Ernst Gideon Bek

Ernst Gideon Bek (born April 18, 1872 in Pforzheim ; † July 27, 1945 ) was a German businessman and entrepreneur . His company, which was founded in Pforzheim in 1897, produced fashion items and was known in the 1920s as a manufacturer of woven ring handbags and purses. In addition, in 1906 he founded the Pforzheim “Gartenstadt Sonnenberg”. He was an honorary senator of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen .

Life

Ernst Gideon Bek was born in Pforzheim in 1872. The parents owned a small nursery and were devout Methodists . Bek attended secondary school in Pforzheim, then he did a commercial apprenticeship at the Rothacker company in Pforzheim. He then worked as a foreign language correspondent for the companies Kinzinger in Pforzheim and Baer in Hanau. In 1893 he was the general agent for the Pforzheim jewelry industry at the world exhibition in Chicago .

In 1897 he founded the Ernst Gideon Bek company, which quickly became known internationally, so that after a few years there were branches in Birmingham , Paris , Toronto , New York City , Newark and India. From 1897 to 1914, Bek traveled more than 100 times to the USA and met Emilie Binder there in 1898, a daughter of German emigrants whom he married in 1899.

As Beck's business flourished, in 1906 he acquired the Sonnenberg, located in the Büchenbronn district of Pforzheim, and realized his dream of founding a garden city on the outskirts of Pforzheim with the Gartenstadt Sonnenberg GmbH, which he founded . In 1907 a weekend house for the Bek family with a surrounding park was built on a 400 acres section of the site. In 1910, the entire Sonnenberg site was opened up and numerous homes and a terrace café were built there according to plans by the Stuttgart architect Linder.

When the First World War broke out , most of Beck's foreign branches were closed or confiscated. Bek entered into collaborations in neutral European countries (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) and was able to avert the threat of bankruptcy due to the closure of the old branches during the war . After the First World War, on his trips abroad, especially in the USA, Bek also served the needy German science, for which he collected numerous donations, for which he was appointed Honorary Senator of the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Construction on the Sonnenberg, which was discontinued after the outbreak of war in 1914, could only be continued in 1927. In 1928, Bek was appointed to the supervisory board of the Association of Friends , one of the first German building societies . At this time, Bek also made a name for himself as a rose grower. Public rose exhibitions and awards took place on the Sonnenberg.

Since the international demand for handbags made of ring mesh and purses was very high in the 1920s, Bek quickly re-established numerous new subsidiaries and branches, including on Menorca, as well as two production plants in Pforzheim: the Automatic Ring Mesh Factory GmbH and the Becker & Bittrolf machine factory . Beks ring mesh accessories were popular all over the world, so almost no other items were produced by the company. Committing to a single product should turn to the detriment when ring mesh accessories went out of style towards the end of the decade. Most of the once more than 500 employees had to be laid off, branches were closed, and the machine factory was no longer needed because there was no longer any demand for ring mesh machines. The global economic crisis that began in 1929 also resulted in large losses in outstanding claims against US customers. In October 1931, a foreclosure auction was finally initiated.

Bek tried to open up new sales markets for his products by traveling tirelessly, but exhausted himself completely and suffered a stroke in July 1932 after returning from a trip to Italy from which he could no longer fully recover. In 1934 he therefore handed over the business to his two sons Wesley Bek (* 1903) and Sigfrid Orville Bek (* 1909), who re-founded the company as EG Bek & Co. KG and were able to lead it to a new bloom. The headquarters in Pforzheim was destroyed in the air raid on February 23, 1945. Ernst Gideon Bek died on July 27, 1945 at the age of 73.

literature

• Sigfrid Bek, Paul Kuder: Ernst Gideon Bek in memory , Pforzheim 1945.