Georg Friedrich Vorwerk

GF Vorwerk

Georg Friedrich Vorwerk (born April 27, 1793 in Hildesheim , † February 4, 1867 in Hamburg ) was a German businessman .

Life and work as a businessman

Georg Friedrich Vorwerk's father was a lawyer who took treasures for the Duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg in Langelsheim . From the age of 14 he got six years in office Heinrich von Hollens in Hamburg. After that, he became the clerk appointed and in 1817 an authorized signatory. In the summer of 1823 he left the company and went on a self-financed journey that took him to Central Germany and Silesia . On September 1, 1823, he founded the company Hochgreve & Vorwerk together with Michael Christopher Hochgreve (1787–1871), son of a businessman from Hamburg . Hochgreve brought more capital and good connections to England, while Vorwerk had good connections to linen traders in Saxony and Silesia. The partners mainly exported cotton goods from England and German linen. In return, they introduced coffee, tobacco, sugar and spices in particular. They mainly traded with Latin America , where many Hamburg merchants did good business. After Hochgreve had become less and less active in the company, Vorwerk had been the sole owner of the business since March 1, 1846. As a merchant banker, he built a new branch of the company that financed merchandise transactions, which later became the London-based Schröder Bank. He also ran a small shipping company, which later became Hamburg Süd . In 1847 he founded a branch in Valparaiso , under & Vorwerk & Co. changed its name. Later he traded increasingly in copper and saltpeter.

From 1833 to 1836 Vorwerk acted as a commercial judge. Afterwards he was elected as a consistent representative of free trade in the Hamburg Commerz Deputation . From 1840 he took over the office of president. During his tenure, the committee drew up new consular regulations. Customs duties, including in particular the Stade customs and the Elbe tariffs, were either abolished or reduced. The deputation reorganized the business with emigrants, organized the expansion of the Hamburg port , the deepening of the Elbe and the construction of the Hamburg-Bergedorf railway . A special concern for Vorwerk was the construction of the Hamburg stock exchange on Adolphsplatz . He led the merchants' move to the new one on December 4, 1841. After the Hamburg fire, Vorwerk participated in a court that estimated the amount of compensation payments. He was involved in the Patriotic Society of 1765 and was one of the signatories of a petition on June 8 calling for a reform of the constitution.

As his company expanded, Vorwerk could not be politically active to this extent on a permanent basis. In October 1847 he took over the consular of Braunschweig , which took less time to complete. Since he was thus subject to a “foreign power”, he could no longer hold any civil honorary posts in Hamburg. An election to the Hamburg Senate , which would probably have been possible, was therefore not possible. To the general regret of the committee, he resigned from the Commerzdeputation before the end of his second term in office. In 1848 he was briefly politically active again as Hamburg envoy in the pre-parliament in Frankfurt .

House on the Alsterglacis

Until 1866 Vorwerk owned an office building with an apartment and storage facility at Katharinenstrasse 25. He lived here with his wife Christiane de Voss (1809–1885), with whom he had 13 children, two of whom died in childhood. In 1840 he acquired extensive farmland near Teufelsbrück to build several summer houses for himself and his children's families . He commissioned the architect Franz Gustav Forsmann , whom he had known and appreciated since the construction of the new stock exchange, to build the main house as his summer residence . The result was a classicist country house, which included a stable and a coach house, a gardener's house and an orangery. The director of the botanical garden, Johann Heinrich Ohlendorff , took on the design of the garden, along with the fruit and vegetable garden. The property in Klein-Flottbek is the last of these large summer houses on the Elbchaussee that is still owned by the builder family to this day.

Summer house (so-called main house) in Klein Flottbek, around 1880

In 1860 Vorwerk took on his son Adolph (1839-1919) as a partner in the Vorwerk & Co. branch in Chile. His son Friedrich (1837–1921) worked as a partner in his father's company, Hochgreve & Vorwerk in Hamburg , from 1861 . During this time, father and son moved the office to a house at Neuen Jungfernstieg 9, where Friedrich Vorwerk lived. Since Georg Friedrich Vorwerk bought a house at Alsterglacis 8, the former residential and office building on Katharinenstrasse was only used as a warehouse.

Georg Friedrich Vorwerk died after a short illness in his apartment on the Alsterglacis. At his death he owned eleven million marks in a bank, which made him one of the richest men in Hamburg. He was first buried in a family crypt in the churchyard of the Katharinenkirche, where Christiane Vorwerk also found her final resting place. Today two simple tombstones in the Nienstedten cemetery remember Georg Friedrich and Christiane Vorwerk. The coffins were transferred here at the behest of Friedrich Vorwerk due to the dissolution of the Katharinenkirchhof.

Since 1957 the Vorwerkstrasse in St. Pauli has been reminiscent of Georg Friedrich Vorwerk.

Act as a donor

Vorwerk felt connected to the main church Sankt Katharinen , for which he repeatedly donated. For his silver wedding in 1852 he financed a choir window. The idea for this came from Friedrich Overbeck , whom Vorwerk had known since visiting the artist's studio in Rome in 1850 . The work of art, based on Overbeck's drawings, was destroyed during Operation Gomorrah in 1943. Vorwerk also co-financed the construction of a new altar. In 1854 he founded the Georg-Friedrich-Vorwerk-Stiftung in the parish , which was supposed to promote the education of children of needy parents. The foundation later became part of the collective foundation of the Sankt Katharinenkirche. As a token of thanks, the church and parish put a plaque on the fourth north pillar in the nave, reminiscent of Vorwerk.

In 1862 he supported the construction of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in the Comité for the construction of an art gallery . In 1866 he had an asylum set up in St. Pauli , with 34 free apartments for people in need. In 1916, the city of Hamburg took over the facility as the new owner in accordance with its statutes. A citizens' initiative was able to prevent the asylum from being demolished in 1981. Then the Patriotic Society took over the patronage of the Vorwerk-Stift , which today offers living and working space to artists.

Further development of the company

After the death of Georg Friedrich Vorwerk his sons named the Hamburg company in Vorwerk Gebr. & Co. to. Later his three grandchildren jointly took over the management. After the managing directors Oscar Vorwerk (1865-1933) and Walter Vorwerk (1873-1933) died and Carl Vorwerk (1875-1949) had emigrated to Chile as the third partner for political reasons, the company in Hamburg was liquidated in 1933.

His great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren continued the establishment in Valparaíso, Chile. The company still exists today as Vorwerk y Cía SA in family ownership .

literature

• Renate Hauschild-Thiessen: Vorwerk, Georg Friedrich . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 1 . Christians, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7672-1364-8 , pp. 328-330 .
• Gustav Adolph Vorwerk: Flottbek , private printing, Hamburg 1987.
• Gustav Adolph Vorwerk: A Hamburg Ambience , private printing, Hamburg 1991.
• Hans Joachim Schröder: The brothers Augustus Friedrich and Gustav Adolph Vorwerk. Two Hamburg merchants , University Press, Verlag der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-937816-61-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Vorwerk y Cía SA