Erich Wallroth

Erich Wallroth

Wilhelm Theodor Erich Wallroth (born January 28, 1876 in Berlin , † January 6, 1929 in Oslo ) was a German lawyer and diplomat.

Life

origin

Erich Wallroth grew up in an upper-class, liberal Berlin family; he was a son of the Berlin bookseller and publisher (Karl) Erich Wallroth and his wife Minna, born. Kampffmeyer. Paul Kampffmeyer and Bernhard Kampffmeyer were his uncles.

career

After Wallroth passed his Abitur exam at the Fürstenwalde grammar school in 1896 , he studied law and political science in Munich and Berlin . After a brief activity in the Prussian judicial service, he turned to studying economics . In 1902, Dr. Wall Roth Research Assistant at its headquarters in Berlin -do Potsdam Chamber of Commerce .

From 1903 Wallroth worked in the Lübeck Chamber of Commerce . The Chamber's syndic at the time, Georg Kalkbrenner , became his mentor there and made him familiar with the Baltic Sea economy in general and the Lübeck economy in particular, and aroused his interest in those areas of the national economy.

When Kalkbrenner was elected to the Senate in 1907 and thus resigned from the Chamber's secretariat, the Chamber elected Wallroth as his successor because of his work in the asset management of the Lübeck merchant class , the commercial training school, as well as the maneuvering , canal towing and port goods administration. The trade , transport and industrial policy of the Baltic Sea economy took the place of administrative activity. The comprehensive memoranda of the 1905 supplementary agreement to the “German-Russian trade agreement”, which was honored by the Foreign Office with regard to trade policy at the time, originated from him , whereby he was able to fall back on the study trip he undertook in 1902 with the Berlin Political Science Association to Russia about the conditions there . In recognition of his memorandum on the “German-Swedish trade agreement”, the Senate awarded him the title of “ Syndikus ” in 1911 . The memorandum on the “German-Finnish trade agreement” and Baltic economic issues should also be mentioned.

Wallroth's larger scientific works should also be mentioned, such as "The position of Lübeck in the competition between the German seaside places", "The basics of Baltic trade and its future", "Lübeck's trade with Finland" appeared in Helsingfors "Mercator", the development of traffic on the Elbe-Trave Canal in the first ten years of its existence, for the construction of the Baltic Sea - Black Sea ( Riga - Cherson ) waterways , as well as the memorandum “Lübeck im neue Reiche”, written on behalf of the Senate. In addition, Wallroth wrote a large number of articles for national science journals.

He was involved in founding the “German-Finnish Association for the Support of the Political, Cultural and Economic Independence of Finland” and in running the business. For this he was awarded the Finnish Freedom Cross. At times he was also active as an economic advisor to the Riga Stock Exchange Committee.

In terms of transport policy, Wallroth particularly advocated the construction of the railway from Lübeck to Segeberg and also ran the three-way business of the Lübeck-Segeberger railway . He supported the realization of the rail project from Lübeck via Fehmarn to Copenhagen . Various comprehensive memoranda are available from him for this purpose. He was also a member of the supervisory board of the "Lübecker Transportversicherungs-Gesellschaft" and the board of directors of the "Tourist Association".

In his office as well as managing director of the industrial association, whose illustrated advertising pamphlet he received in the form of the "Lübeck Industrial Guide", he found many opportunities to work in industrial and shipping policy. As managing director of the “Lübecker Kanal-Verein” as well as a member of the administrative and supervisory board of Hochseefischerei Aktiengesellschaft “Trave” and Lübecker Fischhandelsgesellschaft u. a. m. he took care of Lübeck's interests.

But Wallroth also devoted himself to charitable and municipal political tasks. He was a member of the supervisory board of the "Deutsche Lebensversicherungsgesellschaft", managing director of the "Kaufmann-Witwenkasse", head of the trade museum, board member of the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities , administrative and supervisory board member of the Possehl Foundation ... After the war he became a member of the citizenship and As a member of the joint constitutional commission of the Senate and the citizenship, as well as the sub-commission, had a special share in the new Lübeck state constitution of 23 May 1920 .

In July 1920 Wallroth was appointed to the Reichsdienst, where he worked as a real legation councilor and lecturer in the Foreign Office . Edmund Schüler appointed a group, including Wallroth, of prominent outsiders from the worlds of business, trade and politics to join the diplomatic service of the Weimar Republic as head of the Office's personnel department . Students from the group of Hanseatics experienced in international trade were given preference. Soon after his appointment was sent Wall Roth as charge d'affaires to Helsinki. In autumn 1921 he was sent as the first German envoy to Riga, the newly founded Republic of Latvia . In the spring of 1923, Adolf Köster replaced him here . He succeeded Adolf Georg von Maltzan's head of the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office . As the representative of Stresemann's policy , however, from 1927 onwards he judged the possibilities of an evolutionary development in the USSR with increasing skepticism and pleaded for Germany to be more closely linked to the West.

In March 1928 Wallroth was appointed envoy in Oslo , his successor as head of the Eastern Department was appointed Herbert von Dirksen . He died there less than a year later.

family

Wallroth had been married to Marie Henriette, née Unterilp, (* 1873 in Charlottenburg ), a teacher, activist and daughter of an agricultural machinery dealer, since January 1905 . The marriage had three children.

In 1907, his wife translated Ebenezer Howard's classics of the garden city movement as garden cities in sight and from 1914 was chairwoman of the Association of German Women's Clothing and Culture (today the German Association of Women and Culture ).

His daughter, Hilde Maria, born on June 30, 1906, received her doctorate (Dr. phil.) In 1942 with her dissertation Germany and Austria-Hungary: Contributions to German-Austria-Hungarian alliance policy in the years before the World War at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. She later worked in the Federal Republic of Germany's Foreign Service , including at the embassy in Washington, DC .

Works

• The prohibition of offsetting against wage claims: a treatise on the law of the civil code. Berlin: Chasté (1903), also Diss. Iur. Rostock
• Industry leader. Lübeck: Rathgens 1910
• Lübeck and the Elbe-Trave Canal: a look back at the first decade of the canal's existence, along with an appreciation of its economic importance for Lübeck. Lübeck: Rahtgens 1910
• The economic situation of Lübeck with special consideration of Lübeck's competitive position in the Baltic Sea traffic. Lübeck: Borchers 1911
• The Baltic provinces and Lithuania. Lübeck: Rathgens 1915
• The basics of Baltic trade and its future. Berlin: Mid-1917
• Russia. Volume 1: Land, People and Economy. (= From nature and spiritual world 562) Leipzig: Teubner 1918

Web links

Commons : Erich Wallroth  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Erich Wallroth in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic

literature

• Dr. jur. Erich Wallroth. In: Vaterstädtische Blätter , year 1919/20, no. 23, edition of August 15, 1920, pp. 89–90.
• Dr. jur. Erich Wallroth. In: Vaterstädtische Blätter , year 1928/29, No. 8, edition of January 20, 1929, p. 29.
• Tobias C. Bringmann : Handbuch der Diplomatie 1815–1963, foreign heads of mission in Germany and German heads of mission abroad from Metternich to Adenauer. Saur, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3-598-11431-1 , p. 141

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Another source says that he was only in Rostock in 1903 , but there is no corresponding entry in the Rostock matriculation portal , with a business law dissertation on Dr. jur. PhD.
2. ↑ Marine-Rundschau , 1913, issue 5.
3. ↑ published in the "Meereskunde" collection of the Berlin Institute for Oceanography .
4. ↑ Kurt Doß: The German Foreign Office in the transition from the Empire to the Weimar Republic: The student reform. Düsseldorf: Droste 1977, also: Cologne, Univ., Philos. Fak., Diss., 1976 ISBN 978-3-7700-0446-1 , pp. 273f
5. ↑ Eckart Conze : The Foreign Office. From the empire to the present (= Beck'sche Reihe. Volume 2744 C.-H.-Beck-Wissen ). Beck, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-63173-3 , p. 67
6. ^ Ilja Mieck, Pierre Guillen (ed.): Germany - France - Russia / La France et l'Allemagne face à la Russie: Encounters and confrontations. Berlin: de Gruyter 2000 ISBN 9783486831429 , pp. 198-200
7. ↑ Garden cities in sight: authorized edition with 15 illustrations. Translated into German by Maria Wallroth-Unterilp. With a preface by Franz Oppenheimer and an appendix by Bernhard Kampffmeyer , Jena: Diederichs 1907
8. ^ Germany and Austria-Hungary: Contributions to the German-Austria-Hungarian alliance policy in the years before the world wars. Emsdetten (Westf.): 1941, also Berlin, Phil. F., Diss., 1942