Martin Christian Luther

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Martin Luther Christian (born April 14 . Jul / 26. April  1883 greg. In Reval ; †  12. March 1963 in Munich ) was a Baltic German entrepreneurs. He was one of the leading Estonian industrialists in the interwar period .

Life and Entrepreneurship

Martin Christian Luther was born as the son of the Baltic German industrialist Christian Wilhelm Luther (1857–1914) and his wife Helen Luther (née Greiffenhagen) in the Estonian capital Tallinn (German Reval ). His great-great-grandfather Georg Christian Luther emigrated from Wroclaw in Silesia to Tallinn in 1742 and laid the foundation for the successful family business in Estonia .

Martin Christian Luther first attended secondary school (at that time Ревельское Петровское Реальное училище ) in Tallinn and studied in Hamburg from 1902 to 1904 . He also received training in England and France.

The former factory building of the furniture company AM Luther in Tallinn's Veerenni district

He then worked for the A. M. Luther corporation , which his father Christian Wilhelm Luther and his uncle Carl Wilhelm Luther (1859–1903) had founded in 1898. The veneer factory was one of the largest companies in Estonia and a leader in furniture manufacturing. Martin Christian Luther stood for the further expansion of the company and the development of new markets abroad.

From the death of his father in 1914, Martin Christian Luther was co-owner and director of the furniture factory. In 1915 he founded the Faner company in Lohja, Finland . He launched the Lignum company for the Latvian market in Bolderāja ( Bolderaa ) near Riga .

He was also involved in numerous other companies, such as the tobacco company Laferme and the Estonian airline Aeronaut . He was a co-owner of the English furniture and sales company Venesta Ldt, founded in London in 1897 . and until 1939 member of the supervisory board of the "Baltic Cotton Spinning and Weaving Ltd." ( Balti Puuvilla Ketramise ja Kudumise Vabrik AS ) founded at the end of the 19th century .

Martin Christian Luther headed numerous Estonian business associations. From 1917 to 1938 he was President of the Estonian Manufacturers' Association founded in 1917. From 1925 to 1933, Luther was the chairman of the large-scale industry department of the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Later he was a member of the plenary session of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Luther was also a member of the supervisory board of the Estonian Central Bank ( Eesti Pank ) and of the private banking house G. Scheel & Co, founded in 1884 . Luther was the last elder of the Great Guild in Reval. He was also President of the Church Council of St. Nicholas Church in Tallinn and Commodore of the Estonian Sea Yacht Club.

Politician

Luther was also politically active. As a steward of the Estonian government, he took part as an expert at international conferences and in 1926 at the meeting of the League of Nations . As a representative of the Baltic German minority, Luther was elected to the Estonian parliament ( Riigikogu ) in the parliamentary elections in 1923 . He was a member of the board and one of the three members of the German-Baltic Party in Estonia , but renounced his parliamentary mandate that same year.

Resettlement of the Baltic Germans

Shortly after the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, which in its secret additional protocol left Estonia to the Soviet sphere of interest, Luther emigrated from the Baltic States in March 1940 as the Baltic Germans were resettled . He lived in the Warthegau . During the German occupation of Estonia, he temporarily returned to his homeland from 1941 to 1944 before finally settling in Germany.

This also ended the more than 150-year-old entrepreneurial activity of the Luther family in the Baltic States . With the subsequent Soviet occupation of Estonia, the companies were nationalized and continued as planned economy units.

After Estonian independence was regained, the wife of Luther's son, Dorothea Luther, and his grandson Yens Marsen Luther tried to regain ownership of several former company properties. Most of them failed with their lawsuits, but received a sum of money as compensation.

Private life

Martin Christian Luther married Yvonne Sieger in Tallinn in January 1909. The marriage ended in divorce in 1916. In January 1917 Luther married his second wife Franziska, née Varenhorst, divorced Irschick, in Tallinn.

literature

  • Mads Ole Balling: From Reval to Bucharest - Statistical-Biographical Handbook of the Parliamentarians of the German Minorities in East Central and Southeastern Europe 1919-1945, Volume 1, 2nd Edition . Copenhagen 1991, ISBN 87-983829-3-4 , pp. 125 .
  • Eesti elulood. Tallinn: Eesti entsüklopeediakirjastus 2000 (= Eesti Entsüklopeedia 14) ISBN 9985-70-064-3 , p. 263.
  • Genealogia Lutherorum rediviva, or, News about the Luther Family in Estonia and Russia. Total from Robert Luther ; supplemented and annotated by Carl Russwurm . Reval 1883.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ AS TORMOLEN & KO 1920-1940 on raadiotuba.and.ee
  2. ^ Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Martin Christian Luther. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital
personal data
SURNAME Luther, Martin Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Estonian entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Tallinn
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1963
Place of death Munich