Hermann Delius

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Hermann Delius

Hermann Delius (* 17th June 1819 in Bielefeld ; † 26. December 1894 ) was a German Wholesale - businessman and entrepreneur in the textile industry.

Live and act

Delius came from a linen dealer family in Bielefeld. He was the eldest of ten children of Gustav Delius (1794–1872), a merchant and factory owner in Bielefeld, and since 1843 a Prussian Kommerzienrat and after the death of his father for two years also the manor at Bökel (today Gut Böckel ).

Hermann Delius first attended the Bielefeld secondary school and from 1834 the secondary school in Barmen . For commercial training he went to Bremen in 1835 , later to London and in 1838 to Ireland . In 1838 and 1839 he was on behalf of the company in Málaga . In 1840 Delius joined the family business EA Delius & Sons. In the service of the company, he visited trading centers in Spain , France , Switzerland , Holland , Belgium , Denmark and Russia . In 1844 Delius became a partner in the company. A year later, Delius married Auguste Henriette Rabe, with whom he had eleven children.

The family business traded on a large scale with the linen produced by the home-made proto- industrial linen weavers in the Ravensberger Land . The company was the largest of its kind in Bielefeld. Even under the leadership of Gottfried Delius (his father's brother), the competition for machine-made linen in England led to considerable losses and at the end of the 1840s the business was completely shattered.

Against the background of his experience in England, Hermann Delius also strived to mechanize linen production in Bielefeld. He encountered resistance from parts of the family and the established merchants who wanted to stick to the old methods, as well as the hand weavers and spinners who saw their livelihoods in danger. Against this background there were strong efforts among the merchants, supported in petitions to the government also by the hand weavers, to preserve the previous system, for example by raising quality standards. In 1842 there were even mutual obligations to process only hand-spun yarn. The older generation of linen traders in particular was very skeptical of mechanization and the associated entrepreneurial risk. The Bielefeld district administrator complained in 1847: “ Ultimately, there is not a lack of money, but rather confidence in profitability and the spirit of speculation. "

Ravensberger spinning mill

On the one hand, the smaller, not so firmly established dealers and some members of the younger generation from the wholesaling families were significantly more open to the new development. Hermann Delius was one of them. The first factory was founded in 1852 by the son of the Hungarian immigrant Moriz Bozi with the "Vorwärts" spinning mill. Thereupon Delius managed to get some of the richest linen traders in Bielefeld to support his plans. Under his leadership, a stock corporation was founded in 1854, which opened the Ravensberger Spinnerei in 1857 . The business families raised the capital effortlessly, and the issue of shares even had to be stopped because of oversubscription. At the time, this company was one of the largest mechanical flax spinning mills in Europe. In 1865 the company employed 1,500 workers. In 1862 Delius was also involved in founding the mechanical weaving mill. The three textile factories made Bielefeld one of the leading linen cities in continental Europe , only surpassed by Trutnov in Bohemia.

Delius also played an important role in representing the interests of Bielefeld industry in terms of economic policy. So he tried to connect the city to the railroad. He had been chairman of the Bielefeld Chamber of Commerce since 1859 and laid the foundation stone for its own building in 1873. In 1874, however, he had to resign because he advocated protective tariffs in contrast to the majority in the Chamber .

He was given the title "Secret Commerce Councilor", was a member of the city ​​council for 50 years and in 1887 became a member of the Reichstag . Until 1890 he represented the constituency of Minden 3 (Bielefeld - Wiedenbrück) in the Reichstag. The city of Bielefeld granted him honorary citizenship in 1893 and has been honoring his memory with Hermann-Delius-Straße from 1902 until today.

literature

  • Gustav Engel:  Delius, Hermann Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 584 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Karl Ditt : Hermann Delius (1819-1894) and Carl Albrecht Delius (1827-1915). In: Wolfhard Weber (ed.) Bielefeld entrepreneurs from the 18th to the 20th century. (= Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiographien , Volume 14.) Aschendorff, Münster 1991, pp. 209-237.
  • Otto Sartorius: Hermann Wilhelm Delius (1819-1894). In: Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiographien, Volume I. Aschendorff, Münster 1931, pp. 93-106.
  • Hans Schmidt: From linen to silk. The history of the company CA Delius & Söhne and its predecessors and the work of their owners for the development of Bielefeld. 1722–1925 , Wagner Lemgo 1926

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Günther Schönbauer: The industrialization of Bielefeld in the second half of the 19th century. A sociological study of early and high industrialization in Prussia. Frankfurt 1987, p. 147
  2. ^ Karl Ditt: Industrialization, Workers and Workers Movement in Bielefeld. Dortmund 1982, p. 15
  3. ↑ Ditt, p. 20
  4. ↑ cit. According to Gerhard Adelmann: Bielefeld as the center of factory start-ups. In: Gerhard Adelmann: From trade to industry in continental north-western Europe. Collected essays on regional economic and social history. Wiesbaden 1986, p. 192
  5. ↑ Ditt, p. 68
  6. ^ Fritz Specht, Paul Schwabe: The Reichstag elections from 1867 to 1903. Statistics of the Reichstag elections together with the programs of the parties and a list of the elected representatives. 2nd edition, Carl Heymann, Berlin 1904, p. 137
personal data
SURNAME Delius, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur and politician, MdR
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1894
Place of death Bielefeld