Albert Ballin

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Albert Ballin

Albert Ballin (born August 15, 1857 in Hamburg ; died November 9, 1918 there ) was a Hamburg shipowner and one of the most important Jewish personalities during the German Empire . As general director, he made the Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) into the largest shipping line in the world.

Life

Former Villa Ballin in Feldbrunnenstrasse

Albert Ballin was born in Hamburg in 1857 as the youngest of eight siblings. The father Samuel Joseph Ballin (1804–1874) was of Jewish faith and immigrated from Denmark , his mother Amalie (called Malchen), née Meyer, was from Altona and came from a respected family of rabbis. The father was penniless as a result of the Hamburg fire in 1842 and founded the Morris & Co emigration agency in Hamburg in 1852 . After finishing school in 1874 and after the death of his father, Albert had to start the business at the age of 17. In 1875 he received power of attorney and in 1879 became a partner in Morris & Co. The company brokered ship passages to England and North America for those wishing to emigrate. In 1881 Morris & Co took over the passage agency for the Hamburger Carr-Linie, which in 1886 with the Rob. M. Sloman shipping company formed the Union Line . 17 percent of all emigrations to the USA were brokered by Morris & Co in 1882, which gave Ballin a secure economic situation and a certain level of prosperity. In the same year (1882) he acquired Hamburg citizenship , which was only available to wealthy men who regularly pay taxes and who could pay the fee for the citizenship letter .

In 1883 Albert Ballin married Marianne Rauert, daughter of a medium-sized Hamburg cloth merchant. The wedding was performed according to the Protestant rite, although Ballin did not convert. The Ballins' marriage remained childless. In 1893 the couple adopted a child from Marianne Ballin's extended family.

On May 31, 1886, Ballin became head of the passenger department at HAPAG. In 1888 he was appointed to the board of directors of HAPAG and resigned from Morris & Co; the latter was deleted from the commercial register in 1907. From 1899 he was General Director of HAPAG and turned the company into the largest shipping line in the world.

Ballin's grave at the Ohlsdorf cemetery

In 1906, Albert Ballin had a country house built by the Hamburg architect Fritz Höger in Hamfelde near Trittau in the Stormarn district , where he and his family mainly spent the summer months. The house, called Villa Ballin , at Feldbrunnenstrasse 58, built by architects Lundt & Kallmorgen in 1908 , has been a listed building since 1982 and is now home to the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning .

Albert Ballin was a passionate patriot and was considered a national-liberal monarchist before the First World War . But his attitude changed very clearly in the years of the immoderate arms race between Germany and Great Britain before the war and again in view of the visible results that the war had brought for the economy, the internal situation in Germany and the German population. Shortly after the outbreak of war in August 1914, he organized a Reich purchasing cooperative for the purchase of food from abroad, of which he was also director. He repeatedly warned of the immeasurable damage this war would bring to the economy and trade, and at several points in time tried to take steps towards a separate peace. He was particularly concerned with breaking the power of politicians and the military. Shortly before the collapse of the empire in 1918, he formulated the following urgent conclusions from the misery: “Abdication of the Hohenzollern rule, initiation of peace negotiations, establishment of internal democracy, strengthening of parliamentary responsibility and introduction of universal and equal suffrage. Then we will be able to form a common front against Bolshevism. ”In the revolutionary storm of November, HAPAG was also occupied and the demand was publicly articulated to arrest him as a capitalist. At the same time, a large part of the ships laid up in the countries of the war opponents had been confiscated and thus more than half of the shipping fleet was lost. Shortly afterwards, on November 9, 1918, the day Wilhelm II's renunciation of the throne was announced and the proclamation of the Republic, Albert Ballin died of an overdose of sleeping pills. His funeral took place on November 13th in Hamburg, and the funeral speech was held by his longtime friend and colleague Max Warburg (1867–1946). His grave is in the Ohlsdorf cemetery .

plant

On Albert Ballin excitation, the so-called developed tween decks on overseas passenger ships to the emigrants and cheaper to transport better. He described the economic attractiveness of the mass business with the words: "Without tween deck passengers, I would be bankrupt within a few weeks" . In 1886 there was great competition between the Union Line and the Hamburg-America Line HAPAG in the emigration business, and the competitors divided the market among themselves. After these agreements, in 1886 Guido Wolff moved from the board of the Union-Linie to the board of HAPAG (there until 1907).

In the same year Albert Ballin became head of the passage department there after HAPAG took over the Carr line. In 1887 Ballin introduced the Hamburg – New York express service and was appointed to the HAPAG board of directors in 1888, which was expanded to three people.

Albert Ballin on the first cruise in 1891, drawing by CW Allers

Since the transatlantic passages were booked significantly less in winter due to the bad weather and the choppy sea, Ballin sent the Augusta Victoria in 1891 on a test basis for an “educational and pleasure trip” to the Mediterranean . This trip was a success through and through - the ship was fully booked and the "cruise" was born. This form of sea voyage quickly became popular, with many shipping companies offering additional cruises in their programs.

When he was appointed General Director of HAPAG in 1899, he was responsible for building what was then the largest and fastest ships in the world in the competition for ship-based transatlantic traffic . In 1900 Germany won the “ Blue Ribbon ”. In 1906 the Empress Auguste Viktoria was commissioned as the largest ship in the world. The Imperator followed in 1912 (HAPAG used the male article at the request of Kaiser Wilhelm II ).

Albert Ballin had good contacts with Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst . Ballin commissioned the architect Henry van de Velde , with the consent of Wilhelm Ernst , to carry out the interior design of one of his newly built ships. The project failed due to later resistance from Wilhelm Ernst.

For the emigrants who were transported on the ships of what was then HAPAG, Albert Ballin created the "Emigration Halls" on a good 55,000 m² on the Veddel outside Hamburg. In around 30 individual buildings, he had sleeping and living pavilions, dining halls, baths, a music pavilion, a church and a synagogue and, in particular, rooms for medical examinations built. The purpose of this small town was to provide a safe place for the emigrants waiting to cross. The strict medical controls made it possible to largely avoid rejections by the immigration authorities. The quota was around three percent. The stay, accommodation and meals were included in the price of the passenger tickets.

Some of the "Emigration Halls" in Hamburg, which were demolished in 1963, were rebuilt in the same place and opened on July 5, 2007 as the Museum City BallinStadt .

human

Acceptance in society

It is often emphasized in the literature that Ballin was not fully accepted by Hamburg society. This was particularly true of long-established Hamburg merchants and lawyers who perceived Ballin as outsiders or even as an upstart. According to his biographer Susanne Wiborg, he was a “Hamburger through and through”, but “always remained a stranger in his hometown” (Wiborg 2000, p. 55). The tradition-conscious Hamburg merchants attached great importance to independence, for them Ballin was a highly successful general manager, but only an employee and not the owner of a company himself. He thus embodied the type of a modern manager who at that time still enjoyed little respect in the traditional merchant society. In addition, he encountered incomprehension among conservative citizens with his modern ideas, for example with the intensive involvement of the press and advertising in his entrepreneurial concept, which was considered disreputable among traders who traditionally aimed at discretion and restraint. His poor background may also have played a role. Ballin himself also stayed away from the meeting places of the traditional Hamburg society and was never a member of the influential Hamburg Chamber of Commerce , for example . Olaf Matthes points out that his business and private interests were far beyond the boundaries of his hometown and that Ballin could not afford to deal with the “daily small-scale merchant war” in his position. His Judaism can be seen as another aspect that made Ballin an outsider. He always acknowledged his Jewish origins, and it was common knowledge that Ballin would not be able to convert . Nevertheless, due to his success, but also his engaging personality, he was well respected and respected and maintained relationships with leading personalities throughout Germany, including of course many Hamburgers. Ballin spoke to his fellow citizens of Hamburg in the best Hafenplatt . He was known, among other things, for his contacts with Kaiser Wilhelm II , which he had intensified particularly from 1905 and which earned him the designation “the emperor's shipowner”. The Kaiser first paid Ballin a visit to Hamburg in 1905 and from 1910 to his house on Feldbrunnenstrasse. He felt so comfortable that from now until 1914 he repeated these visits every June. The visits to the emperor were a major social event in which Hamburg society actively participated. Ballin's meticulously kept guest book comprises more than 190 pages for the period from May 31, 1902 to September 29, 1918. The alleged lack of social acceptance of Ballin has therefore been overstated in the literature. According to Matthes (p. 294), there is no reliable evidence for the assertion made by Johannes Gerhardt (p. 74) that Hamburgers “from family” were often guests at Ballin, but did not invite the social climber to come to him.

Political commitment

Ballin was a member of Hamburg's Jewish community and often made donations for charitable purposes. Activities to combat tuberculosis and tropical diseases were particularly important to him . In his environment he tried to gain social recognition, but without placing his Jewish attitude in the foreground, but rather his business successes. In doing so, he did not hide his denominational stance, but was at the same time interested in avoiding discrimination by non-Jews. This is also how his efforts to prevent too many workers of Jewish origin in the companies he runs can be classified.

In Hamburg society, Ballin undoubtedly belonged to the circle of prominent Jews who sought the proximity of Kaiser Wilhelm II before the war and saw him as a guarantor of economic prosperity. These personalities, later sometimes called “Emperor Jews” with disrespectful intent - in addition to Ballin, included the Hamburg banker Max Warburg and Berlin bourgeois and industrialists such as Carl Fürstenberg , Walter Rathenau , James Simon or Eduard Arnhold  - flattered the emperor and sometimes made him substantial gifts of money. Before the First World War, Ballin tried in vain to prevent the arms race through his contacts and to achieve a German-English balance. To this end, he held talks with the German Emperor and the English banker Sir Ernest Cassel, among others . Due to the German naval policy , his efforts failed and his fears came true. During the war he tried to use his contacts to prevent the USA from entering the war and to persuade Wilhelm II to renounce unlimited submarine warfare . Both failed. At the request of the Supreme Army Command , he was chosen as a person of integrity in the final phase of the war to conduct peace talks with England. The former emperor did not reciprocate Ballin's devotion: At the beginning of the 1920s, Wilhelm is said to have said, to justify himself, about Ballin, “he never knew that he was Jewish,” which his contemporaries did not believe.

Due to his reputation, his activities to prevent a war and his increasingly clear distance from the official policy of the German Reich before and during the war, he was at least twice in conversation for the office of Reich Chancellor. On the last suggestion, which was brought to him in mid-1918, he responded with a letter dated September 16, 1918, in which he made it clear that he was no longer able to cope with the nervous tension of this office. Because the war years had exhausted his strength and he suffered from severe depression at times. But his Jewish identity certainly also played a not insignificant role, since he did not want to put himself in the field of fire of anti-Semitic hostility through such an office and in these critical times. In addition, because of his inner attitude, he mistrusted the revolutionary forces of the hitherto unlawful layers of the German population. Therefore he proposed Hugo Stinnes (1870-1924) for this office .

Honors

Postage stamp of the Deutsche Bundespost (1957) for the 100th birthday
  • Order of the Red Eagle , 2nd class with crown and star
  • Royal Crown Order (Prussia) , 1st class in diamonds
  • Red Cross Medal (Prussia) , 3rd class
  • The Ballindamm street in Hamburg , where the HAPAG headquarters is located, was named after Albert Ballin . In Berlin there is also a Ballinstrasse and in Cuxhaven there is an Albert-Ballin-Platz.
  • BallinStadt Emigration Museum , Hamburg. On July 4, 2007, a museum was opened on the former site of the emigration halls, the construction of which was initiated by Albert Ballin. The museum is reminiscent of European emigration via Hamburg in the 19th and 20th centuries; However, the migration movements over four centuries up to the present are also examined .
  • An office building built in 1923 was also named after him, but has been called Meßberghof since 1938 . Ballin was no longer tolerated as a bearer of the name because of his Jewish descent under National Socialist rule. The owner at the time, a Deutsche Bank company , declared his intention in 1997 to give the building its old name back, but this has not happened so far (2015). The current owner, the Hamburg publisher Heinz Bauer , is not aware of any such initiative.
  • A wharf on the Altenwerder container terminal of HHLA was christened Ballinkai 2,001th
  • The passenger ship Albert Ballin , which was commissioned by HAPAG in 1923 , was also named after the shipowner, but was only allowed to carry the name until 1935, as it was renamed at the instigation of the National Socialists.

Others

Several personalities and institutions in Hamburg have come together under the name of the Albert Ballin consortium in order to protect the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company from being sold abroad.

radio play

A radio play by Albert Mähl , produced in 1950 or a little earlier and produced by the NWDR Hamburg , was entitled: Albert Ballin; A radio play about the rise of Hanseatic shipping and the merits that Albert Ballin had in it.

Directed by Hans Freundt spoke:

The playing time of the still preserved work is 57'30 minutes.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Eichler: Albert Ballin. Father - entrepreneur - visionary . Koehler, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7822-1319-6 .
  2. ^ Johannes Gerhardt: Albert Ballin. Hamburg Scientific Foundation, p. 72 (PDF; 2.8 MB).
  3. ^ Christian Schölzel: Albert Ballin (1857-1918). Hentrich & Hentrich, Teetz 2004, p. 47 ff.
  4. ↑ The female form is common for ships, but this has occasionally been deviated from (explanation here!).
  5. ^ Henry van de Velde, Wilhelm Ernst, Albert Ballin: PDF pp. 233-240. Retrieved April 26, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Olaf Matthes: From Albert Ballin's guest book. In: Ortwin Pelc (Ed.): Myths of the Past: Reality and Fiction in History (Festschrift Jörgen Bracker ). V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2012, pp. 287–294 ( preview in the Google book search).
  7. ↑ Harry Graf Kessler passed on the statement of the ex-emperor about Ballin, vouched for by Hellmuth Lucius von Stoedten , in his diary entry of April 3, 1923. Cf. on this (as well as at the beginning of this paragraph) Peter Pulzer : Chap. VIII .: The reaction to anti-Semitism. In: Peter Pulzer, Paul Mendes-Flohr , Steven M. Lowenstein, Monika Richarz (eds.): German-Jewish history in modern times. Third volume: Controversial Integration 1871–1918. Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-406-39704-2 ; Pp. 249-277; here: p. 263 u. Note 25.
  8. ^ Christian Schölzel: Albert Ballin (1857-1918). Hentrich & Hentrich, Teetz 2004, pp. 33 ff. And 47 ff.
  9. ↑ Order according to the manual for the German Empire. 1918, p. 20.
  10. ^ Hamburger Abendblatt: "Ballinkai" - Altenwerder's terminal of superlatives. July 11, 2001, accessed June 7, 2020 .

Web links

Commons : Albert Ballin  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Commons : Pictures of the Ballinstadt Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Ballin, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hamburg shipowner
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1918
Place of death Hamburg