods, he expanded his business area at the time of an unusually strong development of new fur fashion. The invention of the fur sewing machine made the production of fur clothing cheaper; for the first time in modern fashion, fur was worn with the hair facing outwards.

The son Adolf Höper junior consequently began an apprenticeship as a furrier and hat maker in 1910. The training took place in furriers in Hamburg and Hameln, in 1919 he passed his master craftsman examination at the Hamburg Chamber of Crafts. When he returned to his parents' business, he was in charge of the furrier workshop, his father was responsible for hats and caps. When his father died in 1936, he took over the management of the office building. The company survived the war and the post-war depression, and in 1959 Adolf Höper employed around 30 employees.

A furrier, a refugee from Silesia, remembered his work at the Höper company in the post-war period with an extreme housing shortage:

"At that time, Mr. Höper was also looking for a furrier (...), and he wrote me right back that I could start with him and he offered me, that was the best thing you could get, a heated room and lunch in his house ( ...). And then I said yes. "

Two years later, the apprentice furrier completed his master craftsman examination. Shortly afterwards, he had to leave the Röper workshop, as the master furrier Keizer , who previously worked there, had returned from captivity and was entitled to his previous position. He worked for three years in various other cities until he returned to his family in Celle in 1952 and started his own business. Albert Keizer, who returned home, was entered in the fur directory as a self-employed furrier for the first time in 1956 at Schuhstrasse 13.

The furrier workshop was last run by Arno Borchhardt , who in the 1960s regularly worked with several fur seamstresses at the utility table . After Borchardt had passed his master craftsman examination in Aachen in 1955, he came to Höper the following year when he saw his job offer in a specialist newspaper:

“And since Ms. Höper from Friesland, from East Friesland, came from the farming family, we immediately got on well. And that was also the reason why I got the job. "

In 1968 Adolf Höper junior gave up his business for health reasons. Master furrier Arno Borchardt took over the business and moved from the Großer Plan to Schuhstrasse 45. When Arno Borchardt closed the craft business in 1989 for reasons of age, his four employees, three fur seamstresses and a saleswoman, also retired.

literature

• Beatrix Herlemann , Helga Schatz: Biographical Lexicon of Lower Saxony Parliamentarians 1919–1945 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. Volume 222). Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 2004, ISBN 3-7752-6022-6 , p. 161

Web links

Commons : Adolf Höper  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} o. V .: Höper, Adolf in the database of Niedersächsische Personen (new entry required) of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library - Lower Saxony State Library in the version of April 13, 2006, last accessed on April 8, 2019
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Folklore in Lower Saxony . News reviews, dates , ed. from the seminar for folklore at the University of Göttingen, Göttingen: Schmerse Verlag, 1992, passim ; limited preview in Google Book search
3. ^ List of members of the Reichsbund der deutschen Kürschner e. V. 1928 . Verlag Arthur Heber & Co., Leipzig, p. 65.
4. ↑ Compare the recording of people in individual locations, especially in Northern Germany. - SD card index: Vol. 60 , archival signature BArch, R 58/1397 , in the archive portal of the German Digital Library
5. ↑ C. Schmitz: The Organization of the Kürschnerhandwerk [ undated ], as a PDF document on the page kuerschner-innung.de , last accessed on April 8, 2019.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Birgit Puck: Kürschnerhandwerk in Celle . Bomann-Museum Celle (ed.), December 1991 ( → table of contents) .
7. ↑ Winckelmann specialist address book for the tobacco and fur industry and the furrier trade Germany No. 64, 1956, p. Kü 29.
8. ↑ Winckelmann specialist address book for the tobacco and fur industry and the furrier trade in Germany No. 81, 1973, p. 235.