Friedrich Heinrich Bertling
Friedrich Heinrich Bertling (born November 4, 1842 in Northeim , † May 26, 1914 in Lübeck ) was a German businessman , politician and senator of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. He founded the still existing, now in Hamburg -based logistics - and shipping company F. H. Bertling .
Life
origin
Friedrich Heinrich Bertling's parents were the master locksmith Johann Heinrich Bertling and his wife Johanna Friederike, née Warnecke. After completing his commercial training, he moved to Lübeck in 1864. On May 26, 1865, he became a member of the merchant class there , on May 31, he took the citizenship oath and on June 12, the company FH Bertling was registered at the commercial court. The forwarding , commission and agency business was initially located at Breite Straße 818 (today: 42). In 1868 Bertling acquired the Große Altefähre 715 (today: 23), in which the company remained until the company's headquarters were relocated to Hamburg in 1980 and whose facade still bears the company name.
career
Bertling initially encountered resistance as a new immigrant, but was able to quickly gain a reputation and benefited from the general economic upswing that Lübeck experienced after 1864. He initially operated the Lübeck branch of the Hamburg forwarding company Otto Lange Wwe. & Rohde, from 1865 to 1869 the general agency of the Gladbacher Feuerversicherungs-Gesellschaft and from 1869 to 1903 the Lübeck representation of Fortuna Allgemeine See-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft from Berlin. In 1870 he began to act on his own account when he took over the warehouse of cast iron goods, household items and building materials from the Lübeck merchant CF Wessel. In 1868 Bertling began to invest in ship investments, a line of business that he continued to expand in the following years. Until the beginning of the 1880s he became a shareholder and board member of several companies that operated shipping connections to the Baltic Sea region from Lübeck , mainly to Russia : the Hanseatische Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft AG , the Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft Germania , the Lübeck- Wyborger Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft , the Riga -Lübecker- Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft and the Libau- Lübecker-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft . In 1881 he was a partner in the founding of the Lübeck- Königsberger Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft and set up his own shipping department in addition to the insurance department and the forwarding and commission department . In line with the growing importance of the shipping business, the company with its meanwhile 60 employees changed its name in 1885 to the Bertling University of Applied Sciences, freight forwarding and commission business, and steamship shipping .
At the beginning of the 20th century, Bertling expanded his company's business to include inland shipping and traffic with the Scandinavian countries. The Magdeburg-Lübecker Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft , founded in 1901 together with the Magdeburg company Andreae & Stahlkopf, operated a weekly scheduled service between Magdeburg and Lübeck and was completely taken over by FH Bertling in 1908. Since then, the company has operated as FH Bertling, trading company , forwarding and commission business, steamship shipping company, river shipping, freighting, Magdeburg-Lübeck express steamship service . In 1904, FH Bertling established a branch in Hamburg and, together with a Danish and a Norwegian partner, founded the Nordische Transport Gesellschaft mbH , also in Hamburg, to operate forwarding business between Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Last but not least, Bertling's business success was due to the fact that his company was able to secure exclusive rights as a ship broker and charterer for the Lübeck blast furnace, which was founded in 1905 . The ship brokerage department set up in 1907 with clearing points in Herrenwyk and Travemünde took over the organization and handling of all transport to and from the blast furnace until 1973.
Public life
In 1877 Bertling was elected a member of the Chamber of Commerce , the board of directors of the Lübeck merchants' association , and the Lübeck citizenship , to which he belonged until 1892 and 1893, respectively. In the Chamber of Commerce he was a member of the Exchange Committee, from 1879 to 1881 its chairman, a member of the Committee for Railways, Shipping and Transport and since 1889 second deputy to the President of the Chamber of Commerce. From the citizenship he was appointed civil deputy to the finance department and the high school authorities, was a member of the citizens' committee and its deputy chairman several times ; Furthermore, he was assessor of the Maritime Office and head of the navigation school and the St. Johannis-Jungfrauen monastery. On December 11, 1893, he was finally elected as the successor to the late Johannes Fehling to the commercial senator and thus belonged to the government of the Lübeck city-state . In this function he was mainly active as a member of the Finance Department and the Commission for Trade and Shipping, but also held numerous other offices. Bertling was instrumental in driving the construction of the Elbe-Trave Canal (today: Elbe-Lübeck Canal ) and promoted the construction of the Vorwerker cemetery and the preparatory work for the construction of the new insane asylum . Together with Senator Hermann Wilhelm Fehling, he was particularly committed to the development of the seaside resort of Travemünde , where he owned a summer villa at Kaiserallee 22; as a member of the committee of the Lübeck-Büchener Railway , he enforced the railway connection from Lübeck to Travemünde . In 1907, the local council of Travemünde named the road leading from the beach to the beach station after him.
Bertling also did a lot of voluntary work. In the Society for the Promotion of Charitable Activities , he was a member of the board of directors. He was an active member of the parish of St. Lawrence , in whose parish council , he was a member since 1891 and chairman from 1895 to 1906. Construction of the new church of the district of St. Lawrence was due primarily to the use of time, money and influence Bert compact.
family
Bertling was married to Anna Catharina Sophie (1846–1921). She came from the long-established Lübeck boatmen family Steffen . The couple's son, Jakob (James) Friedrich Heinrich Bertling (1869–1916), joined the FH Bertling company in 1888 and became a partner in the company in 1898. He was appointed Royal Norwegian Consul on March 31, 1906.
In October 1905, Bertling suffered a stroke , the health consequences of which forced him to resign from the Senate on December 16, 1905, to give up all public offices and largely to withdraw from management.
On May 29, 1914, Bertling was buried by senior pastor Johannes Bernhard in the St. Lorenz cemetery, where the family grave has been preserved.
His son continued to run the company on his own after his father's death.
literature
- Marianna Heinemeier, Ralf Petersen (Eds.): 150 Years of Bertling. The Bertling Group, Hamburg o. J. (2015) (commemorative publication for the 150th company anniversary)
- Emil Ferdinand Fehling : On the Lübeck Council Line 1814–1914 , Max Schmidt, Lübeck 1915, No. 82 ( digitized on Wikimedia Commons)
- Emil Ferdinand Fehling: Lübeckische Ratslinie , Verlag Max Schmidt-Römhild , Lübeck 1925, No. 1021 Unchanged reprint Lübeck 1978. ISBN 3-7950-0500-0
- Senator Bertling †. In: Vaterstädtische Blätter , year 1913/14, edition from May 31, 1914 ( digitized version at the archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck; PDF, 391.3 MB)
- Senator FH Bertling †. In: Lübeckische Blätter , 56th year, number 22, edition of May 31, 1914
Web links
- Company history on the website of FH Bertling Holding GmbH
Individual evidence
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , p. 15
- ↑ a b c 150 Years of Bertling , pp. 19-20
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , pp. 22-24
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , pp. 31-37
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , p. 39
- ↑ A list of his functions in Fehling's work: On the Lübeckische Ratslinie 1814–1914 , pp. 54f.
- ↑ The former “new insane asylum” is now the Lübeck part of the UKSH .
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , p. 30
- ↑ 150 Years of Bertling , p. 35
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bertling, Friedrich Heinrich |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German businessman, politician and senator of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 4, 1842 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Northeim |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 26, 1914 |
| Place of death | Lübeck |