Conrad Binding

Conrad Binding (born December 23, 1846 in Frankfurt am Main ; † December 17, 1933 there ) was a German brewer , entrepreneur and patron . In 1870 he founded the Binding Brewery , which was taken over by the Oetker Group in 1952 and has been part of the Radeberger Group since 2002 .

family

Conrad Binding came from a family of bakers. His great-grandfather, Johann Peter Binding (1735–1804) immigrated from Reichelsheim to the imperial city of Frankfurt and received Frankfurt citizenship due to his marriage to the baker's daughter Sibylla Catharina Becker (1746–1782) . Their son, Johann Lorenz Binding (1776–1856) ran a bakery as a master baker in Fahrgasse 17 and became wealthy. His marriage to Maria Dorothea Schäfer (1783–1834) had 14 children, including Conrad Binding's father, Daniel Binding (1810–1883), who took over the father's bakery. His older brother Eduard Binding (1810–1869) received a doctorate in law , the younger brother Theodor (1820–1892) Müller in Versbach near Würzburg, Emil (1822–1893) wine merchant, Carl (1823–1860) a privateer and Ferdinand (1813-1870) ) Operator of the Café du Grand Balcon on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris.

Daniel Binding married Maria Sibylle Bieber (1822–1854) from Homburg before the height . The marriage produced five children, including Conrad Binding. Conrad Binding married Cathinka Dorothea Scherlenzky (1854–1888) in their first marriage and Anna Margaretha Lindheimer (1867–1956) in their second marriage . The second marriage resulted in a child.

Life

education

Conrad Binding attended the model school from 1854 and switched to the municipal high school at Easter 1858 , after having made up for a year of Latin in private lessons. According to his father's wish, like his uncle Georg Christoph Binding , he should become a lawyer. However, the son had other plans and wanted to become a beer brewer. He switched to the higher civil school and finished school in April 1862 and began an apprenticeship as a brewer. To do this, he first had to learn the cooper's trade from master cooper Raumer in Sachsenhausen. From September 1, 1864, he completed his actual brewing apprenticeship with Conrad Dahlem, master brewer at the “Zur Rose” inn in Aschaffenburg . This was followed by Walz from autumn 1865, including in Nuremberg, Munich and Vienna.

In 1867 he had to muster return to Frankfurt. The previous Free City of Frankfurt was annexed by Prussia in 1866 . The Binding brothers were subject to Prussian military service . In order to avoid being called up, Daniel Binding organized that Adolf and Gustav acquired US citizenship and Conrad Swiss citizenship. Despite a successful draft, he has now been deferred from military service. Conrad continued the years of wandering and worked in France until 1869.

Founding of a brewery

After returning, he explored the Frankfurt beer market. There were 30 breweries in the city. Ernst Ehrenfried Glock's brewery, founded in 1860, ran into financial difficulties. Binding succeeded in acquiring the Glocksche Brewery on August 1, 1870 for 84,000 guilders (this corresponded to around 144,000 marks after the currency reform of 1875 ). In addition to the brewery at Garkücheplatz 7 with the “Stadt Schwalbach” inn, he acquired a rock cellar in Darmstädter Landstrasse 163 with inventory for 20,000 guilders. He financed the start-up of the company with 11,000 guilders of the maternal inheritance and borrowing.

The business benefited directly from the interruption in delivery of Munich beer as a result of the Franco-German War . The subsequent founding years ensured further growth. In the Frankfurt beer riot in 1873, Binding got away with a small loss of 400 guilders and benefited indirectly from the far greater losses of some competitors. In 1874 he received a loan of 42,000 marks from his father, which he used to expand his business.

expansion

Glock had sold an annual production of 1,600 hectoliters . In the first business year 1870/71, Binding increased this to 3½ times, in 1879/80 he sold 45,319 hectoliters. In 1874 he had bought the neighboring house from a Mr. Gosdorffer with the credit of his father and used a 10 HP steam engine from Conrad Ranke. In 1876 and 1878 he acquired the neighboring building on Garkücheplatz.

Further expansion in the old town was difficult. Binding therefore decided to relocate production to Sachsenhausen Berg . For this purpose, on November 5, 1878, the Engelsche property adjacent to the company's own rock cellar was acquired. The previous owner had a pit dug there in which he burned lime. This pit was converted into an ice cellar and the production building expanded.

In 1880 the Binding brewery was the market leader in Frankfurt. Binding was now debt free and was able to expand further.

Private life

With his business success, Binding had acquired the financial independence that he used for extensive private trips. So he visited the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878 , Switzerland and took a cure with his wife in Franzensbad . On December 15, 1884, he moved into his newly built villa at Darmstädter Landstrasse 186. He lived alone with his wife in the representative house, which was destroyed in World War II, as the marriage had remained childless. After the death of his first wife, he made a trip to the North Cape in 1890 . Binding had been a member of the Frankfurter Masonic Lodge Zur Einigkeit since 1881 .

Corporation

The brewery market had changed significantly. The small breweries largely disappeared, and the brewery joint-stock companies founded from the early days of the company achieved ever larger market shares. Binding also decided to convert the sole proprietorship into a stock corporation . This was founded on May 16, 1885. Binding brought in his company shares, which were worth 3.2 million marks, and became chairman of the board. In 1895 he moved to the head of the supervisory board. During his time as CEO, beer output had doubled from 86,983 to 167,207 hectoliters.

Binding gradually withdrew from the company and also reduced its equity stake. In 1899 he founded a brewery in Essen . The brewery in Essen expanded until the First World War , but then suffered from the war economy and was sold in 1918/19.

Second marriage

On January 21, 1891, he married Anna Lindheimer (1867–1956), the daughter of the architect, painter and building historian Otto Lindheimer . Their son Theodor was born on March 9, 1892. The family continued to travel a lot. Binding particularly valued hiking holidays in Bavaria. He also enjoyed hunting and was a hunting tenant in Sprendlingen from 1885 and in Hohemark from 1887 . In 1894, Binding acquired a representative villa on Fellnerstrasse and had it converted by Franz von Hoven . The attached palm house was a particular eye-catcher. In 1919, Binding gave up the house that had been destroyed in World War II and moved to Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse 17 in Sachsenhausen.

Local politics

On June 15, 1909, the non-party, but close to the FVP Binding was elected as an unpaid city councilor in the magistrate of Frankfurt. He was a member of the magistrate until April 1, 1917 and resigned at his own request. Binding supported numerous artists, including the painter and sculptor Fritz Boehle , and donated a beer garden and a hippopotamus to the zoological garden , of which he was part of the shareholders . On May 8, 1913, he was honored with the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle, 4th class.

Binding brewery merges

Grave of Conrad Binding

The Binding brewery was hit hard by inflation . With the participation of the Bank für Brau-Industrie , it merged in 1921 with the Hofbierbrauerei Schöfferhof from Mainz and the Frankfurt Bürgerbrauerei to form Schöfferhof-Binding-Bürgerbräu AG. Conrad Binding withdrew from the company and lived as a privateer until his death. He is buried in the family grave in the main cemetery. The grave (Gewann F 816-817) is a listed building .

The Bindingstrasse in Sachsenhausen is named after him. In 1908 the sculptor Friedrich Christoph Hausmann created a series of 23 reliefs for the south building of the New Town Hall in Bethmannstrasse. One of them, the figure of the brewer, is a portrait by Conrad Binding.

literature

• Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . First volume. A – L (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 1 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-7829-0444-3 , p. 70 .
• Elmar Wolfart: Conrad Binding 1846–1933. A Frankfurt entrepreneur from the early days. 2001, ISBN 978-3-7829-0523-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lindheimer, Otto in the Frankfurter Personenlexikon