Alsterhaus

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Current Alsterhaus logo
Alsterhaus, 2006
Alsterhaus signet from 2010 to 2016

The Alsterhaus is a department store opened in 1912 at Jungfernstieg 16-20 in Hamburg with five floors.

From 1994 to 2014 it was a branch of the Karstadt department store group (as part of Karstadt Premium GmbH), since then it has formed The KaDeWe Group GmbH with Oberpollinger in Munich and KaDeWe in Berlin . The department store has a sales area of around 24,000 square meters and specializes in high-quality items such as perfumes , accessories, clothing and delicatessen . On the fourth floor there is a Le Buffet restaurant with a view of the Inner Alster .

It is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The Alsterhaus also has its own parking garage, which can be reached via Poststraße and Bei der Stadtwassermühle .

history

The Gera merchant Oscar Tietz opened the first branch of his Hermann Tietz (Hertie) department store in Hamburg on March 1, 1897, with a wide range of textiles, food, furniture, carpets and books. He acquired 5200 square meters of space on Jungfernstieg , which had become the first address in Hamburg. On the area where Scholviens Passage, the Hotel zum Kronprinzen and other houses were located, he built a new branch of his "Hermann Tietz department store", which opened on April 24, 1912. The construction costs for the department store with an upscale range and sophisticated furnishings such as marble and crystal chandeliers amounted to 4.5 million gold marks . The plans were drawn up by the Cremer & Wolffenstein architects , and Richard Jacobssen from Hamburg was in charge of the construction. The property was previously secured with 5000 oak piles, which were driven into the soft soil of the Alster bank.

The time of National Socialism

In the economic crisis after 1929 the sales of the Tietz department stores collapsed by up to 46%. The Aryanization of the department store was preceded by a liquidity bottleneck, which in 1933 resulted in the refusal of an already approved credit line. In March 1933, the managing directors, the brothers Georg and Martin Tietz, as well as their brother-in-law Hugo Zwillenberg, were presented with a debt relief plan, which ultimately led to the sale of the shares of the Tietz family to Commerzbank, Deutsche and Dresdner Bank without direct state intervention ( cold Aryanization ) led. The Tietz family emigrated to the United States with a settlement of 12 million Reichsmarks.

Two Aryan managing directors were appointed for the department stores. One of the two managing directors was Georg Karg , who had previously been responsible for purchasing textiles for the Tietz stores .

He bought the shares from the banks in two installments during the war. The Hermann Tietz department store on Jungfernstieg was then given its current name Alsterhaus in 1935 . (For details see: Expropriation of Tietz .)

Historians have found evidence that in 1943 and 1944 the Alsterhaus sold textiles that had been manufactured in the Litzmannstadt ghetto .

The Tietz family tried in 1949 to have their property returned and finally agreed in a settlement with the Hertie company to compensation by transferring the branches in Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. At that time, the Hertie group still had ten branches.

Development after the war

From 1948 to 1961 the Alsterhaus was the headquarters for the Hertie department store group , which was solely owned by the Karg family.

The Alsterhaus suffered only minor damage during the war and continued to operate as a full-range department store. Great emphasis was placed on a dignified range of high quality.

At the end of the sixties, Hertie acquired the property “ Große Bleichen ” on the corner of “ Poststraße ”, on which the textile house Dyckhoff's shop was located. A modern extension was built here with an additional entrance to the Alsterhaus.

In 1983, the Alsterhaus was completely renovated, which lasted ten months and cost 50 million German marks at the time .

In 1988 the music store WOM (World of Music) moved into its sales area in the basement of the Alsterhaus. The branch was closed again in April 2004 during the renovation of the Alsterhaus, after Karstadt had parted with the company.

Takeover by Karstadt

In 1994 parts of the Hertie department stores, including the Alsterhaus, were taken over by Karstadt . In Arcandor's consolidated balance sheet , it was last shown (2008) under the Karstadt Premium Group without giving detailed figures.

However, the owner of the Alsterhaus property remains the non-profit Hertie Foundation , which means that Karstadt cannot decide independently on structural changes to the house.

The takeover had a strong impact on purchasing policy, which previously was largely independently the management of the company. These had an impact on the range of goods. A little later, the premium goods segment was also partially abandoned and lower-priced items were added to the range, which met with little customer acceptance.

Another step with the intention of improving the profitability of the house was the reduction of the product groups in the range. The areas of toys, books, electrical appliances, entertainment electronics, carpets, furniture and housewares have been completely abandoned.

Between 2003 and 2005 the Alsterhaus was completely rebuilt for around 35 million euros. The Hamburg architect Christian F. Heine is responsible for the plans. The facade on Jungfernstieg and on Poststrasse at the back was rebuilt and brought closer to the original designs. The interior has been completely renewed and modernized.

The large light shaft over all floors with the glass dome from the original building was not restored, instead there are now small atriums over two floors each and a small oval light shaft over all floors, high shop windows on the Jungfernstieg that reach down to the ground, and glass elevators are the most striking innovations. The new window front on the Alster with 7.50 m high new windows is one of the highest in Germany. Above the atria there is a restaurant on the fourth floor, the ceiling of which was designed by Professor Dirk J. Breuer and which also influenced the rest of the furnishings during the renovation.

With the renovation, a strategy of the premium range with higher quality products on the smaller sales area was aimed for and consistently pursued. The depth of the assortment will be reduced in some of the remaining areas. The grocery department was significantly reduced and taken over exclusively by shop-in-shop providers, the size of the haberdashery and fabric department, for which the Alsterhaus was famous, was considerably reduced.

A number of external companies received their own sales areas as part of the shop-in-shop system.

The part of the building on the corner of Poststrasse and Große Bleichen was spun off in 2003 and is now a branch of Hennes & Mauritz with access to the Alsterhaus on all floors.

After the takeover by Signa Holding of the Austrian entrepreneur René Benko , the Karstadt Premium GmbH stores were renamed The KaDeWe Group in order to separate them from the other Karstadt department stores and to emphasize their affiliation with KaDeWe . In June 2015 Signa sold the majority stake (50.1%) to the Italian department store chain La Rinascente , which in turn is part of the Thai Central Group .

various

Alsterhaus am Jungfernstieg , 2009

Before the great fire of 1842, the house of the bookseller Friedrich Christoph Perthes , the son-in-law of Mathias Claudius , stood on the site of the department store . The poet spent his last weeks here and died here. For the 175th anniversary of that day, the Alsterhaus donated a memorial plaque, which is placed next to the entrance on Jungfernstieg.

On the nearby Ballindamm there is an office building on the Inner Alster , also known as the “Alsterhaus” ( picture ).

In 1987 Prince Charles and his wife Princess Diana also visited the Alsterhaus during their stay in Hamburg.

literature

Web links

Commons : Alsterhaus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ History of the Alsterhaus during a shopping weekend
  2. ↑ Hanna Kastendieck: Alsterhaus celebrates its 100th anniversary. Hamburg shopping palace on 5000 oak piles. (Part 1) and (Part 2) In: Hamburger Abendblatt from February 29, 2012.
  3. ↑ Nobody goes to Tietz anymore . In: Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung
  4. ^ "Alsterhaus" was only used by the Nazis . In: taz , March 29, 2012
  5. ↑ Christoph Richter: Everyday family life in hell . Deutschlandradio , July 2, 2010; Report on a photo exhibition
  6. ↑ Hans-Otto Eglau : The Lord of Hertie . In: Die Zeit , No. 48/1970
  7. ↑ a b Gisela Schütte: The Alsterhaus has 100 years on the clock . In: Die Welt , March 1, 2012.
  8. ↑ Most recently available annual report of the insolvent company
  9. ↑ Thomas Heise, Felix Kurz, Harald Schumann : Tax tricks of the Hertie heirs . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1999, p. 76-78 ( online ). Internet presence of the non-profit Hertie Foundation .
  10. ↑ Press release on the renovation ( Memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  11. ↑ The largest picture by Jörg D. Breuer ( Memento from May 1, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Thomas Thieme: KaDeWe Group - Karstadt owner forges premium alliance. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung (online), June 9, 2015.
  13. ↑ Half of KaDeWe sold to Italian group ( Memento from June 12, 2015 in the web archive archive.today )

Coordinates: 53 ° 33 ′ 11.3 "  N , 9 ° 59 ′ 29.1"  E