Emil Georg Bührle

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emil G. Bührle (born August 31, 1890 in Pforzheim ; † November 28, 1956 in Zurich ) was a Swiss arms manufacturer of German origin, art collector and patron . For many years he was the managing director and majority shareholder of the machine tool factory Oerlikon . The EG Bührle Collection Foundation emerged from his art collection .

Live and act

Early life

The son of the tax officer Josef Bührle, who came from Kappel am Rhein , and Rosa Bührle, b. Benz, discovered his passion for modern French painting in 1913 when the Impressionist Hall in the Berlin National Gallery was inaugurated. After studying philosophy , literary history and art history at the Universities of Freiburg and Munich , Bührle was a cavalry officer from 1914 to 1919 and took part in the First World War. In January 1919 Buehrle resigned as commander of the headquarters guard General Roeder in the Freikorps and took active part in the suppression of the November Revolution in Berlin in part. The children Dieter (1921–2012) and Hortense (1926–2014) emerged from his marriage to the banker's daughter Charlotte Schalk in Magdeburg in 1920 .

In 1919 he joined the Magdeburg machine tool factory and rose to become an authorized signatory. The Magdeburg machine tool factory bought the machine tool factory Oerlikon in 1923 , of which Bührle became managing director the following year. In the same year the company moved to Zurich. In 1924, on Bührle's advice, the company bought the insolvent Maschinenfabrik Seebach and thus obtained the patents for a 20-millimeter cannon . From now on, besides machine tools, weapons were also produced. When the Magdeburg parent company itself ran into financial difficulties in 1927, Bührle, with the support of his father-in-law, acquired 15 percent of the shares and in 1929 he became the majority shareholder of the Oerlikon machine tool factory (later Oerlikon-Bührle Holding AG). In 1937 Bührle received Swiss citizenship .

Bührle as an industrialist

In 1929 Emil G. Bührle was able to supply the Chinese civil war government of Chiang Kaishek with 120 cannons, and almost at the same time China's opponent Japan also ordered weapons from Bührle. In the following year 45 guns were delivered to Germany under false declarations (the Versailles Treaty forbade such business with Germany). In the 1930s, global demand for weapons increased, and the Oerlikon machine tool factory received orders from Great Britain , France , North and South America , Finland , Estonia , Latvia , Czechoslovakia , Turkey and the Soviet Union , among others .

The main customer in World War II was the German Reich , which between 1941 and 1944 generated an annual order volume of 120 to 180 million Swiss francs each ; the Allies, on the other hand, could not be supplied because Switzerland was completely surrounded by opponents of the Allies at this time. The USA and Great Britain produced the Oerlikon Bührle guns in large numbers on a license basis.

After the Second World War, Oerlikon-Bührle fell into the red. With the advent of the Cold War , cannons were in demand again. In 1947 the USA removed Bührle from the black list because the Navy wanted to order anti-aircraft missiles from him.

Appreciation

Emil Georg Bührle's role as an industrialist is controversial and has been assessed differently over the past decades. On the one hand, he converted the machine tool factory Oerlikon, which was about to go bankrupt, into a flourishing company; on the other hand, arms production and exports are always under moral pressure. The Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland - World War II carried out detailed studies on this and published its assessments in 2002. Before the Second World War, Republican Spain (i.e. Franco's opponent) and independent Abyssinia (in the colonial war against fascist Italy ) were supplied as well as the Baltic countries , Czechoslovakia, Greece , China, Turkey, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain .

The delivery of armaments to the German Reich and Italy during the Second World War took place at the request of the Swiss government. These were exclusively anti-aircraft guns and accessories. The independent commission of experts classifies these arms deliveries as not decisive for the war and not prolonging the war.

Late life

In order to become more independent from the armaments business, Bührle bought three textile companies that had got into financial difficulties and began building engines and railway brakes . In 1949 Bührle founded the industrial and commercial bank IHAG and thus created his own house bank for his industrial activities. Emil G. Bührle died of heart failure on November 28, 1956 while working . His son Dieter Bührle then took over the management of the company.

Bührle as an art collector and patron

donate

In 1941, theater makers rejected a donation from Bührle in the amount of two million Swiss francs to the Zurich Schauspielhaus : the workforce, who had largely immigrated from Nazi Germany, did not want to accept “blood money”, as they put it. The following foundations can be traced back to Bührle: the Emil Bührle Foundation for Swiss Literature (1943) and the Goethe Foundation for Art and Science (1944) and the Foundation for the Extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich (1954).

Art collection

Paul Cézanne, The Boy in the Red Vest

Bührle's first acquisitions were two watercolors by Erich Heckel in 1920 , followed by a picture by Maurice de Vlaminck in 1924 . The actual development of the Bührle Collection began in 1936, when the financial conditions were in place. The collector acquired most of his collection (around 75 percent) between 1951 and 1956. Among others, Bührle was advised by gallery owner Fritz Nathan and a small group of international dealers in Paris , London and New York , including Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg also belonged to Max Kaganovitch and Frank Lloyd of the Marlborough Gallery . In addition to medieval sculptures and paintings by old masters , the collection mainly includes pictures from French Impressionism and Classical Modernism , including masterpieces by Paul Cézanne ( The Boy in the Red Vest ), Pierre-Auguste Renoir ( La petite Irène ) and Vincent van Gogh ( Sower ).

Bührle was in the tradition of collectors in Germany, Scandinavia , Great Britain and the USA, who before the First World War and in the interwar years had made French modernism the focus of their interest. This preference also coined many collections of Switzerland, such as a comparison with the incurred after 1920 collection "On Römerholz" by Oskar Reinhart in neighboring Winterthur shows.

Three fifths of the Bührle collection were brought into the EG Bührle Collection Foundation by the heirs in 1960 and have been accessible to the public ever since. The works of art that remained in the family's possession were also repeatedly shown in exhibitions. At an exhibition of works from the 1990 collection in Washington DC, protests and discussions arose in the media about Bührle's role as an arms exporter in World War II and the sometimes incomplete origin of the pictures from formerly Jewish property. The Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War examined this question as well . After the Second World War, Bührle had to return thirteen paintings from French-Jewish ownership to the former owners or purchase them a second time due to a judgment of the Federal Court in 1952.

literature

  • Daniel Heller: Between entrepreneurship, politics and survival. Emil G. Bührle and the machine tool factory Oerlikon, Bührle & Co. 1924–1945. Frauenfeld / Stuttgart / Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-7193-1277-1 .
  • Ruedi Christen: The Bührle Saga. Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-85791-033-X .
  • Alex Capus : Patriarchs: Ten Portraits . Albrecht Knaus-Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-8135-0273-2 .
  • Peter Hug: Swiss arms industry and war material trade during the time of National Socialism: corporate strategies - market development - political surveillance. Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-0340-0611-X . [1]
  • Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss , Georg Kreis : Fluchtgut - looted property. The transfer of cultural goods in and via Switzerland 1933–1945 and the question of restitution. Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-0340-0601-2 .
  • Emil Georg Bührle in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
  • Thomas Buomberger: Black Book Bührle: Looted Art for the Kunsthaus Zürich? Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2015, ISBN 3-85869-664-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Albert Köbele, Dorfsippenbuch Kappel am Rhein, 3rd reprint, Lahr 1987, family number 374, p. 113
  2. ^ The second death of Rosa Luxemburg. Retrieved February 5, 2019 .
  3. a b c d e Alex Capus, Patriarch: Ten Portraits . Albrecht Knaus-Verlag, Munich 2006.
  4. ^ Ueli Müller: Bührle, Dieter. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  5. ^ Entrepreneur Dieter Bührle is dead. ( Memento from November 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: Swiss television from November 12, 2012
  6. Information on the division of the collection on the website of the EG Bührle Collection Foundation ( memento of the original from November 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buehrle.ch

Web links

Commons : Sammlung EG Bührle  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files