Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Master

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Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Master

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meister (born February 17, 1827 in Hamburg , † January 3, 1895 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German businessman and industrialist . Together with Eugen Lucius and Adolf von Brüning , he was one of the founders of what would later become Hoechst AG .

life and work

Meister came from a long-established Hamburg trading company with extensive overseas relationships. His parents were the merchant Carl Ludwig Daniel Meister (born August 14, 1800 in Detmold; † October 15, 1877 in Hamburg) and his wife Juliane nee Oppermann (born February 4, 1802 in Hamburg; † November 14, 1883 ibid).

After secondary school and an apprenticeship with a Hamburg wholesaler, he went to the Caribbean in 1848 , where his father owned numerous commercial branches. Master visited the islands of Saint Thomas , Cuba, and Venezuela one by one to get to know his father's customers and the business thoroughly.

In 1851 he accompanied his father to London , where the world exhibition was taking place at that time . He then took over the branch in Manchester , where he stayed in the German colony there for several years. In 1857 he made friends with the young chemist Eugen Lucius , who wanted to study the modern industrial processes of English industry there.

In 1859, Meister took English citizenship. In 1860 he started a cure in Wiesbaden because he suffered from rheumatism at a young age . He met in the house of his friend Lucius Marie Georgine Arnoldine Becker (born April 23, 1840 in Düsseldorf; † 1912), a daughter of the Frankfurt painter Jakob Becker and his wife Wally née Müller. Her younger sister Maximiliane Eduarde Becker was engaged to Lucius; the two married in the summer of 1860.

On September 3, 1861, Wilhelm Meister and Marie Becker also married. Meister returned to Manchester with his wife, who, however, soon longed for the friendly atmosphere and civil society of the then Free City of Frankfurt . In 1862, Meister followed a suggestion from his friend and worked with him to set up a chemical factory in Höchst am Main in Nassau . In this city just outside Frankfurt, there was already freedom of trade back then .

Together with Ludwig August Müller, an uncle of their wives, Meister and Lucius founded the tar paint factory Meister, Lucius & Co. on January 4, 1863. This company later became Hoechst AG , which for a long time was the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world. Meister brought in most of the capital when it was founded and took over the commercial management of the new company. Lucius student colleague Adolf Brüning became technical director with profit participation, but without holding any own capital shares. It was not until 1865, after Müller had left, that Brüning joined the company as a partner, which was now called Farbwerke Meister, Lucius & Brüning .

In 1875 Meister had himself renaturalized and took on German citizenship again . From 1880 on, since the transformation into the Aktiengesellschaft Farbwerke formerly Meister, Lucius & Brüning , he was a member of the supervisory board , which he left in 1890 for health reasons.

Like the other founders, Meister was happy to use his extraordinarily large fortune for philanthropic purposes. In 1879, together with Lucius and Brüning, he founded the Kaiserin Augusta Foundation , a pension fund for workers that also granted mortgage loans for house building. In 1890 he set up the Wilhelm Meister Foundation , the purpose of which was to build houses for older workers. In the following years, the Heimchen-Siedlung was built at the gates of the Farbwerke , which finally consisted of 136 standardized housing developments with three or four living rooms, a small garden and a stable. The houses cost 3,500 and 4,500 marks respectively and were therefore quite affordable for the workers; the garden and the stable enabled the residents to produce food for their own use.

Grave in the main cemetery in Frankfurt

Wilhelm Meister refused in 1888 the promotion to the Prussian nobility, but allowed his sons Herbert (1866-1919) and Wilhelm (1863-1935) to use the hereditary title from then on. Meister died on January 3, 1895 in Frankfurt am Main. He was buried in the main cemetery.

Even after his death, the Meister family remained closely connected to the development of the Farbwerke and the cities of Frankfurt and Höchst, which were incorporated into the municipality in 1928. Son Wilhelm von Meister became a lawyer, was the district president of Wiesbaden from 1905 to 1919 and worked for the League of Nations in Geneva from 1930 to 1933 , where he also died in 1935. In 1902 his brother Herbert became a board member of the Farbwerke and later of IG Farben . Master's son-in-law Walther vom Rath was for a long time chairman of the supervisory board of the Farbwerke and later deputy chairman of the supervisory board of IG Farben.

A great-grandson of Wilhelm Meister was William ("Bill") von Meister (1942–1995), founder of Control Video Corporation (CVC), from which the company AOL emerged .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Over 100 letters from Marie, Herbert and Wilhelm von Bismarck (children of Otto and Johanna von Bismarck) to Marie Meister today in: GStA PK, VI. HA, FA Bismarck, v., No. 1.
personal data
SURNAME Master, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Master, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman and industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH January 3, 1895
Place of death Frankfurt am Main