Conrad Machens

Conrad Machens

Conrad Machens (born May 3, 1856 in Ahrbergen near Hildesheim , † April 27, 1930 in Hildesheim), called Fiji-Machens , was a German South Sea merchant.

Live and act

Conrad Machens was born on May 3, 1856, the seventh child of Kötner Johann Conrad Machens (1806-1877) and his second wife Therese Magdalene Machens (1818-1906) in the village of Ahrbergen near Hildesheim (Prussian since 1866). At the age of almost 17 he went to the provincial capital Hanover and started a commercial apprenticeship in a colonial, material, delicatess and fat goods store . After completing his apprenticeship, he continued to work as a clerk for a while and, in the spring of 1876, swapped this job for a job in a meat wholesaler in Hamburg. A good two years later, with a good job reference, he left the Hanseatic city and went to London. When he could not find a job there, he traveled on to Gravesend on the Thames estuary, where he boarded the SS Hankow of the Colonial Line of Australian Packets on September 17, 1878 , to emigrate to Australia.

In Sydney , three weeks after his arrival, he got a temporary job in the import and export business of Frederick Caesar Hedemann from Cuxhaven, who negotiated goods between Europe and the South Seas . After he didn't have enough work for him, Machens had to look around for new opportunities. In the following years he worked, among other things, as a salesman in a men's wardrobe shop of German origin in Maitland, as a decorator at the World Exhibition in Sydney in 1879 and as a traveling dealer and at times also as a gold digger in New South Wales. In 1881, FC Hedemann offered him a new job in the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific, a British crown colony since 1874. There, in the then capital Levuka on the small island of Ovalau, Hedemann had one in 1871 with the support of the Hamburg trading company Wachsmuth & Krogmann (founded in 1797), which competed with the famous Hamburg trading company Joh.Cesar Godeffroy & Son Commercial establishment established. It traded under the name Hedemann & Co. and was headed by Hedemann's younger brother Ferdinand Hugo.

In Fiji, Machens was successful as a successful businessman within just a few years and, in his early days, was also active as an attentive documenter of Fijian conditions. In 1883 he became a partner and in 1888 temporarily sole owner of the growing company. In the same year he returned to Germany for the first time for business reasons, where he married the 16-year-old Bertha Sebald, daughter of the Hildesheim master hairdresser and inventor of a well-known tincture of hair, Johann Sebald, shortly before his return to Fiji on January 14, 1889. She gave birth to two daughters in Fiji, Florence and Bertha. Shortly after the birth of the second daughter, his young wife died at the age of only 20 on August 27, 1892 as a result of childbed fever . (Her grave is in the Levuka cemetery.)

Machens then initially entrusted the supervision of the two small children to his longtime houseboy Charley, a Solomon islander. In the end, however, he came to the conviction that in the long run it would be better to leave the children in the care of his mother and older sister in Germany in order to enable them to be raised in Germany at the same time. His absence from Fiji, initially estimated at one year, made some new business arrangements necessary in advance. Before he set out on the trip to his old homeland in April 1894 accompanied by Charley, he took his long-time trusted colleague Frederick Vollmer (1852-1918, later Mayor of Levuka), a British naturalized hamburger, as a partner in the company. At the same time he appointed William Kramp (1858–1943), who was also naturalized in Britain, as manager in cooperation with his new partner.

In 1895 he temporarily returned to Fiji, but decided, also for health reasons, to stay permanently in Germany in 1897 in order to buy European goods (especially fabrics from Manchester , the European center of the textile industry) for export to the South Seas to do. He left the management largely to his two German (British naturalized) partners Frederick Vollmer (1852-1918, later Mayor of Levuka) and William Kramp (1858-1943). In 1897 he introduced the private picture postcard to the Fiji Islands from Germany.

In the following years he made numerous extensive trips outside of Europe, including a. to the United States , Canada , British India , the Japanese and Chinese Empires, and German Samoa . He documented his experiences in numerous detailed, previously unpublished travel reports. During the outbreak of the First World War , Machens was on his fifth sea voyage to Fiji, where he wanted to negotiate with his partners about the future of his company Hedemann & Co. after increasing differences . However, due to the entry into the war, the German steamer could not continue its voyage and had to call at the port of Tjilatjap in Java . From there, Machens only reached the destination of his journey via detours, where the British initially forbade him to leave the country after the company had been reorganized into a British limited company. Finally, through the mediation of the governor Sir Ernest Bickham Sweet-Escott (1857–1941), who was well-disposed towards him, at the end of May 1915 he still received approval to embark on a small American schooner for San Francisco . In Fiji he had previously exchanged as much money as he could for gold. On August 26, 1915, he boarded a Danish steamer in New York and finally reached Hildesheim again on September 15, after an exciting sea voyage. There he drew with the saved gold in a brief touch of patriotic enthusiasm for 45,000 Mark war bonds.

While Machens was able to return happily to his homeland, his two companions were deported as enemy aliens by the British to Australia in early November 1917 and interned there until the end of the war. (Vollmer died shortly after his early release on March 13, 1918.) Hedemann & Co. , which had been reorganized into a limited company in 1915 and whose share capital was increased to £ 30,000, was liquidated like the other German competing companies. After the end of the war, Machens struggled for years for compensation on the basis of Article 297 of the Versailles Peace Treaty , but at the end of 1924 he lost his right to compensation from Germany due to the subsequent revocation of his Prussian citizenship . Thereupon he endeavored to have the proceeds from the liquidation of his private property returned to the London offices. At the beginning of 1925, after tireless struggle, his request was finally given in. Machens spent the last years of his life with his family in Hildesheim. He died there on April 27, 1930. The family burial site with his grave is located in the Godehardi cemetery there.

meaning

Machens left behind an extensive, privately owned private and business correspondence, several handwritten travelogues and geographical records, and hundreds of photographs depicting the archipelagos of Fiji, Samoa , Tonga and the Norfolk Island . These show that in addition to colonialism in the traditional sense, there was another form of German engagement in the South Seas. In addition, they represent a unique cultural, social and economic historical source for a period of increasing globalization during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

swell

Handwritten letters and notes, private archive of the Müller-Machens family.

literature

• The Cyclopedia of Fiji (Illustrated). A Complete Historical and Commercial Review of Fiji (Sydney 1907; Reprint Fiji Museum, Suva, Fiji, 1984) p. 321.
• Stephan A. Lütgert: "Fiji Machens" - a Hildesheim merchant in the South Pacific. Back then. The magazine for history and culture, issue 9/2008, pp. 26–30.
• Ders .: Conrad Machens - a merchant's life between Germany and Fiji. Husum Verlag, Husum 2009, ISBN 978-3-89876-482-7 .
• That. (Ed.): Conrad Machens. Letters from Fiji from 1883. Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-3811-3 .

Web links

• Article from the history magazine DAMALS, issue 9/2008