Jacob Jebsen

Jacob Jebsen (1870-1941)

Jacob Friedrich Christian Jebsen (born December 27, 1870 in Port Townsend , † December 14, 1941 in Aabenraa ) was a shipowner , entrepreneur and chairman of the Knivsberg Society.

life and work

childhood and education

Jacob Jebsen was born in Port Townsend, USA, where his parents, Captain Michael Jebsen sen. and Mrs. Clara, because of the Franco-German War with which Bark Galathea had to take a forced break. The presence of French cruisers in the Chinese sea and the danger for a ship sailing under the German flag of being attacked was too great. At the beginning of 1871, the ship sailed to Valparaíso and from there to Hamburg , from where the family returned to Aabenraa in Schleswig-Holstein. Due to his father's employment with Alfred Krupp , Jacob Jebsen spent part of his youth from 1875 to 1880 in Vlissingen and Rotterdam . Then he stayed in Aabenraa, graduated from high school in 1889 as the youngest in his class at the Flensburg High School and studied chemistry in the following years at the then Technical University of Karlsruhe and the University of Berlin, where he attended both the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University and the Technical University University of Berlin matriculated. In 1890 Jebsen was forced to break off his studies and decided to become a businessman and to complete a commercial apprenticeship at the Belgian shipping company, Arnaments Deppe, in Antwerp .

First company founding

After returning to Aabenraa in 1893, he received power of attorney for his father's company. In 1894 Jacob Jebsen traveled to Hong Kong , where the Jebsen shipping company operated twelve steamships in Chinese coastal shipping. On March 1, 1895, he and Heinrich Jessen founded the company Jebsen & Co. in Hong Kong . The company developed well thanks to the successful trade in BASF dyes in Asia. In the period that followed, Jebsen & Co founded branches and subsidiaries in Tsingtau ( Diederichsen , Jebsen & Co), Chefoo , Hamburg, Hoihow , Shanghai and Vladivostok , Canton and Tientsin . In 1909 the company Jebsen & Jessen was founded in Hamburg. In 1913 Jebsen & Co. opened the Nanning branch . In 1913 the company's balance sheet closed with a surplus of 420,000 marks. After almost 20 years of work, the company had generated a capital of around 5 million marks for the two company owners.

Marriage and First World War

In 1907 Jacob Jebsen married Käthe Bock from the Groß Brütz manor near Schwerin in Mecklenburg and after the marriage traveled with her to Hong Kong for a year and a half. In early 1909 the couple returned to Aabenraa. In 1910 the family moved into the "Lensnack" house, the construction of which Jacob Jebsen had commissioned in 1906 and which has since been completed. The First World War in 1914 brought the construction and expansion of the shipping company and trading company to a sharp end. Jacob Jebsen, who was currently in Hong Kong, was interned - like many other Germans - and transferred to Australia in 1916 . Only in July 1919 was he able to return to Europe and resume his work in Aabenraa. The shipping company's ships were expropriated and the company in Hong Kong and the branch in Canton were forcibly liquidated. The company was practically on the ground. The Jebsen and Jessen families were able to quickly re-establish the former company through clever negotiations and good, stable Chinese and international connections.

Time after the First World War

The Jebsen & Co. company in Canton reopened as early as 1919, and business operations of the Jebsen & Jessen company in Hamburg were also resumed in 1919. After the plebiscite in 1920 in northern Schleswig, Aabenraa had become Danish and the Jebsen shipping company at its headquarters became a Danish company. In 1923 the company reopened in Hong Kong and in 1925 the company's headquarters were relocated from Canton to Hong Kong. In 1926, the Jebsen & Co. company established itself in Shanghai. Between the two world wars , Jebsen & Co took over the representation of important European companies in the China business, such as Mercedes-Benz and the Danish Maersk line. Jacob Jebsen traveled to China for the last time in the winter of 1932/33 . Then his eldest son, Michael Jebsen jun. the shops in Hong Kong. With the outbreak of the Second World War , Jacob Jebsen had to experience once again that his companies got into "heavy seas" again. After the occupation of Denmark by German troops on April 9, 1940, the British declared him a "technical enemy" and the Jebsen ships were requisitioned. Jacob Jebsen did not live to see the end of the war, he died in 1941.

Knivsberg Society and Attitude to National Socialism

After the death of his father Michael Jebsen sen. In 1899 Jacob Jebsen took over the chairmanship of the Knivsberg Society and took care of the completion of the Bismarck Tower on the Knivsberg. The inauguration of the memorial at this meeting place of the Germans in North Schleswig took place on May 4, 1901. After the referendum in 1920 Jacob Jebsen was one of the closest confidants of Pastor Johannes Schmidt-Wodder , the political leader of the German minority in North Schleswig . In addition to his work in the Knivsberg Society, Jebsen was involved in the Schleswig voter association . He was at the forefront of German work in the Aabenraa district. In addition, he was active in several supraregional committees and boards. He campaigned for the creation of a German standardized newspaper , Nordschleswigsche Zeitung , of which he was chairman of the supervisory board from 1929 to 1931. The co-ordination of the German minority in North Schleswig during the National Socialist era was deeply repugnant to Jebsen, who was connected to his homeland and at the same time universally thinking, and he therefore withdrew from the public work of the minority and gave the chairmanship of the Knivsberg Society to a confidante, the lawyer Sophus Erichsen from Hadersleben.

voluntary work

• 1901 to 1937: Chairman of the Knivsberg Society
• 1929 to 1931: Chairman of the supervisory board of the daily newspaper Nordschleswigsche Zeitung

swell

• Nekrolog in Deutscher Volkskalender Nordschleswig. Born in 1943, p. 105.
• Günter Weitling : Jebsen & Co. in China. In. Gerd Stolz, Günter Weitling: North Schleswig - landscape-people-culture. Husum 2005, p. 183 ff.

literature

• Emma von Hassel: Michael Jebsen. The life of the ship owner Michael Jebsen and the chronicle of his ancestors. Self-published, Aabenraa 1953.
• Adolf von Hänisch: Jebsen & Co. Hong Kong - China trade through the ages 1895–1945. Self-published, Aabenraa 1970.
• 100 years of the Knivsberg Festival. Special supplement. In: Der Nordschleswiger - The German daily newspaper in Denmark . Volume 49, No. 133 from June 11, 1994.
• Harboe Kardel : Knivsbergfeste-Knivsbergspiele. 1971.
• Nis-Edwin List-Petersen : Jugendhof Knivsberg. Educational facility of the German Youth Association for North Schleswig. Husum Printing and Publishing Company, 1982.
• Jürgen Ostwald (ed.): The Knivsberg. 100 years of the German meeting place in North Schleswig. West Holstein Publishing House Boyens & Co, Heide 1994.

Web links

• The company Jebsen & Co in the North Schleswig
• North Schleswig encyclopedia of the German library headquarters in Aabenraa