Ernst Merck

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Ernst Merck
Epitaph for Ernst Merck on the family grave in today's Jacobipark in Hamburg-Eilbek
Ernst Freiherr von Merck Reichsminister , Molly Busse 1812–1897 , double collecting grave of the Merck family , Ohlsdorf cemetery

Ernst Merck , since 1860 Ernst Freiherr von Merck , (born November 20, 1811 in Hamburg ; † July 6, 1863 ibid) was a German entrepreneur and politician .

Life

Merck grew up in a wealthy merchant family, his father was the future Senator Heinrich Johann Merck . His mother was Marianne Rohlffs (1783-1853), who had married the father in a second marriage. Carl Hermann Merck, later known as the Senate Syndicate, came from the father's first marriage to Marie Catharine Dankert (1771–1809) .

Merck graduated from commercial school in Bremen and then completed a commercial apprenticeship. After working in Antwerp , Liverpool and Rio de Janeiro , he became a partner in his father's company HJ Merck & Co. in 1840 , and in 1853 he owned most of the company's shares.

Together with his brother-in-law Justus Ruperti , with whom he got along very well, he led the company HJ Merck & Co to the top of the Hamburg merchant banking houses within two decades. Merck chaired the founding meeting of HAPAG on May 27, 1847 .

He was elected as one of the three Hamburg MPs in the Frankfurt National Assembly (parliamentary group: Café Milani ). Merck was a member of parliament from May 18, 1848 to May 30, 1849, from May to December 1849 Reich Finance Minister of the Provisional Central Authority and in April 1849 a member of the Imperial Deputation . Like his father, who belonged to the oldest German Masonic Lodge Absalom zu den netteln in Hamburg and was Honorary Grand Master of the Great Lodge of Hamburg , Ernst Merck also became a Freemason : in 1841 he was accepted into the Hamburg Lodge Ferdinande Caroline .

In 1853 Merck was appointed Consul General of Austria in Hamburg. At the same time he invested in railroad lines in Austria and in 1856 was elected to the board of directors of the Imperial and Royal Empress Elisabeth Railway . Thanks to his work, he was elevated to the hereditary Austrian nobility and baron by Emperor Franz Joseph I. This was not only received positively by the bourgeois Hanseatic people . Adolphine Schramm, b. Jencquel, said she found it pathetic to be scolded by a baron as the head of a company . Even his half-brother, the Senate Syndicus Carl Hermann Merck (1809–1880), had reason to complain that recently Hanseatic people “hunted for medals and nobility and other satisfaction from vanity.”   Merck was captain and head of the cavalry of the Hamburg citizen military .

From 1860 he initiated the establishment of Zoological Gardens west of the railway station Hamburg Dammtor at the Hamburg-Altona link line , not far from the former Botanical Garden and the burial places of several parishes ( Dammtor cemeteries ) along the road at cemeteries . From 1863–66, Alfred Edmund Brehm , the author of Brehms Tierleben , was the first director of the zoological garden, the area of ​​which became the nucleus of Planten un Blomen from 1930 .

The hall built on this site on the north side (towards Tiergartenstrasse ) bore his name. When the Hamburg-Messe was built in the triangle Karolinenstraße, Bei den Kirchhöfen and Jungiusstraße (today partly St. Petersburger Straße ), the new Ernst-Merck-Halle was used as a large event hall for dancing balls, trade fair exhibitions, New Year's Eve celebrations and legendary live performances by Bill Haley , The Beatles , The Rolling Stones , Queen or Santana - until they were demolished and rebuilt as part of the trade fair modernization.

Together with Cesar Godeffroy , Johann Christian Jauch junior, Johann Heinrich Schröder and Robert Miles Sloman, he was one of the initiators of the International Agricultural Exhibition in 1863 on the Hamburg Heiligengeistfeld and signed the guarantee fund.

Merck was a co-founder of the Norddeutsche Bank (see history of Deutsche Bank ).

On August 8, 1861, the “Hamburg Association for Rescue of Shipwrecked People” was established under the chairmanship of Ernst Freiherr von Merck. He remained its chairman until his death.

Ernst Merck married Johanna Anna Borgnis (1820–1906), the daughter of the Frankfurt merchant Carlo Hieronymus Borgnis, in Frankfurt in 1839 . The couple had 4 children. Their son Carl Heinrich Johann Freiherr von Merck (1843–1920) later became a co-owner of HJ Merck & Co.

The grave of the Heinrich Johann Merck family, in which Ernst Freiherr von Merck is also buried, is located in today 's Jacobipark , the former cemetery of the main church of St. Jacobi . The large crypt is one of the few tombs still preserved today.

Ernst Merck and his sister Molly Busse (1812–1897) are commemorated on the left-hand side of the double collection grave slab of the Merck family in the Althamburg Memorial Cemetery, Ohlsdorf Cemetery .

Works

Pictorial representations

  • Bust of Julius Lippelt (1829–1864), 1863, in the Tax Museum / Finance History Collection in the Federal Ministry of Finance
  • Lithograph by W. Graupenstein , 1863, printed by Charles Fuchs , Hamburg

literature

Web links

Commons : Ernst Merck  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The daughter Pauline Merck (1808–1861) from the father's first marriage had married Justus Ruperti in 1829.
  2. ^ Percy Ernst Schramm : Hamburg, Germany and the world ; Achievements and limits of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the period between Napoleon and Bismarck; 2nd edition, Hamburg 1952, p. 116
  3. ↑ Members by parliamentary group ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2016 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. in the Federal Archives.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bundesarchiv.de
  4. ↑ Percy Ernst Schramm: Profit and Loss , the history of the Hamburg senatorial families Jencquel and Luis (16th to 19th centuries) in: Publications of the Association for Hamburg History , Vol. 24, 1969, p. 108
  5. ^ Renate Hauschild-Thiessen: Nobility and Bourgeoisie in Hamburg , 1997, p. XXXI
  6. ↑ Ernst von Merck died only two months after the zoological garden opened. In his honor, Cesar Godeffroy collected funds for a bust and a Merck hall (Literature: Franz Hilgendorf: Guide through the Zoological Garden in Hamburg. With an introduction to the history of the garden by Dr. jur. H. Donnenberg, Verlag der Zoologischer Gesellschaft, Hamburg, 1869, p. VIII.)
  7. ↑ House Documents, Otherwise Publ. As Executive Documents: 13th Congress, 2nd Session-49th Congress, 1st Session, 1863: Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Correspondence of the minister of the Hanseatic republics in relation to an international agricultural exhibition in the city of Hamburg. P. 31
  8. ↑ Illustrierte Zeitung No. 1044 of July 4, 1863, p. 8
  9. ↑ Germany , in: Börsen-Halle , August 8, 1861, page 6, ( digitized version )
personal data
SURNAME Merck, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merck, Ernst Freiherr von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur and politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1863
Place of death Hamburg