Karl Anspach

Karl Peter Anspach (born December 13, 1889 in Sauerschwabenheim , † May 1, 1941 in Heilbronn ) was a German merchant who built the largest blind association in the world.

Life

Anspach was a son of the Farmer Philipp Anspach (1864–1890) from Sauerschwabenheim and his wife Barbara, nee. Schweikard (1863–1898). He lost his birth father when he was just a few months old. His mother married the sugar confectionery manufacturer Adolf Wankmüller (1866–1928). The family now lived in Frankenthal ; Barbara and Adolf Wankmüller's marriage resulted in three children who were born between 1894 and 1898. Barbara Wankmüller died soon after the birth of her youngest daughter Irma. The widowed Adolf Wankmüller married Juliane von Gemünden (1875–1962), a cousin of his late wife, in 1901. With this second wife he had five more children.

Karl Anspach fell ill with an eye disease in preschool age. After an apparently unsuccessful operation, he became completely blind at the age of eight. As a result, he had to leave the elementary school and was in the Frankfurter housed Blindenanstalt, where he braille learned and was able to gain some idea of the geography of the world through tactile maps, but did not acquire any real general education. At the age of 15 he was expelled from the institution after long disputes and returned to Frankenthal. There he was sent to the upper secondary school and after two years he graduated from school, which corresponded to the secondary school leaving certificate . In retrospect, he was grateful for the expulsion from the school for the blind, as attending school with sighted people had spurred him on to study. He then completed a commercial apprenticeship and then became a partner in a factory for bicycle accessories in Mannheim .

In 1912 he published a table of logarithms for the blind in dot print. At that time he was still living at Eisenbahnstrasse 30 in Frankenthal, where the Vauwe sugar factory (Veil and Wankmüller) was located. In 1915 his address was Rheinhäuserstraße 18 in Mannheim. In this city he sang in the blind choir and was first second and finally first chairman of the Association of the Blind of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and the surrounding area. During this time he also represented the Alsace-Lorraine and Palatinate area at the Reichsdeutscher Blindenverband. It is possible that in this position he met Rudolf Kraemer , who had founded the Heilbronn Association for the Blind in 1913 and was looking for a commercial manager for it in 1915. In April and May 1915, Anspach held a lecture on the blind associations at the Württemberg Blind Association and was invited to all board meetings of this association from 1917 onwards.

In the summer of 1915 he gave up his partnership in the Mannheim factory and took over the work in the Heilbronn cooperative for the blind, which he was to pursue for more than 20 years. When he joined the cooperative, it had 37 members and manufactured all kinds of goods for the blind in a small workshop . Anspach increased annual sales, which in 1913 had only been 16,000 marks, to over a million marks by 1935. After 20 years, the cooperative's workshop and storage space had grown to around 35 times its original size. The Heilbronn blind association became the largest blind association in Germany through Anspach.

Anspach not only took care of the economic success, but also provided social facilities: lunch for the employees was subsidized and came from their own kitchen, paid vacation and free work clothes were just as much a part of the amenities for the employees as a library for the blind Support fund to turn to in case of emergency or illness.

In 1921 he organized an exhibition of blind goods in Frankfurt to draw the attention of sighted people to these products. In the same year, the rest home for the blind was set up on the Kniebis , whose management Karl Anspach took over; In addition, around this time he also became part-time managing director of the Württemberg Blind Association, which he remained until 1932, and was a member of the Reichsblindenverband from 1924, from 1930 as an assessor on the board of directors and from 1938 as an honorary member of this body. He also headed the Labor Welfare Department of the Reich Blind Association, which was set up in 1932. Anspach headed the labor welfare of the Bavarian Association of the Blind from 1935 onwards.

From 1926 Anspach worked on the pension committee of the Reichsblindenverband and fought with Rudolf Kraemer for the introduction of the blind pension. In the same year he acted as a representative of the Reichsblindenverband in talks with the credit association of non-profit self-help organizations when it came to creating a trademark that should protect blind craftsmen from fraudulent companies. This trademark for the blind was introduced in 1927. A working group for the promotion of the German blind handicraft e. V., which was founded in the course of these efforts, was transferred to the Reich Association for the Blind Crafts in 1935. Another association that Anspach was involved in was the ring of the Southwest German companies for the blind, which was launched in 1933 at a conference in Heilbronn.

Anspach published numerous articles and writings. At first he mainly presented associations for the blind in series for the blind, but soon afterwards he also wrote about questions relating to the organization of the blind and the opportunities for blind people to earn a living in the trade. In 1924 he founded the Schwäbischer Heimatverlag in Heilbronn, with which he made products of the Swabian spirit accessible to the blind. In the same year he published as part of the Stuttgart Blind Welfare Congress, the memorandum of the German Reich Association of the Blind e. V. on the current status of the blind trade and on proposals to improve the lot of our craftsmen , in which he again advocated the cooperative model. From 1924 the magazine Das Blindenhandwerk appeared , in which Anspach worked as both an author and an editor. From 1933 this organ was called Handwerk und Handel. Monthly magazine for blind traders . From 1936 onwards, Anspach's friend Dr. Alexander Reuss is the editor; Anspach continued to work for this magazine. In the 1930s, Anspach also looked at the job opportunities for blind people outside of the trade, asked numerous companies about their experiences with blind people in economic and administrative positions and published the results in book form.

In addition to his writings for the cause of the blind, Anspach also wrote poems mostly in private. With a small play in verse written in 1926 as a competition entry for a Christmas prize riddle of the Heilbronner Neckar-Zeitung , which was entitled The People's Assembly of Käthchenbronn , he won a shopping voucher worth 300 Marks to be redeemed in the Landauer department store on Kaiserstraße . From 1929 onwards he published several volumes in a series that he called The Recitator . It contained selected works of literature, including many poems, in Braille.

Karl Anspach died unexpectedly at the age of 51 on May 1, 1941 of a heart attack. On the day before his death, he had attended a board meeting of the Württemberg Association for the Blind in Heilbronn and had been entrusted with negotiating pension negotiations with the Stuttgart government treasury. On the day of his death he should have inaugurated a garden for the blind association in the south of Heilbronn. He was buried on May 5, 1941 in the Heilbronn main cemetery. He left his widow Liesel, née Eppinger (1896–1949), and a daughter, Dr. Ingeborg Längle.

The rooms of the Heilbronner Blindengenossenschaft in the Achtungstrasse and in the Mozartstrasse were completely destroyed in the air raids on Heilbronn in September and December 1944. After the Second World War, the cooperative was continued in the rebuilt and later expanded premises on Achtungstraße and was renamed the Württembergische Blindengenossenschaft in 1949 . In 1953, the cooperative also opened a home for the blind on Olgastraße. The cooperative was particularly economically successful in the 1970s, but then suffered its decline due to a decline in membership and was liquidated from 1995 to 2006.

Fonts (selection)

• Association of the blind of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and the surrounding area (eV). In: Blindenwelt. 3, 1915, pp. 57-58.
• Blindengenossenschaft eGmbH, Heilbronn. In: Blindenwelt. 5, 1917, pp. 114-118.
• Württembergischer Blindenverein e. V. In: Blindenwelt. 7, 1919, pp. 27-28.
• A contribution to the right to self-determination. In: Blindenwelt. 8, 1920, pp. 88-89.
• The craft of the blind and its future, a contribution to modern care for the blind. Heidelberg 1922.
• The craft of the blind in danger. In: Blindenwelt. 12, 1924, pp. 119-127.
• The blind trade. In: Handbuch der Blindenwohlfahrtspflege, Berlin 1927, pp. 128–152.
• Messages from the New York blind system. In: Contributions to the education system for the blind. 1927, pp. 76-80.
• Poultry farming as a main or sideline for the blind. In: Blindenwelt. 16, 1928, pp. 293-294.
• Guidelines for the organization of work for the blind. In: Blindenwelt. 17, 1929, pp. 34-42.
• The revival of brush making. In: Blindenwelt. 17, 1929, pp. 167-169.
• Feather clothespins. A new occupation for the blind. In: blind friend. 52, 1932, pp. 279-280.
• Craft and trade. In: Blindenwelt. 21, 1933, pp. 51-54.
• 25 years of the Heilbronn Blind Association. Report on our work from 1913 to 1938. Heilbronn 1938.
• Basketry, the stiff child of the craft of the blind. In: Blindenwelt. 27, 1939, pp. 215-218.
• Industrial equipment within a blind commercial enterprise. In: Blindenwelt. 28, 1940, p. 55.
• Sources of supply for the German blind trade. Berlin 1941.

literature

• Christhard Schrenk : The father of the German blind associations. Karl Anspach (1889–1941). In: Christhard Schrenk (Ed.): Heilbronner Köpfe III. Life pictures from three centuries (= small series of publications of the archive of the city of Heilbronn. Volume 48). Heilbronn City Archives, Heilbronn 2001, ISBN 3-928990-78-0 , pp. 9-22.
• Christhard Schrenk: Karl Anspach - A blind businessman revolutionizes the craft of the blind. With contributions to the history of the Württemberg Blind Association in Heilbronn, the Württemberg Blind Association and its Heilbronn local group as well as the Association of German-speaking Blind People . (= Small series of publications by the Heilbronn City Archives. Volume 57). Heilbronn City Archives, Heilbronn 2009, ISBN 978-3-940646-03-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Letterhead of the sugar factory on oldthing.de ( Memento from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive )