Eduard Pfeiffer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eduard Pfeiffer

Eduard Gotthilf Pfeiffer , from 1900 also von Pfeiffer , (born November 24, 1835 in Stuttgart ; † May 13, 1921 there ) was a German banker , cooperative and social reformer .

Live and act

Eduard Pfeiffer was born on November 24th, 1835, as the thirteenth child of Hofbank director Marx Pfeiffer (1786–1842). Marx Pfeiffer was one of the first Jewish citizens to receive the right to live in Stuttgart. His mother was Pauline, b. Wittersheim (1801-1867), who married Marx Pfeiffer in third marriage. His older brother was Ernst Ezechiel Pfeiffer , who had made a name for himself with several charitable foundations in Cannstatt . The already wealthy Eduard Pfeiffer made a great career as a banking and business specialist. In 1869 he was one of the founders of the Württembergische Vereinsbank , whose steep rise in the years of the Empire was largely due to him. As a member of the supervisory board of leading companies in the country, Eduard Pfeiffer exercised a significant influence on economic life. Eduard Pfeiffer was one of the richest citizens in the Kingdom of Württemberg .

After high school he attended the Polytechnic School in Stuttgart , where he was registered between 1850 and 1852, first as an engineer, then as a businessman. In 1857 he graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris with a degree in chemical engineering and devoted himself thereafter to 1862 at the Universities of Leipzig, Heidelberg and Berlin of economics and finance . He made numerous trips within Germany, to France, Italy and England, where he visited the London World Exhibition in 1862 . On these trips he began to familiarize himself with aspects of the social and economic situation in Europe; in England in 1862 he got to know the cooperative movement.

On September 12, 1872, Pfeiffer married Julie Benary, b. Kann (born September 9, 1843 in Frankfurt am Main ; † February 5, 1926 Stuttgart), the young widow of the banker Louis Ferdinand Victor Benary (* 1839 in Berlin; † 1869 in Paris).

Grave of Eduard Pfeiffer in the Prague cemetery

In 1883 King Karl of Württemberg awarded him the title of court counselor , which was associated with the staff nobility. Pfeiffer never attached importance to the address of . Pfeiffer died on May 13, 1921 and found his final resting place in the Prague cemetery in Stuttgart . The Pfeiffer couple remained childless. The entire joint assets flowed into the Eduard Pfeiffer Foundation established in 1917, which is still in existence today.

Pfeiffer's wealth was never an end in itself, but an obligation to serve the community. For this reason, the city of Stuttgart granted him honorary citizenship in 1909 and thanked him for the financial support of the Stuttgart old town renovation from 1906 to 1909.

Pfeiffer was also politically active. On August 7, 1866, he founded the national liberal German party with friends and acquaintances, including Gustav Siegle , Kilian Steiner and Julius Hölder , with the aim of a Prussian-led nation state. Between 1868 and 1876 he was the first Jewish citizen to have a seat in the second chamber of the Württemberg state parliament , which was forbidden by law until then.

In 1865, at his suggestion, the office for proof of work was created in Stuttgart - the first non-commercial employment agency in Germany and thus a forerunner of the employment office. In 1874 he initiated a home for factory workers and in 1889 the workers' home on Heusteigstrasse in Stuttgart. 1910/11 he donated to build a large Single home to resolve the grievances of lodgers and sleeping goers. Above all, however, four large residential colonies (see below ) and the redevelopment of downtown Stuttgart can be traced back to his initiative.

In addition to numerous measures in residential construction, one of Pfeiffer's most important goals was to improve the health system. The situation around 1870/1900 - not only in Stuttgart - was characterized by infant mortality, inadequate hospital hygiene, backyard situations and food hygiene in need of improvement. In 1910/12 he financed an urgently needed infant hospital . Pfeiffer was also one of the founders of three public bathing establishments in Stuttgart and two public libraries. He organized the sale of healthy milk to infants and children and opened a day nursery and a children's playground.

Eduard Pfeiffer and the consumer cooperative movement

Eduard Pfeiffer is seen as the first great herald and pioneer of an independent consumer cooperative movement. In 1863 his first book about cooperatives was published . Pfeiffer considered social reforms to be urgently necessary and saw the ideal way to go in a targeted and controlled self-help program. Throughout his life, the aim of his efforts was to bind the workers to the bourgeois social system through constant improvements in their living conditions and to keep them away from socialist and communist ideas. Pfeiffer considered the solution of the social question to be conceivable only through cooperation between the possessing and working classes. The publication Die Consumvereine, their essence and work , published in 1865, had a similar orientation . In addition to practical instructions on how to set up and set them up. Further publications on economic topics followed. He soon put the idea of ​​the consumer association into practice and in November 1863 he founded the Stuttgart Consum and Savings Association , which became the model for most consumer cooperatives in Germany.

At the invitation of Pfeiffer, a meeting took place in Stuttgart in 1867, which led to the establishment of the Association of German Consumers . The task should be the joint purchase of goods for the consumer associations for individual articles throughout Germany, for most goods zones of the collective purchase should be created. When the association was founded , the Consumverein was created as an association body , which Pfeiffer published.

The association for the well-being of the working classes

In 1866, at the suggestion of Eduard Pfeiffer, the Association for the Welfare of the Working Class was founded, which he chaired from 1876 to 1921. To promote the interests and raise the moral and economic conditions of the working classes (statutes) also included the procurement of living space. Although the association had over 100 influential and financially strong members, Pfeiffer, who financed most of the association's work through personal foundations, donations and cheap loans, the contacts to companies and merchants, banks, was almost entirely behind the association's tasks and goals The royal family and the city and brought his ideas, theories, experiences and practical experience.

The association was and remained Pfeiffer's most important enterprise. Through him he poured all of his ideas and experiences into a form that has remained unique in Stuttgart and beyond to this day. Most of the projects are still a reality in Stuttgart today. Pfeiffer and the association undertook the greatest socio-political, social, financial and organizational efforts in the area of ​​housing welfare in a rapidly growing city.

Eduard Pfeiffer and his wife Julie in front of the Ostheim colony in 1895

Eduard Pfeiffer and housing construction

After an extensive survey of the living conditions in Stuttgart in 1887, which unearthed terrifying results with regard to the health and social conditions in many old town apartments , the association, led by Pfeiffer, decided in November 1890 to launch the cheap housing for small people settlement project . Even the title describes the target groups were not wanted alone among the workers, but among the less well off of any kind, d. H. also in craft. Four large settlements gradually emerged in different parts of Stuttgart under the building authority of the association:

  • 1891–1901 Ostheim settlement : 1,300 apartments
  • 1901–1904 Südheim housing estate : 140 apartments
  • 1902–1904 Westheim settlement : 100 apartments
  • 1911–1913 Ostenau settlement : 260 apartments

With these projects Pfeiffer was not able to solve all, but - together with other settlements of other sponsors - most of the problems in the Stuttgart housing sector. The most important components of the new settlements and houses included sufficient space, allotment gardens, sufficiently large (but also costly) building clearances to ensure light and air circulation, practical floor plans and the waiver of trapped rooms, individual facades in the style of the bourgeois houses of the time, in some cases with bay windows, ornamental gables and half-timbered applications. In addition, the residents were given the opportunity to buy the houses in installments, which eventually made them members of the owning class .

With the first Ostheim housing estate, Pfeiffer began working with the Stuttgart architect Karl Hengerer , who, with the exception of Westheim, was essentially responsible for all housing projects as a planner and construction office. The infant home and the single home (both 1910/12) as well as the renovation of the old town (1906-09) were planned and carried out by him.

Old town redevelopment Stuttgart

The largest joint venture besides Ostheim was the extensive renovation of Stuttgart's old town between 1906 and 1909, after which Pfeiffer was given honorary citizenship. However, it was not a renovation in the current sense, but meant the demolition and complete re-planning of around 10% of Stuttgart's old town. The new buildings, which replace the dilapidated old fabric, were designed in the style of urban residential and commercial buildings from the late Renaissance, similar to the inner cities of Innsbruck, Salzburg or South Tyrolean villages. At the same time, the streets were made wider and a central square was enlarged. Theodor Fischer , too, had fundamentally advocated such a romanticizing, but in contrast to the historicist urban planning, at least homeland and landscape-related design . On the edge of the redevelopment area, the Graf-Eberhard-Bau was one of the largest and most modern commercial buildings of that time in Stuttgart. In addition to Karl Hengerer , u. a. and Paul Bonatz and Ludwig Eisenlohr individual buildings in the redevelopment.

Honors, traces

  • In 1894 Pfeiffer was appointed "Privy Councilor".
  • In 1895, the Württembergische is his Order of Olga awarded
  • In 1900 he was awarded the Cross of Honor of the Order of the Württemberg royal family ; which is associated with the personal title of nobility. However, he only rarely makes use of this right.
  • In May 1909 Eduard Pfeiffer was made an honorary citizen of the city of Stuttgart.
  • In 1910, Eduard-Pfeiffer-Straße, a newly laid out high street on Stuttgart's Kriegsberg, was named after Pfeiffer.
  • After the name Pfeiffers disappeared from the public during the years of National Socialism, the Eduard-Pfeiffer-Platz (formerly Teckplatz) in the Ostheim colony, the Eduard-Pfeiffer-Haus of the Workers' Education Association at Heusteigstraße 45 and the Stuttgart-Ost city ​​library are also used today as the Eduard Pfeiffer Library.
  • In 1913, Pfeiffer became an honorary citizen of Pinzolo in the Dolomites because he published a detailed travel guide about Madonna di Campiglio - his favorite holiday destination.

Writings by Eduard Pfeiffer

  • Pfeiffer, Eduard: About co-operatives - What is the working class in today's society? And what can he become? Leipzig: Wigand 1863. Digitized
  • Pfeiffer, Eduard: The consumer associations, their essence and work. In addition to practical instructions on how to set up and set them up . Stuttgart: Kröner 2nd edition 1865.
  • Pfeiffer, Eduard: Your own home and cheap apartments . A contribution to the solution of the housing question with special reference to the creation of the Ostheim-Stuttgart colony. Stuttgart: Wittwer 1896.

literature

  • Bernd Langner, Michael Kienzle , Herbert Medek: Staged happiness - The renewed Stuttgart old town 1909. Karl Krämer, Stuttgart 2009.
  • Anne Hermann:  Pfeiffer, Eduard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 316 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Erwin Hasselmann: In the current of time, 60 years of the Central Association of German Consumer Cooperatives , in: Contributions to the theory and history of the cooperative system, ed. from the Central Association of German Consumer Cooperatives e. V., Hamburg, Verlaggesellschaft deutscher Konsumgenossenschaften mbH, Hamburg, 1963.
  • Heinrich Kaufmann : The large purchasing company of German consumer associations mb H. GEG. For the 25th anniversary 1894–1919 . Hamburg 1919.
  • Walther G. Oschilewski : Will and Action. The way of the German consumer cooperative movement . Hamburg 1953.
  • Wolfgang Schmierer: Eduard Pfeiffer - writer, politician, chairman of the Association for the Welfare of the Working Class , Privy Councilor and honorary citizen of Stuttgart. 1835-1921. In: Life pictures from Swabia and Franconia, vol. 15. Stuttgart 1983, pp. 316–355.
  • Bernd Langner: Non-profit housing construction around 1900. Karl Hengerer's buildings for the Stuttgart Association for the Welfare of the Working Class. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1994.
  • Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 656 .

Notes / individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Hasselmann 1963, p. 6.
  2. ↑ About the Graf-Eberhard-Bau
  3. ↑ Court and State Manual of the Kingdom of Württemberg 1901, p. 162.
  4. ↑ List of Stuttgart's cultural monuments (as of August 25, 2008), p. 10 (PDF file; 490 kB)
  5. ↑ cf. Schmierer 1983, p. 347f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Pfeiffer, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfeiffer, Eduard von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German banker , cooperative and social reformer
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1835
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1921
Place of death Stuttgart