Louis Kniffler

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Louis Kniffler , baptized Franz Ludwig Albert Kniffler (born January 14, 1827 in Wetzlar ; † May 20, 1888 in Düsseldorf ), was a German businessman and entrepreneur in Japan in the late Edo period and in Düsseldorf. From 1861 to 1865 he was the Prussian Vice Consul in Nagasaki , making him the first consular officer of the Kingdom of Prussia in Japan. He is considered a pioneer of German-Japanese relations .

Life

Dejima near Nagasaki in Japan , around 1864, photograph by Felice Beato depicting the row of buildings on the bank in which Louis Kiffler had started German-Japanese trade in his residential and commercial building with his trading house L. Kniffler & Co., founded in 1859 (center )

Kniffler was born as the third child of tax inspector Franz Tillmann Kniffler and his wife Maria, b. Stein, born in Wetzlar, then part of the Prussian Rhine Province . In Düsseldorf, where the family had moved a year and a half after his birth, the Knifflers lived in the house at Flinger Steinweg 212 (today Schadowstraße 75). 1850 Kniffler went to Hamburg in order for the company & Co. Bollhagen to work. This company had business relationships with the likewise German company Pandel & Stiehaus in Batavia , Dutch East Indies . In 1853 Kniffler moved to Pandel & Stiehaus in Batavia, and in 1857 he became their partner.

In 1859, at the time of the opening of Japan , which had been enforced in 1853 by the so-called Black Ships of the US naval officer Matthew Calbraith Perry and formally initiated with the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 , Kniffler moved with his colleague Martin Gildemeister (1836-1918) to Japan after suffering a sizeable loss on a deal at his old company. On July 1, 1859, he founded the Japanese trading company L. Kniffler & Co. on the island of Dejima off Nagasaki under Dutch protectorate , the first company in Japan to be founded by a German. With branches in London , Amsterdam , Nagasaki, Yokohama , Hakodate and Kobe as well as contract agencies in Osaka and Niigata , it soon established itself as the most successful German trading company in this country. The global company was at times so successful was that reported 50 percent of the tonnage of 1,865 arriving in Yokohama ships would for L. Kniffler & Co. have been determined. Through his brother Karl in Krefeld , Kniffler maintained intensive business contacts with the up-and-coming industry on the Rhine and Ruhr and helped them sell goods on the Japanese market.

As the first German merchant in the districts of Japan open to foreigners and thus as a pioneer of German-Japanese trade relations, Kniffler worked with the Prussian government in Berlin to conclude a Prussian-Japanese trade agreement in order to protect the legal situation of Prussian companies in what was then still largely isolated To improve land . In the course of the Prussian East Asia expedition (1859–1862), a Prussian-Japanese trade and shipping agreement was signed on January 24, 1861. In the same year Kniffler became the Prussian Vice Consul in Nagasaki and thus the first permanent diplomatic representative of a German state in Japan. As early as 1860, 14 Hamburg merchants campaigned in vain to appoint Kniffler as Hamburg consul in Japan. Until his departure from Japan at the turn of the year 1865/1866, he remained the only Prussian consular officer in Japan.

After he had given his employee Gustav Reddelien the power of attorney for his Japanese trading company, he settled in the spring of 1866 in Düsseldorf's Goltsteinstrasse 17 to coordinate the business of his company from there. On September 24, 1866, he married Hedwig Pfeffer, the 19-year-old daughter of the doctor Adolf Pfeffer. In 1880 Louis Kniffler retired from active business life. His trading house was continued under the name Carl Illies & Co. by Carl Illies senior , in 1884 in Ratinger Strasse 49, from 1885 in Goltsteinstrasse 15 . Illies had already received the power of attorney of the trading house L. Kniffler & Co. in 1868 . In 1873 he had become its partner. In 1888, after Kniffler's death, the company, which had taken over the management of the German Japanese trade, was relocated to Hamburg. In 1893, Kniffler's widow Hedwig also left the company.

Commemorative plaques at the German-Japanese Center in Düsseldorf

At a ceremony on May 30, 2014 in the plaza of the German-Japanese Center on Immermannstrasse in the city ​​center of Düsseldorf, the center of the local "Japantown" , the Japanese ambassador Takeshi Nakane placed another commemorative plaque in Japanese under a bronze plaque that had already been attached in 1978 Font unveiled to honor Louis Kniffler's importance to German-Japanese trade. Another commemorative plaque was set as a floor slab in the sidewalk in front of his former home at Goltsteinstrasse 15.

literature

  • Kurt Meissner: Germans in Japan. 1639–1960 (= communications from the Society for Nature and Ethnology of East Asia. Supplement. 26, ZDB -ID 404128-8 ). German Society for Nature and Ethnology of East Asia, among others, Tokyo, among others, 1961.
  • Erich Zielke: Consul Louis Kniffler - the pioneer of German trade in Japan. In 1859 he founded the first German company in Japan. In: Journal of Company History . Vol. 25, No. 1, 1980, pp. 1-11, JSTOR 40694686 .
  • Louis Kniffler. (1827-1888). Pioneer of German-Japanese trade. In: nippon news. Vol. 5, winter edition 2008, p. 4, ( digital version (PDF; 483 kB) ).
  • Johannes Bähr , Jörg Lesczenski , Katja Schmidtpott: Trade is change. 150 years of C. Illies & Co. Piper, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-492-05322-8 .
  • Edmund Spohr : Louis Kniffler, the pioneer of the Japanese-German trade. In: Jan Wellem. Vol. 84, No. 2, 2009, ZDB -ID 542756-3 , pp. 2–4, ( digital version (PDF; 3.36 MB) ).

Web links

  • Louis Kniffler , biography in the portal nfs.nias.ac.jp (in English)
  • Dejima District , Louis Kniffler under No. 4 in the list of a tenant directory of the Dejima District, website in the portal nfs.nias.ac.jp (in English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See photo with mark (x) on the website Schleswig-Holstein and Japan: 1543–1853 , accessed on the portal schleswig-holstein-und-japan.de (Jürgen Andersen) on June 12, 2016
  2. ↑ Holmer Stahncke: Diplomatic relations between Germany and Japan. 1854–1868 (= Studies on Modern History. Vol. 33). Steiner-Verlag-Wiesbaden-GmbH, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-515-04618-6 , p. 113, (At the same time: Hamburg, University, dissertation, 1985; Google Books ).
  3. ↑ Kniffler board now also in Japanese . Article from May 12, 2014 in the portal rp-online.de , accessed on June 11, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Kniffler, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kniffler, Franz Ludwig Albert (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH Wetzlar
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 1888
Place of death Dusseldorf