Karl Walter Mautner

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Karl Walter Mautner (born May 2, 1881 in Enns , Austria-Hungary ; died February 12, 1949 in London ) was an Austrian civil engineer who worked mainly in Germany . The headframe he constructed above Shaft IV of the Camphausen mine in Saarland was awarded the title “Historic Landmark of Civil Engineering in Germany” by the Federal Chamber of Engineers in 2016.

Origin and education

Mautner's father Josef Mautner (1830–1902) was a senior engineer at the Austrian State Railways ; the mother Rosalinde came from the Planner family. Karl Mautner married Mathilde Tragau from Vienna in 1907; the marriage resulted in two daughters.

After attending the Oberrealschule in Linz, Mautner began studying as a teacher training candidate in Vienna in 1898 , but at the same time studied civil engineering at the technical university there . Following his second state examination , Mautner received his doctorate in bridge construction in 1906 ; 1904–1906 he worked as an assistant in this subject at the university.

Worked in Düsseldorf until 1915

In 1907 Karl Mautner came to the Carl Brandt construction company in Düsseldorf as a senior engineer . During this time, the former Hennebique licensee developed into the largest construction company in town with numerous branches, e. B. in Hamburg, Saarbrücken and Breslau. Mautner was responsible, among other things, for the presentation of special buildings in the trade press and at the German Concrete Day. In 1914 Mautner became the company's technical director.

Use in the First World War

During the First World War , Mautner worked for Austria-Hungary from autumn 1916 as a pioneer in bridge building and as a lecturer at the Technical Military Academy in Mödling. He was awarded the golden honorary medal for bravery in a ribbon and the Iron Cross 2nd class.

Work for Wayss & Freytag

Even before he was called up as a soldier, Mautner moved to the Düsseldorf branch of the construction company Wayss & Freytag AG in 1915 , to which he returned as the first technical manager with the rank of director after the end of the war. On April 1, 1928, Mautner moved from Düsseldorf to the company's head office in Frankfurt am Main as a member of the board without the usual intermediate step of a deputy .

Although some foreign subsidiaries of Wayss & Freytag AG, for example in Argentina or Turkey , developed very well in the 1920s, during the Great Depression the company suffered such heavy losses in Germany from 1929 to 1931 that under the management of the sole board members Karl Walter Mautner and Alfred Schütze as well as the board of directors chaired by the previous long-term board chairman Otto Meyer the settlement had to be announced. A new public limited company was established in 1932 under the name Neue Baugesellschaft Wayss & Freytag . Alexander Kinen replaced Alfred Schütze, who moved to the supervisory board, on the executive board. At the same time Otto Meyer rejoined the board. Just over a year later, on June 30 and December 31, 1933, Kinen and Mautner resigned from the board of directors “in amicable agreement with the administration”. Mautner's Jewish descent probably played an important role in this. Mautner's successor was a long-time Düsseldorf employee, the engineer Gärtner, who became a substitute on the board.

Mautner now officially settled in Frankfurt as an independent consulting engineer . He remained in close contact with the new construction company Wayss & Freytag through Emil Mörsch and, together with them, took care of the acquisition of the prestressed concrete license from Eugène Freyssinet in 1935 , the application of which he prepared through numerous experiments. In 1938 the first prestressed concrete bridge in Germany was built over the Reichsautobahn in Oelde in Westphalia.

Academic career in Aachen

In 1912 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the ribbed dome in the subject of reinforced concrete construction at the Technical University of Aachen and has since taught there together with Josef Pirlet as a private lecturer in the department of civil engineering. His teaching activity in Aachen was only interrupted by his assignment in the First World War, during which time he also worked as a lecturer (see above). In 1926 he was appointed honorary professor for "Reinforced Concrete Buildings in Mining and Metallurgy" and continued teaching when he switched from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt am Main in 1928.

Mautner's scientific merits during this time included research into the combination of cast iron rings with concrete and reinforced concrete for the stability of shaft construction in mining. As director and board member of Wayss & Freytag AG, he no longer emerged as a planner of individual buildings, but the company's broad activity in this area shows its strong influence. Thus, as part of his occupation with building in the mining area u. a. also the coking coal tower of the Anna coking plant in Alsdorf near Aachen.

Persecution and expulsion from teaching

When the student body started denouncing the Technical University of Aachen in the spring of 1933 , Mautner was also targeted. The ASTA ( General Student Committee ) and the student guides sent the denunciation committee specially appointed for this purpose, consisting of Hermann Bonin , Hubert Hoff , Felix Rötscher , Adolf Wallichs and Robert Hans Wentzel, about which of the lecturers and professors were not of Aryan descent and were supposed or actually had an undesirable political attitude. According to the law to restore the civil service due to his Jewish origin, Mautner was supposed to be together with the other non-Aryan professors Otto Blumenthal , Walter Fuchs , Arthur Guttmann , Ludwig Hopf , Theodore von Kármán , Paul Ernst Levy , Alfred Meusel , Leopold Karl Pick and Rudolf Ruer , Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss ' teaching permits are withdrawn. However, he filed a complaint against the threatened dismissal on the basis of the so-called front fighter privilege and asked the incumbent Rector Paul Röntgen for a temporary leave of absence until the facts were finally clarified. Röntgen did not consider this to be necessary at first, but after a second denunciation letter from the ASTA in April 1933, Mautner finally had to be given leave of absence. The leave of absence was lifted due to the "frontline fighter privilege" at the beginning of October 1933, and Mautner was initially able to continue his teaching activities. The final dismissal was then forced upon him after the passage of the First Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act of November 14, 1935, in which the compulsory retirement was also stipulated for civil servants with previous front-line combatant privileges.

Emigrated to London and worked in exile

After he had been arrested for a few weeks in November 1938 and interned in Buchenwald camp, British colleagues, with the help of the British secret service, ensured that Mautner and his wife could emigrate to London via Rotterdam in the summer of 1939 ; the married daughters stayed in Germany.

With the tradition-steeped Mouchel construction company and its newly founded Prestressed Concrete Company (PCC) in London, Mautner continued the development of prestressed concrete construction with the help of his research results and became the founder of this construction method in Great Britain. He died in London on February 12, 1949.

Fonts

  • Arched roof and one-sided cantilever arm in Monier construction, Brühl near Cologne . In: Deutsche Bauzeitung , supplement “Communications about cement, concrete and reinforced concrete” , 4th year 1907, No. 15, pp. 57–59.
  • Fine coal tower in reinforced concrete of the Recklinghausen II colliery, Harpener Bergbau AG . In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, supplement “Communications on cement, concrete and reinforced concrete construction” , 5th year 1908, No. 4, pp. 25–28.
  • For the calculation of reinforced concrete pull rings and horizontally curved beams (dome and other reinforced concrete structures on the new Orpheum Theater in Bochum). In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, supplement "Communications about cement, concrete and reinforced concrete construction" , 5th year 1908, No. 11, pp. 65–67 / No. 12, pp. 69–71 / No. 13, p. 73, P. 75 and tables on this.
  • About some vaulted and domed structures in reinforced concrete ( Kreuzkirche and Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court ). In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, supplement "Communications on cement, concrete and reinforced concrete construction" , 6th year 1909, No. 1, pp. 1–3 / No. 2, pp. 5–7 / No. 4, pp. 13– 14th
  • Newer reinforced concrete constructions in the mining sector. In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, supplement "Information on cement, concrete and reinforced concrete construction" , 8th year 1911, No. 8, p. 57, p. 62–64 / No. 9, p. 70–72 / No. 10, Pp. 75-79.
  • About the structural systems of the new turbine pumping station of the waterworks of the city of Bochum in Blankenstein an der Ruhr. In: Armierter Beton, monthly for theory and practice of the entire concrete construction , 4th year 1911, issue 12, pp. 425-431.
  • Contribution to the theory of the rib dome shape commonly used in reinforced concrete construction. Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1911. (= publications of the German Committee for Reinforced Concrete , volume 6.) (= research work in the field of reinforced concrete , volume 13.)
  • About the strength of cast iron segments and their reinforcement by reinforced concrete. Bonde, Altenburg 1913.
  • (with Oskar Domke): Roof structures. In: Fritz von Emperger (Hrsg.): Handbuch für Eisenbetonbau , 2nd edition, Volume 10 Building constructions II. Verlag Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1920.
  • Contribution to the question of building security in mining subsidence areas. In: Der Bauingenieur , 1st year 1920, pp. 144–149.
  • About some strength and concrete-technical questions in buildings in the mining and metallurgical areas. In: Festschrift on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Wayss & Freytag AG, 1875–1925. Frankfurt am Main 1925, pp. 110–159.
  • Strength issues in shaft construction. In: Glückauf , 70th year 1934, pp. 409–415.
  • Prestressed concrete using the Freyssinet method. In: Beton & Eisen , 35th year 1936, pp. 320–324.
  • Prestressed concrete according to the Freyssinet system. In: Beton , 2nd supplement to the magazine De Ingenieur , 6th year 1937, pp. 5–15.

buildings

gallery

  • Crematorium in Bremen

  • Kreuzkirche in Düsseldorf

  • Orpheum Theater in Bochum (state of construction)

  • Headframe above shaft IV of the Camphausen pit

literature

  • Mautner, Karl W. In: Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 2: L-Z. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1931, DNB 453960294 , p. 1210.
  • Ernst-Ulrich Reuther, Ulrich Kalkmann, Peter Antweiler: Karl Walter Mautner 1881–1949. In: Klaus Habetha (Ed.): Science between technical and social challenge. The Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen 1870–1995. Einhard Verlag, Aachen 1995, pp. 225-230.
  • Jupp Grote, Bernard Marrey: Freyssinet, Prestressing and Europe 1930–1945. Éditions du Linteau, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-910342-13-1 , pp. 38–40.
  • Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933–1945). (= Aachen Studies on Technology and Society , Volume 4.) Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 , p. 86 ff.

Web links

Commons : Karl Walter Mautner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Award-winning works on Wahrzeichen.ingenieurbaukunst.de (website of the Federal Chamber of Engineers ), accessed on November 27, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Mautner, Karl Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian civil engineer, university lecturer at RWTH Aachen
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Enns
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1949
Place of death London