Dr. Trenkler & Co.

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Advertisement from 1907 with the company logo

The Graphic Art Institute Dr. Trenkler & Co. was a large graphic company in Leipzig . Its main line of production was postcards . Private and commercial photos, catalogs and company publications, advertising stamps and printing plates of all kinds were also part of the scope of production. The main production phase extended from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1920s.

history

The beginnings

In 1894, Dr. Bruno Trenkler started a small print shop in Leipzig. Trenkler was born in 1863 and obtained his doctorate in 1887 after studying chemistry at the University of Würzburg . Initially, rooms in Dorotheenstrasse 5/7, today's Cäcilienstrasse ( map ), were rented. At this point in the Leipzig district of Neureudnitz (extension of Reudnitz ) Trenkler initially employed five workers.

Trenkler recognized the potential of the increasingly popular postcard and devoted himself with all his energy to improving the reproduction processes that could be used for this purpose. Gustav Jahresig from Leipzig took over the commercial part. The ensuing success meant that additional rooms had to be rented, which soon extended to five different streets.

In 1901 a plot of land at Eichstädtstrasse 11 in the Stötteritz district was acquired and a factory building, which was completed in the first parts by 1904, was built. In 1903 Max Hoffmann from Dresden became a partner.

The heyday

In Eichstädtstrasse ( map ), all work from the draft, the recording, the clichés and the printing to the binding work could be coordinated and implemented in one house. And it continued to be built and expanded. In 1909 Trenkler employed over 700 workers. There were around 130 printing presses in the machine park, and two to three million postcards were dispatched every week. There were company representatives in Dresden , Hamburg , Brussels and The Hague, among others . Travelers kept in touch with customers . The company had an inventory of 25,000 different designs and types of postcards, with cityscapes by far the majority. In the summer, eight to ten landscape photographers traveled to the most beautiful spots in Germany and abroad to obtain the photos. But there were also print jobs with predetermined motifs.

  • The Graphic Art Institute Dr. Trenkler & Co. on Eichstädtstrasse in Leipzig

  • View of the courtyard in 1909

  • Drawn high perspective 1923

  • The lithography

  • The coloring room

  • Street front Eichstädtstrasse

For 1909 the following departments of the company are given with their key points:

  • Photographic studio: For catalogs, sample books and the like, pictures of up to 1 by 1 meter can be made with artificial light.
  • Negative retouching : Darkroom, negative or positive retouching on plates or copies.
  • Drawing studio: This is where decorative frames for postcards are drawn, but also, as a specialty of the house, highly perspective representations in formats up to 7 meters wide
  • Coloring room: 70 to 100 workers use stencils to colorize up to 20,000 postcards per day by hand.
  • Proofing : New motifs are created on ten lithographic presses to check their effect.
  • Stone printing: On 28 high-speed and manual presses, 30,000 large-format sheets, predominantly of postcards, can be produced daily using the photo-chromolithographic process.
  • Collotype printing : Fourteen large presses produce up to 12,000 sheets of postcards a day using single-color or duplex printing .
  • Lithographic studio: More than 60 lithographers are busy doing preparatory work for color printing in this room.
  • Atelier for autotypes : This is where clichés are made for own and third-party use in dimensions of up to one meter.
  • Three-color etching: Chromolithographers carry out the etchings for the color printing of postcards.
  • Book printing: 130,000 printed sheets of the largest format can be produced on 21 high-speed presses per day. Three-color printing is possible.
  • Bookbinding: In addition to the classic binding of book-like works, the 78 individual cards are automatically cut and stacked from one large sheet each.
  • Expedition: The required card consignments are compiled from a huge card store, into which the cards are sent after an individual quality check.
  • Paper storage and packing: The paper supply in the cellar, worth around 200,000 marks, lasts for eight to ten days and requires constant replenishment. The shipment is packed in wooden boxes, which are lined with sheet metal for overseas.
  • Main office: 50 commercial officials take care of bookkeeping and cash management. Around 500 letters are received every day.
  • Publishing office: The office is responsible for the global postcard business including acquisition of photos, management of motifs and sales of cards. He is also responsible for the publication of industrial advertising publications. For the publication of new products of art and the applied arts there is a special company “Moderner Kunstverlag Dr. Trenkler & Co ”.
  • Trenkler's postcards

  • The Heumarkt in Cologne (photo watercolor)

  • View from the Thomaskirche Leipzig (foldable postcard, collotype)

  • Potpourri menu
    with 75 Leipzig motifs

  • The Leipzig Naschmarkt (lithograph)

  • The main market in Nuremberg (chromolithography)

The high quality of its products brought the company numerous honors and recognitions: Gold medal at the International Photographic Exhibition Dresden 1909, two honorary diplomas at the World Exhibition Brussels 1910 , the Royal Saxon State Prize at the International Hygiene Exhibition Dresden 1911 and the Saxon State Certificate of Honor at the exhibition for all photography in Leipzig in 1922. At the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Leipzig in 1913 , the Trenkler Art Institute was granted sole photo rights for the entire exhibition. The company had a monopoly on postcards with Greek views from the Greek government .

The decline

Bruno Trenkler died on September 10, 1926 and was buried in the south cemetery in Leipzig . In the following years the company must have been divided, because in 1931 the cooperative and commercial register next to Dr. Trenkler & Co AG in Eichstädtstrasse (director Wilhelm August Döhrmann) also ran a Trenkler-postcard GmbH in Dessauer Strasse 13 ( map ) (managing director Gustav Fehre). And in an advertisement by Dr. Trenkler & Co AG from 1927 postcards are not mentioned.

Furthermore, the appearance of the company Dr. Dietz & Ritter 1931 at Eichstädtstraße 11 pointed out that the huge production halls were no longer used by Dr. Trenkler & Co AG could be used to capacity. The Dr. Dietz & Ritter GmbH was a forerunner of the Körting Radio Werke , which became VEB Funkwerk Leipzig in 1948, which occupied the entire production area that remained after the war.

A company named also with the managing director Gustav Fehre Dr. Trenkler-Verlag GmbH existed in 1941 at Wittenberger Straße 15 ( map ), a building that belonged to Emil Pinkau & Co AG . This address is also given for the company in the address book from 1949. In 1972 a company Pinkau & Trenkler was taken over by VEB Interdruck Graphischer Großbetrieb Leipzig.

Further research needs

Just like the field postcards sold by Belgian publishers at the time of the First World War or those from German publishers such as “[...] Dr. Trenkler & Co., C. Hünich / Berlin-Charlottenburg, Friedrich Stünkel / Elberfeld, [...] field bookstore of the 4th Army " and others such as the Hanoverian art publisher Heinrich Carle is" [...] a detailed study of such publishers " and their "[...] scientific significance" with regard to the history of the First World War, despite the text Between Home and Front published by C. Brocks in 2009 "[...] not yet explored in detail ."

literature

  • Heinz-Jürgen Böhme : Dr. Trenkler & Co. in: Heinz-Jürgen Böhme, Günther Clemens: Bilderbogen. Leipzig postcard series from 1895 to 1945 . Verlag PRO LEIPZIG, Leipzig 2010 ISBN 978-3-936508-39-0 , pp. 50-57 (according to the so-called Trenkler number of the magazine Deutsche Industrie Deutsche Kultur, Volume VII, No. 8 (1909))
  • Diana Schulze: Dr. Trenkler & Co. , in: The photographer in gardens and parks: Aspects of historical photographs of public gardens in Germany from 1880 to 1930 , also a dissertation at the University of Göttingen in 2004, in the series Epistemata: Würzburg scientific writings , Volume 493, Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, ISBN 3-8260-2699-3 , pp. 87, 283
  • Dr. Trenkler & Co. Lower Letter Coding in the 1920s. In: The Postcard Album issue no.27, from around November 2013, p. 32 f

Web links

Commons : Trenkler & Co.  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heinz Peter Brogiato: Leipzig around 1900 , vol. 1: The inner city in colored postcards from the archive of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig eV Leipzig 2009: Lehmstedt, ISBN 978-3-937146-69-0 , p. 6
  2. ↑ The buildings are realistic, the surroundings are presented in an idealized way - a tram has never ridden on Eichstädtstrasse.
  3. ↑ Heinz-Jürgen Böhme: Dr. Trenkler & Co.
  4. ^ A. Waldow: Archive for Book Trade , Volume 38, Part 1, p. 56; online as a snippet view from Google books
  5. ↑ Inventory 20745: Dr. Dietz & Ritter GmbH, Leipzig. State Archives Leipzig , accessed on October 16, 2019 .
  6. ^ Address book Leipzig 1949
  7. ↑ Inventory 21100: Interdruck Graphischer Großbetrieb Leipzig. State Archives Leipzig, accessed on October 16, 2019 .
  8. ^ Rik Opsommer : Field postcards from West Flanders. Historical research possibilities and limitations of an everyday medium in the First World War. In: Conference "Writing in War - Writing from War": Field Post in the Age of World Wars. Museum for Communication Berlin , 13. – 15. September 2010 on the site feldpost-archiv.de