Kurt Barnekow

Alfred Albert Kurt Barnekow (born April 9, 1910 in Altona ; † March 25, 1998 in Hamburg ) was a German furniture manufacturer and dealer.

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Barnekow was the only child of the Hamburg textile merchant Otto Barnekow. At the age of seven he became an orphan and spent his childhood in poor circumstances with two aunts in Stralsund , where he attended a secondary school, which he left prematurely in 1927. He then completed a two-year apprenticeship as an import and export clerk at the Hamburg trading company Brock & Schnars and, at the same time, a commercial apprenticeship at the Büsch Institute. He finished this in March 1929 as the best of his class with the award-winning work “Von der Reklame”.

In October 1929 he accepted a position as an assistant at Ruscheweyh AG in Langenöls, founded by Robert Ruscheweyh . At the time, the company was one of the leading German furniture manufacturers, for which Barnekow set up an export department in Hamburg. After the seizure of power in early 1933 , the Jewish owners moved to France , whereupon the company went bankrupt . The now unemployed Barnekow initially worked as a self-employed furniture salesman, helped build Erwin Hass's Hamburg furniture wholesaler in the mid-1930s and later became the sole owner of the company. Since Barnekow managed the company successfully and advocated a new representation of interests alongside the already existing associations, conflicts arose with leading furniture retailers who, with the support of Reich ministries, succeeded in restricting wholesalers that were not yet established at the time.

Barnekow repeatedly criticized economic policy decisions of the National Socialist authorities and was detained in Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp from July 1938 and later in the remand prison after he had previously been denounced by competitors as an enemy of the regime. Barnekow was released from custody less than a year later and the economic criminal proceedings against him were discontinued at the end of 1939. Barnekow tried to rebuild the company, but initially had little success, also because he was drafted as a soldier in the Wehrmacht in 1942.

After the end of the Second World War , Barnekow opened a furniture store in Hamburg-Altona . The company called KUBAH ( Ku rt Ba rnekow H amburg) subsequently became known nationwide, also because Barnekow had excellent language skills and was able to establish good contacts with the British military government . From 1948 onwards, Barnekow initially offered frequently discussed installment purchases , made them known through advertising campaigns that attracted attention throughout Germany and thus became a pioneer in buying in installments. In 1949 the company opened a branch in Kiel and a production facility for series furniture in Wedel , which, due to the high technical standards, was soon viewed as exemplary for the industrialization of the branch. At the end of the 1950s, KUBAH had almost 400 employees. In addition to the manufacture and sale of furniture, Barnekow opened what was then a new and controversial carpet wholesaler in the mid-1960s.

In 1970 Barnekow stopped producing furniture in Wedel and concentrated on retailing furniture, which he had given up a few years earlier. He founded a flourishing shopping center in Wedel and opened a branch in Hamburg-Ochsenzoll in 1975 . After 1975, the entrepreneur became known throughout Germany for his exploration of new marketing strategies for leading furniture retailers such as IKEA . In 1986 he gave up the furniture trade and ten years later the remaining companies.

literature

• Josef Schmid: Barnekow, Kurt . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 3 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , p. 29-30 .