Karl Poellath (engineer)

Karl Poellath (born June 7, 1857 in Landau in the Palatinate ; † June 28, 1904 in Munich ) was a German engineer , factory inspector and founder of the Munich Workers' Museum.

Karl Poellath came as the son of the future Colonel Friedrich Poellath and his wife Anna, née. Münster, to the world. He attended the humanistic grammar school in Speyer and from 1872 the secondary school in Munich. From 1874 to 1879 he studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Munich . After an internship with the Bavarian State Railways, he worked as an engineer at the Bavarian Steam Boiler Association in Augsburg from 1884. In 1888 Poellath entered the Bavarian civil service as a factory inspector for Upper Bavaria and Swabia. In 1892 the trade inspectorate in Bavaria was reorganized and a separate factory inspector was appointed for each district (today's administrative districts): Poellath was appointed factory and trade inspector for Upper Bavaria. Responsible for commercial affairs in the Ministry of the Interior since 1900 , on August 11, 1902, he took over the newly created position of central inspector for factories and commerce with the rank of government councilor . Inspired by his experience as a factory inspector, Poellath has been campaigning for the establishment of a workers' museum in Munich since 1897 to inform employers and workers about work safety and accident prevention. Made possible by private support, the museum was approved by the Ministry of the Interior in 1900 and opened under the name Museum for Workers' Welfare Institutions on October 21, 1900. Even before Poellath's death in 1904, the Bavarian State Parliament approved the funds for a new building that was being built at Pfarrstrasse 3 in the Munich district of Lehel . In 1906, Poellath's founding was converted from a private institute into a state institution and operated under the name of the Royal Bavarian Workers Museum .

literature

• Dieter Albrecht : The beginnings of the Munich workers' museum. In: Dieter Albrecht / Dirk Götschmann (ed.): Research on Bavarian history. Festschrift for Wilhelm Volkert on his 65th birthday. Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 255-272.