Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur
The Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1870 by German chemical and pharmaceutical company based in Frankfurt am Main . It originated in a grocery store founded in 1798 by Leopold Cassella in Frankfurt's Judengasse . From 1970 to 1995 Cassella was a subsidiary of Hoechst AG. The location in Frankfurt-Fechenheim still exists today as the Fechenheim industrial park and has been part of the Weylchem Group since 2013.
history
In 1798, Cassella founded the trading company Caßel & Reiss in Frankfurt's Judengasse . In 1828 the childless Cassella Ludwig took Aaron Gans on as a partner in his company, which from then on traded as Leopold Cassella & Co. and primarily traded in dyes . Gans' sons Friedrich (Fritz) and Leo Gans expanded their father's trade in 1870 to include a tar paint factory , which they founded together with their brother-in-law Bernhard Weinberg and the chemist August Leonhardt at the Mainkur in Fechenheim am Main , the Frankfurt aniline paint factory of Gans und Leonhardt . This date was later considered the founding date of Cassella Farbwerke. In 1879 Fritz Gans brought five million marks into the company. They came from the legacy of his brother-in-law G. Ettling, who had managed the Spanish Rothschild branch in Madrid. In the same year August Leonhardt resigned from the company, which since then as Frankfurt aniline factory Goose & Co. changed its name. The chemist Meinhard Hoffmann became the company's new technical director .
In 1882 Bernhard Weinberg's sons, Arthur and Carl Weinberg , took over the management of the company. Under her leadership, the Farbwerke quickly developed into the world's largest manufacturer of synthetic dyes. In 1894 the partners merged the Frankfurt aniline factory with the paint wholesaler. The new company was called Leopold Cassella & Co. The sulfur dyes developed by Richard Herz based on the model of Vidal-Schwarz by Henri Raymond Vidal (with whom there were patent disputes, but which the Cassella company won) contributed to its success, especially from 1900 onwards .
In 1900, when the Mainkur plant was already employing over 2,400 workers, Arthur Weinberg founded a pharmaceutical department. Weinberg worked with his friend Paul Ehrlich , whose research, carried out at the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt since 1899, led to the establishment of chemotherapy in 1906 .
In 1904, Leo Gans and the Weinberg brothers led the Leopold Cassella & Co. color works into what was then known as the dual alliance with the Hoechst color works . They exchanged a quarter of their shares for shares in the Farbwerke. From then on, Cassella stopped producing acids, aniline and soda and concentrated on the production of dyes. At the same time, BASF, Bayer and Agfa formed the Triple Alliance . A year later, Cassella and Hoechst were connected to the chemical factory Kalle in the Dreiverband .
In 1916 the Triple Alliance and the Triple Alliance merged to form the "small IG Farben".
When the large IG Farben AG was founded in 1925, Cassella also merged into the new company. Leo Gans and Arthur von Weinberg, who was raised to the nobility in 1908, were members of the IG's supervisory board until they were forced to resign from all public offices after the National Socialist seizure of power .
After the Second World War , the Allies put IG Farben under compulsory administration and in 1951 spun off a number of successor companies, including Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur AG . The previous connection with Farbwerke Hoechst was not resumed at first; instead, the three big IG Farben successors, BASF , Bayer AG and Hoechst, each acquired 25.1 percent of the shares in Cassella. It was not until the anniversary year 1970 that the press called the land consolidation . BASF and Bayer sold their shares in Hoechst, which strengthened its position as a manufacturer of dyes and pharmaceuticals. Cassella now also includes the subsidiaries Cassella-Riedel Pharma and Riedel-de Haën AG in Seelze near Hanover , a manufacturer of specialty and laboratory chemicals.
In 1981, Cassella AG and Hoechst AG built a sewage treatment plant to purify the wastewater from Cassella AG and the Offenbach works of Hoechst AG. The Arthur-von-Weinberg-Steg was built to cross the Main for the sewage pipe from Offenbach . In 1995 Cassella AG was merged with Hoechst AG. Shortly thereafter, pharmaceutical research at the Cassella site was closed, in the same year the cosmetics division, which traded under the name Jade , was sold. In 1997, Hoechst sold its specialty chemicals business to the Swiss company Clariant AG. The Cassella site in Fechenheim became the Cassella plant of the German Clariant subsidiary. In 1998 the Offenbach and Cassella plants of Clariant merged to form the Cassella-Offenbach plant . The two parts of the factory are about three kilometers apart on different sides of the Main . As part of the plant merger, infrastructure areas of the plants were merged. The factory school and the analytics division have been combined at the Cassella site.
In 2001, Clariant sold the Cassella-Offenbach plant, with the exception of two research departments, to a group of former Hoechst managers who continued the business under the name AllessaChemie GmbH. AllessaChemie - the name is an ananym from Cassella - produces specialty chemicals for industrial clients with around 1,000 employees, including pigments, dyes and a large number of intermediate products in Fechenheim. A significant part of this is produced on behalf of Clariant. On December 31, 2011, AllessaChemie GmbH returned the Offenbach plant section, which had meanwhile been completely gutted, to Clariant. Industrial life on the former site of the Cassella-Offenbach plant came to an end. The future should lie in the residential and service sectors. Plans for this have not yet been finalized.
In 2012 AllessaChemie secured the trademark rights to Cassella and has been using the traditional brand logo again since December of that year as neon advertising on the roof of the Cassella building in Frankfurt-Fechenheim. The logo has a diameter of five meters and is equipped with 208 fluorescent tubes with a total length of 178 meters.
The former AllessaChemie GmbH has been operating as Allessa GmbH since October 1, 2012. It has been part of the WeylChem group of companies since 2013.
TC Cassella
The Cassella tennis club was founded on November 24, 1949 under the direction of Wilhelm Weber. The club was intended as a company sports association for the Cassella Farbwerke. However, according to the statutes formulated in 1959, up to 20% of non-factory workers were allowed to join the association. Since the Cassella Farbwerke were located in the Frankfurt district of Fechenheim and there were no suitable tennis courts at the time, the members rebuilt two former private tennis courts in the Fechenheim forest. On May 21, 1950, after the opening ceremony, gaming operations could begin. Due to the steadily increasing number of members, the tennis facility was expanded by a further three courts in 1960, 1965 and 1970.
In 1970 the company sports association was converted into a non-profit association and finally in 1975 into a registered association. Thus the association was now also open to all non-company employees. Because of this, the construction of two more tennis courts and an air dome was initiated. The two new tennis courts were then opened in 1979. Furthermore, the clubhouse was renovated and enlarged.
In 1999, for the 50th anniversary of TC Cassella, the club logo was adapted to the new era. The Erlenmeyer flask previously in the club's yellow-blue pennant, the symbol of the former Cassella chemical company, has been exchanged for a tennis ball. Despite the conversion to an e. V. the association is in close contact with the company AllessaChemie, which is also a sponsor.
As of December 31, 2010, the association had over 300 members, including 85 young people and children.
literature
- Ernst Bäumler: The red factory. Family history of a global company. Piper, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-492-10669-2 .
- Angela von Gans, Monika Groening: The Gans family 1350-1963. Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-89735-486-1 .
- Hansjörg W. Vollmann: CASSELLA AND ITS OWNERS - GREAT FRANKFURTER PATRONS - Lecture as part of the series “Patrons, Donors, City Culture” of the Frankfurt Civic Foundation on Wednesday, January 23, 2013, 7.30 p.m., venue: Haus am Dom , Frankfurt , Bad Soden am Taunus , January 23, 2013, lecture as PDF, accessed on: January 3, 2014
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Treaties of September / October 1904
- ^ Treaties October 1904, merger to form the Triple Alliance on January 1, 1905
- ↑ Cassella logo shines again in: FAZ of December 8, 2012, page 45
Coordinates: 50 ° 7 ′ 46.1 ″ N , 8 ° 45 ′ 47 ″ E