Gustav Robert Paalen

Gustav Robert Paalen around 1918

Gustav Robert Paalen (born May 22, 1873 in Bisenz ; † March 12, 1945 in Örsundsbro near Uppsala , Sweden ) was an Austrian inventor , entrepreneur and patron of the arts in Vienna and Berlin during the Josephine and Wilhelmine era, patron of the Berlin museums, advisor to Kaiser Franz Joseph I and founder and financier of numerous charitable institutions. He became known with the successful further development of the new patenting and marketing of the thermos flask from 1907, as well as the Atom vacuum cleaner (from 1905), together with his partner Axel Wenner-Gren from 1910 to 1916 through the development of the handy vacuum cleaner Dandy , which was designed for private households the 1st World War under the name Santo-Besen (from 1928 Vampyr ) brought the Berlin AEG million sales. Gustav Robert Paalen was the father of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen .

Life

Gustav Robert Paalen was born in Bisenz on May 22, 1873 as the youngest son of the Jewish businessman Moritz Pollak and his wife Charlotte, née Teller. Bisenz is a small town in the Prossnitz district not far from Brno in the southern, at that time predominantly German-speaking part of the Danube monarchical province of Moravia , which after 1918 became part of the newly founded Czechoslovakia . Moritz Pollak already ran a large trading house with which he supplied Bisenz and the surrounding area with all the necessary goods. Later he moved his home and main house to the provincial capital Prossnitz and only had one branch in Bisenz. It is not known exactly when the young entrepreneur moved to Vienna. In 1900, at the age of 27, he moved into an apartment in the 6th district at Getreidemarkt 11 as an unmarried merchant, resigned from Judaism and adopted the Protestant religion in the Protestant parish in Vienna. On the same day he applied for a change of name from Pollak to Paalen, which was approved on February 18, 1901 without objection. In 1905 he moved into one of Otto Wagner's Vienna row houses on Linke Wienzeile No. 40 / Köstlergasse 1 and married the German actress Clothilde Emelie Gunkel. Their first son, Wolfgang Paalen, was born in the same year, followed by three more sons. In the same year, the young entrepreneur rented a shop in the 1st district at Spiegelgasse 21 together with his partners Ludwig and Moritz Duschnitz and had GR Paalen & Co. commercially registered here with the concession “General commission trading with machines”. Further company offices, spread over the entire inner city area, followed. On the basis of his retail stores, Gustav quickly developed a witty and sometimes witty trade in equipment, some of which he had developed and patented himself, and for the purpose of marketing it internationally, he entered into open and anonymous business interests that reached as far as the United States .

In his capacity as a wholesale merchant, he represented the Central Purchasing Company of the German Reich government during the First World War , which, led by AEG Chairman Walter Rathenau, was responsible, among other things, for supplying the army at the front. Gustav Paalen's rather civil position in this equally influential society, which was directly under the emperor, was possibly supply-related nature. Paalen's Viennese company Zentralkauf at Kärntnerring 5 (in the building of the Hotel Bristol) supplied large quantities of horse fodder and thermos flasks for the units of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies under General Field Marshal Mackensen , who led the campaign to conquer Romania on the Balkan front in 1916 . The civilian way of involvement in the German-Austrian war economy is reflected in the decoration that Emperor Karl I personally bestowed on Paalen in 1918 at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. He turned down the offered nobility, allegedly because it would have been socially uncomfortable to belong to the parvenu nobility , and contented himself with the Emperor Franz Josef Order 2nd class (commander with a star) for particularly honorable civil merit in times of war. He had previously spent considerable sums of money on social and charitable causes. In 1908 that was 21,000 kroner for the establishment of a home for blind men, in 1910 four free places for sick officers in his own spa hotel Tobelbad in western Styria, which he owned for several years, in 1915 a total of 11,000 gold marks for the Red Cross in Germany, in 1916 twenty war sponsorships, a Ludendoff, Hindenburg and colonial war donation and finally in 1917 that was 50,000 gold marks in a Gustav Robert Paalen Foundation registered in Sagan .

Vacuum cleaner and thermos

Drawing for the patent from 1908

In 1907, Paalen founded the Santo-Staubsauger GmbH in Berlin with the US patents acquired before 1905 for the Santo and Atom vacuum cleaners . Paalen had already successfully sold the atom through his Viennese company GRPaalen from 1905, u. a. the Vienna Hofburg was cleaned with the atom from October 1905 . Together with the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren , Paalen developed the first light vacuum cleaner for household use, the Dandy , which was produced and sold by AEG by 1910 . The dandy was a revolutionary forerunner of the "Vampyr", which was mass-produced and sold millions of times by AEG in the 1920s . Before the First World War, Paalen also worked on a large scale for several years with the completely new, double-walled vacuum cold and warming bottle, which was invented by the English scientist James Dewar in England in 1896 . Dewar was the first to come up with the idea of ​​turning the container, originally developed for liquid air below 200 ° Celsius, into a vacuum jug for private use, but failed to patent his idea . The German glassblowers Reinhold Burger and Albert Aschenbrenner worked in their small business in Berlin for a long time on a bottle for private use and patented it in 1903 under the name Thermos . In 1906 Gustav Paalen founded Thermos GmbH together with Burger and Aschenbrenner (first founded as "Rara GmbH" on June 22, 1906, then renamed "Thermos GmbH" in August 1906; Paalen held 50% of the shares, Burger and Aschenbrenner 25% each ) in order to make the bottle ready for the market and to set up industrial production including global marketing. In addition to small technical improvements, he developed an apparatus for sewing the glasses, made it suitable for cavalry with a sheet iron jacket and designed an elegant pot for the bourgeois tea table. In 1907 he paid out burgers and ash burners in full and became the sole owner of Thermos GmbH, which had a share capital of 1 million marks. Between 1907 and 1909 he registered his own patents for various variants of these new creations in Germany, Austria and the USA. In 1907 the Austrian cavalry was first equipped with the miraculous canteen and in 1909 the rest of the army troops were equipped with a lighter aluminum version . In 1907 the American businessman William B. Walker founded the American Thermos Company Inc in Portland Maine with Paalen, with production in Brooklyn / New York. From here, the thermos began its unstoppable triumphal march through all armies in the world.

Rheostat and neon sign

In 1908, Paalen had a new, continuously adjustable electrical resistor for high current loads patented, which was based on old rheostat models. In combination with clocks, this allowed large fluorescent tube systems to be switched on and off slowly at regular intervals. This preform of the dimmer was particularly suitable for the high voltages of large advertising and theater lighting systems. Thanks to his experience with vacuum glass, it was easy for him to have the light glass tubes, which at that time still worked with low pressure, shaped as desired for advertising and entertainment purposes.

The art patron, Titian's Venus and the organ player

As an art collector and patron , Paalen became a member of the support group of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now the Bode Museum ) under Wilhelm von Bode during the First World War . In the course of 1916 Wilhelm von Bode, through the mediation of Gustav Paalen and the Viennese painter Carl Moll, made one of the most important acquisitions in the history of the Berlin museums, Titian's Venus with the organ player . In his memoirs, Moll tells how in the summer of 1913 he “discovered the Titian and brought it to Vienna, which the enthusiastic Professor Dvorák from the University of Vienna tried in vain for the Vienna Art History Museum. The Central Commission for Monument Protection, which he mobilized, discussed in front of the picture for an hour, and at the end Prince Franz Liechtenstein declared verbatim: “We are in agreement, gentlemen, that this masterpiece should remain in Vienna; Hopefully there will be a rich Jew who will buy it. ""

The picture was first deposited in Oskar Kokoschka's studio on the Stubenring, which made it a source of inspiration for the poet Georg Trakl and Kokoschka themselves . Oskar Kokoschka reports in his memoirs that nobody should have known that the Titian was not imported from (still) Austrian South Tyrol , but from Italy , because it actually came from the possession of a Prince of Orleans who lived in Turin . He complained pitifully when, after about three months, his friend Moll brought Venus back to himself from its productive hiding place so that Bode could personally inspect it in Vienna. Because he was decidedly Greater German-minded, it should not go to Vienna, but to Berlin from the start. Moll, who later also sympathized with the Nazis , was enthusiastic about the German efficiency with which such things were dealt with on a general staff basis (and did not cry a bit after the apparent loss to slower Austria): "His Excellency Bode had been in Vienna and decided to Bringing the picture to Berlin is just waiting for the decisive Viennese gentlemen to decide. Since they do not take any further steps after the decision of Prince Liechtenstein , the picture will be sent to Berlin after two years, half of the purchase price will be paid by the state, the other half will be signed by the members of the museum association within ten minutes. "

In June 1916 Gustav Paalen transferred the sum of 230,000 gold marks to the museum association for the purchase of the titian. Converted according to purchasing power , this corresponded to today's sum of approx. 2.1 million euros.

Paalen also organized the transport from Vienna to Berlin, which was not safe in times of war. Apart from the board member and grand patron James Simon , who only contributed 10,000 gold marks on this occasion , the patrons were not named in the annual reports. It remained in the dark for the public who gave the rich Jews not only wanted by Prince Liechtenstein , contributed almost a quarter of the required million gold marks and was also prepared to manage the transport, which was risky at the time, on their own. Experienced in the forwarding of commercial goods in times of war, Paalen was sure to come to the aid of his contacts with the allied German and Austro-Hungarian army staff. On April 10, 1916, Julius Meier-Graefe noted in his diary that at the end of March 1916, Paalen brought “Venus with the organ player Titians, which Moll found with a Tyrolean aristocrat. Bode bought it for a million. The money must be raised through collection. After the beautiful primitive antiquity in the Altes Museum (1,250,000 Mk), this is a second stately peaceful victory in the war. ”On October 7, 1916, Emperor Wilhelm appeared in the museum in the presence of the association's members to inspect the newly acquired Titian. He had been given the "beautiful and quiet place (...) in the Venetian Hall", which Bode had "already had a lot going around in his head". Venus now hung "alone on the blue wall between two doors (in the middle)", where previously "the Strozzi daughters of Titian" were prominently placed.

literature

• Andreas Neufert : Wolfgang Paalen. Inside the whale . Springer, Vienna / New York 1999, ISBN 3-211-83304-8 . (Monograph and catalog raisonné).
• Andreas Neufert: To love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen . Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to the second transcript from the Protestant Parish Office in Vienna.
2. ↑ Andreas Neufert: On love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen . Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 , p. 49 ff.
3. ↑ https://thermosrechner.jimdo.com/fake-news-zur-thermosrechner/
4. ↑ Gustav Paalen had his first Dewar vessel patented in Berlin on July 8, 1907, see also Deutsche Mechaniker Zeitung. J. Springer, Berlin 1908. In 1908 further registrations followed under his name, some of which competed with others. American production ran under a patent with the number 110888, which was registered in March 1908 in the name of Gustav Robert Paalen and registered in Berlin on October 18 of the same year. Also registered under the numbers 358627, 353628 u. 353629 various subsidiary patents, e.g. B. a device for fusing the neck seam of double-walled vessels, GR Paalen 1908. In: Deutsche Mechaniker Zeitung. ibid. In the files of the Canadian Thermo Bottle Company, Gustav Robert Paalen is named as the inventor and owner to this day.
5. ↑ The equipment of the cavalry with the enamelled canteen in 1907 and the remaining troops with the aluminum version in 1909 is in Austria. State Archives registered (War Archives, Army Ordinance Sheets for 1907 and 1909).
6. ↑ Nancy Villa Bryk, curator of the Henry Ford Museum, researched Paalen's participation in Thermos GmbH, to whom I owe as many details of the history of the thermos flask as the friendly information provided by Armin Burger, Reinhold Burger's grandson.
7. ↑ The patent for this Rheostat et Dispositif de Controle with the number 115354 is still held today in the Canadian Thermos Bottle Company Ltd, Canada; Gustav Robert Paalen is registered as the invention and patent holder. According to the available documents, the patent was applied for on November 4, 1908 and registered on December 1, 1908. All information s. a. Office de la propriété intellectuelle du Canada, Montreal
8. ^ Tizian, The Venus and the Organ Player, Bode-Museum Berlin No. 1849 (today Staatl. Museen Berlin Preuss. Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie).
9. ↑ Carl Moll: My life. Private print, Vienna 1943, p. 187.
10. ↑ Presumably it was Louis Philippe Robert d'Orléans, Duc d'Orléans (first name: Philippe) (1869 Twickenham – 1926 Palermo), the son of Louis Philippe Albert d'Orléans, Comte de Paris and his wife Maria Isabella of Spain and the great-grandson of the last French king Louis-Philippe I. Philippe married the Archduchess Maria Dorothea of ​​Austria (1867–1932), a great-granddaughter of Emperor Leopold II of Austria , on November 5, 1896 in Vienna
11. ↑ Carl Moll 1943, p. 187 (quoted in Catherine Krahmer 2001, p. 376)
12. ^ Reports of the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein on the financial years 1915-20, Berlin 1915-20, Berlin Art Library, and Wilhelm von Bode to Carl Moll, April 6, 1916 (Berlin, Art Library, WvBode estate), with thanks to Michaela van den Driesch for the transcription
13. ^ Manfred Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, Berlin (Brothers Grimm) 2007, p. 280.
14. ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe, cit. n. Catherine Krahmer, (ed.), Julius Meier-Graefe, art is not there for art history, letters and documents, Göttingen (Wallstein Verlag), 2001, p. 376.
15. ^ Wilhelm von Bode to Carl Moll, June 29, 1916, (Berlin Art Library, WvBode estate), with thanks to Michaela van den Driesch for the transcription