Heinrich Pallenberg (furniture manufacturer)

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Portrait of the company founder Johann Heinrich Pallenberg by the painter Wilhelm Leibl
Furniture by Jakob Pallenberg in the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne
Sumptuous oak buffet around 1900 in the MAKK
Detail of the magnificent buffet
The only surviving window in the Pallenberg Hall of the Kunstgewerbemuseum am Hansaring
Pallenberg advertisement around 1895

The furniture manufacturer Heinrich Pallenberg (also H. Pallenberg or Heinr. Pallenberg ) in Cöln was a cabinet maker and an outfitter for high-quality neo - Gothic and historicist as well as Art Nouveau interior furnishings. The company, founded in 1827, was the most important furniture factory in Prussia towards the end of the 19th century and existed until 1959.

history

The company's founder, Johann Heinrich Pallenberg, came from a large family of craftsmen from Cologne. He began an apprenticeship in a brewery , but soon switched to an apprenticeship with a Cologne master carpenter , who discovered and promoted his talent for drawing. From 1819 he led his years of travel both for nine months after Brussels as an artistic also for four years into what was then the center of the furniture craft, after Paris . In addition to his technical training, he received drawing lessons from the court architect Jakob Ignaz Hittorff in Paris . He did his military service as a regimental carpenter in Cologne, which also gave him the opportunity to run a small carpenter's workshop with four journeymen in his father's business .

After his father's death in 1827, Pallenberg was released from military service and concentrated on his small carpentry workshop, H. Pallenberg , which initially specialized in building stairs and furniture . In 1830, he acquired a wine tavern and vineyard at Am alten Ufer 41 in Cologne, originally run by his father . Pallenberg operated a by Roßmühle driven veneer Tailoring , one of the first of its kind in Germany. In 1836, Pallenberg was the first Cologne business enterprise to purchase two steam engines to drive four saws . At that time he employed 36 carpenters and two turners . Pallenberg also developed its own machines for inlay work .

Since 1843, his brother Franz Jakob Pallenberg (1808–1895) continued the veneer cutting shop, which had since been separated, so that Johann Heinrich Pallenberg could devote himself to the production of period furniture as well as the business of high-quality interior fittings and furnishings . Pallenberg also employed sculptors , decorators and upholsterers . In the 1850s, the Pallenberg brothers expanded their business to include a carpet defeat, an upholstery fabric store and a mirror warehouse. In the field of artistic wood interior work, the furniture manufacturer H. Pallenberg advanced to one of the leading houses and to the royal Prussian court purveyor as well as the kuk court purveyor . The list of customers included numerous German aristocratic houses and the names of important industrialists . Even during the revolutionary years of 1848/49 , the slump in sales could be compensated for by orders from the USA without major losses.

In 1861 Johann Heinrich Pallenberg withdrew from the company and on February 7, 1872, transferred the business to his sons Jakob and Franz . Both sons had previously received a comparable training in furniture trade as their father, including a longer stay in Paris. Thanks to the use of the most modern machines, the company remained successful as a manufacturer at the transition to industrial production at the highest level.

After the death of his brother Franz (1882), Jakob Pallenberg continued to run the largest furniture factory in Prussia with over 150 employees. Like his father, Jakob Pallenberg was a great art patron and donated a large number of valuable art objects for Cologne museums. As a donor, he was particularly committed to the new arts and crafts museum . In 1898 he commissioned the Berlin artist Melchior Lechter to design a splendid hall for the new house on Hansaring . Jakob Pallenberg did not live to see the completion of the “Pallenberg Hall”.

Jakob Pallenberg died unmarried in 1900 on a trip to Cairo. In his will , he ordered the use of his property for the expansion and furnishing of the Pallenberg Hall and for the construction and maintenance of a workers' settlement in Cologne-Weidenpesch . The "Jakob Pallenbergs Arbeiterheim" settlement was completed in 1906 by the architects Hans Verbeek and Balduin Schilling in the form of a residential complex of 19 individual houses with kitchen gardens.

After Jakob Pallenberg's death, Louis Ziegler, a friend of Pallenberg's and partner in the company since 1895, successfully continued the manufacture until the beginning of the First World War . At the beginning of the 20th century the company employed 300 people. In addition to the expansion of the Crown Prince's palace in Tokyo in 1903, H. Pallenberg was also involved in the interior design and manufacture of the furniture for the restaurant in the Berlin Hotel Adlon and the Ehrenfremden apartment , the hunting and billiards room and the library at Drachenburg Castle . Later, until 1932, Kommerzienrat and Consul General Theodor Wanner and Arthur Thürmer took over the H. Pallenberg company .

The company's economic decline began during the First World War and the post-war period. Despite prestigious work on the interior of the luxury car (saloon car) of the Rheingold train , the Graf Zeppelin airship , the luxury steamer Bremen and the Villa Gerling , the company ran into economic difficulties. In 1931/32 the existence of the company could only be saved through liquidation and transfer to a rescue company . The entire inventory of the exhibition center at Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 23 was auctioned. Despite all rescue efforts and transfer to a GmbH in 1933, initially under the management of Arthur Thürmer, after his death from 1935 by Clärmargot Thürmer and Fritz Falk, the H. Pallenberg company did not recover . After 1945 the production of upscale equipment, furniture and interior fittings was called Heinr. Pallenberg GmbH resumed, but the manufacture was no longer able to assert itself on the market. On the one hand, customers turned to cheaper, industrially manufactured products, and on the other hand, when public facilities were expanded, the proportion of wood fell sharply for fire protection reasons. In 1959, the completely overindebted company that last produced at Wilhelm-Mauser-Strasse 47 in Cologne-Bickendorf had to file for bankruptcy.

Picture gallery

  • Salon car (Rheingold Express)

  • Common room (LZ Graf Zeppelin)

  • Library (Drachenburg Castle)

  • Billiard room (Drachenburg Castle)

  • Sumptuous buffet (MaKK)

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Pallenberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Jürgen Weise:  Pallenberg, Johann Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 16 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ a b Jürgen Weise:  Pallenberg, Jakob. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 16 f. ( Digitized version ).
  3. ↑ Klara von Eyll: Leafed through Cologne address books . Greven Verlag, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-7743-0160-3 , p. 59
  4. ↑ Jürgen Weise: Heinr. Pallenberg For an exquisite ambience: luxury furniture from Cologne . in: Mario Kramp, Ulrich S. Soénius (Ed.): Made in Cologne - Brands for the world. JP Bachem-Verlag, Cologne 2nd edition 2015. ISBN 978-3-7616-2750-1 , pp. 141-143
  5. ^ Deutscher Reichsanzeiger and Royal Prussian State Gazette , 1872, p. 830
  6. ^ Gerhard Dietrich: Museum of Applied Arts Cologne - Chronicle 1888–1988 . City of Cologne (ed.), Cologne 1988, p. 44f.
  7. ↑ Workers' settlement with bay windows and turrets . ksta.de; accessed on August 8, 2015
  8. ^ Clara E. Laeis: Corporate Citizenship: entrepreneurial citizen competence in the service of a renewal of the social market economy: a concept for medium-sized companies. Writings of the Institute for Christian Social Sciences of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Volume 53, Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-8630-1 , p. 79
  9. ↑ Ehrenfremden apartment. ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 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. schloss-drachenburg.de; accessed on August 9, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schloss-drachenburg.de
  10. ↑ Hunting and billiard room ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 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. schloss-drachenburg.de; accessed on August 9, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schloss-drachenburg.de
  11. ↑ Library ( Memento of the original from January 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. schloss-drachenburg.de; accessed on August 9, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schloss-drachenburg.de
  12. ^ Address book for Cologne 1931 . Greven, Cologne 1931 p. 780
  13. ↑ Inventory of the well-known furniture and equipment company Heinr. Pallenberg, Cologne, Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 23: due to abandonment of the exhibition center; Auction: January 27-30, 1931 (Catalog No. 314). uni-heidelberg.de; accessed on August 9, 2015
  14. ↑ Quality furniture and entire inventory of the well-known furniture and equipment company Heinr. Pallenberg Cologne, Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 23: Auction: June 10th and 11th (Catalog No. 52). uni-heidelberg.de; accessed on August 9, 2015
  15. ↑ Klara von Eyll: Leafed through Cologne address books . Greven Verlag, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-7743-0160-3 , p. 61
  16. ↑ Source of the Month - June 2013 ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 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. ihk-koeln.de; accessed on August 8, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ihk-koeln.de
  17. ↑ Speech by Lord Mayor Jürgen Roters on the occasion of the ceremony to mark the 125th anniversary of the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne on June 10, 2013, 7 p.m., MAKK. (PDF) stadt-koeln.de; accessed on August 9, 2015