Karl Michael Knittel senior

Karl Michael Knittel senior (born April 22, 1904 in Memmingen ; † January 6, 1972 in Lörrach ) was a German advertising specialist who modernized advertising, particularly in the automotive sector, in the 1930s.

Life

He was the son of a master carpenter and trained as a businessman in Memmingen. As a trainee in the advertising department, he worked at Junkers in Dessau and made it to the position of head of this area. He also met his wife at the company. Knittel started his own business as a freelance advertising consultant in 1927 ; one customer in 1929 was the ADKA bodywork factory in Munich. Subsequently, until 1930, advertising for the Mauser company’s single-lane wagon was on the agenda , and it also advertised the company's range of sports and hunting weapons. With the help of the Frankfurt photographer Paul Wolff , the advertising for the Neue Röhr Werke was created from 1932 to 1935 , and Knittel had taken over the advertising management. Until then, it had not been possible in the automotive industry to photograph attractive young women with the vehicles to be advertised. Knittel saw himself as “the first advertising specialist in Germany”, and he was also able to win over the draftsman Theo Matejko and the commercial artist Bernd Reuters to work at Röhr . Karl Michael Knittel lived in Ober-Ramstadt during that time - after 1952 he chose the place again as his place of residence for another job - and after the final end at Röhr he moved to the advertising department of the Maybach company in Friedrichshafen . After the Second World War he was head of the Berlin advertising agency Werba KG in Frankfurt.

literature

• Werner Schollenberger: Röhr. A chapter of German automobile history , Verlag Günter Preuß, Darmstadt 1996, ISBN 3-928746-04-9 , p. 317 u. 382 f.