August Lüderitz

August Lüderitz

August Georg Heinrich Lüderitz (born August 6, 1838 in Bremen , † December 15, 1922 in Bad Schwartau ) was a German wholesale merchant and colonial pioneer .

Life

origin

His father, from Hannover Dating Bremen tobacco merchant Franz Adolf Eduard Lüderitz (born March 28, 1801 in Celle, † March 1, 1878 in Bremen) and his wife Henriette Wilhelmine , a born Schuessler (born December 29, 1811 Oldenburg i O. .; † April 25, 1883 in Bremen) were the owners of the renowned raw tobacco company FAE Lüderitz .

Adolf , his older brother, continued the business as a businessman after his father's death.

career

After leaving the Bremen School of Academics , he devoted himself to his commercial career in his father's raw tobacco business. Like other young merchants, after completing his training, he took a longer stay abroad to broaden his business perspective. Like his brother two years earlier, Adolf Lüderitz , he went to North America in 1856 . He crossed it, with many dangers and adventures, partly by horse. In 1868 he went to Colombia for the London house “Fruhling & Goschen” . There he first became a dispatcher and then an authorized signatory before returning to Bremen in 1879.

As early as 1881, August moved to Lagos , in what was then British West Africa , as his brother's commercial representative , in order to buy African products such as palm oil , palm kernels and ivory for his brother in Bremen . In 1882 he took over the management of the trading post from his brother . The attempt to assert itself against foreign competition with the branch failed, however.

In Bremen, his brother decided, together with Heinrich Vogelsang , to found a German colony in South West Africa, which has not been occupied by any other colonial power. In December 1882, his brother sent Vogelsang to Cape Town , South Africa , in order to explore local options in the southwest. Advised by the son of the missionary Carl Hugo Hahn , who worked in South West Africa , he was advised of the bay of Angra Pequena ( Portuguese for small bay ) as a favorable landing site.

In June 1884 August also came to the Walvis Bay . He wanted to prevent the English , who had already occupied them at that time, from expanding further into the interior of Africa from there. For this purpose he tried to acquire the lands surrounding the Bai , as well as the northern coastal areas up to the Portuguese border.

In August 1884, a purchase contract was signed with the Topnaar tribe on his instructions . In the contract, their chief, Piet Heibib, sold a large area surrounding the whale bay to the company and the English property had become an enclave . The commanders of the German corvettes Elisabeth , Rudolf Schering , and Leipzig , Otto Herbig , who were lying in the bay , then hoisted the German flag on his instructions on August 7, 1884. The valuable documents about the "land acquisition" were personally brought to Germany in December 1884.

Otto von Bismarck's concept for the protected area was that the merchant and not the Berlin bureaucrat should rule there. In addition to Heinrich Ernst Göring , August Lüderitz, mission pastor Büttner and his secretary Nels negotiated for the empire . Bismarck supported him and Göring on their expedition into the interior of the country, richly illustrated by Lüderitz as a photographer, in May 1885. When Lüderitz tried to conclude a concession agreement with Maharero in 1884, Maharero initially refused in favor of British interests. When he returned with Goering in October 1885, Maharero responded to the interest of the German representative Goering and placed himself under German protection. The expedition also provided valuable information about the nature of the land.

Former Luderitz Villa

In the Lüderitzland and Lüderitzbucht , named after the brothers, there were memorial stones of the creative and energetic German pioneers, Adolf and August Lüderitz, in Africa.

While Adolf Lüderitz had a fatal accident on an expedition on the coast of South West Africa , August Lüderitz returned to Germany and first took up residence in Hamburg and moved from there to Schwartau in the mid-1890s .

Web links

Commons : August Lüderitz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

• August Lüderitz †. In: Vaterstädtische Blätter , year 1922/23, No. 7, edition of December 31, 1922, p. 25.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mathias Münter Elfner; Brockhaus, the library: Dawn of the masses, horrors of wars (1850-1945) , FA Brockhaus, 1999, ISBN 9783765374418 , p. 284
2. ^ Heinrich Loth : Studies on the history of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Volume 9 , Akademie Verlag , 1963, p. 100
3. ↑ In memory of August 7, 1884, his wife was named Elisabeth and he lived in his villa in Schwartau in Elisabethstrasse 30, named after the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg , who died in 1896 .
4. ↑ Hans Schinz : Fragments. Research trips in German South West Africa , Basler Afrika Bibliographien , 2010, ISBN 978-3905758320 , p. 169
5. ↑ Bernd G. Längin : The German colonies: Schauplätze und Schicksale 1884-1918 , Mittler, 2004, ISBN 9783813208214 , p. 113
6. ↑ George Harzers: colonial pioneer August Lüderitz was Bad Schwartau citizens. In: Association for the care and promotion of local history (Hrsg.): Yearbook for local history . Struve's Buchdruckerei und Verlag, Eutin 1990, pp. 182-183.