Mechanical weaving (Hanover)
seen from about the height of the kitchen garden in the direction of Blumenauer Strasse, around 1910
The mechanical weaving mill in Hanover was a weaving mill that was founded in 1837 as the first company of its kind in Europe. Later it was also the largest company here. Mechanical weaving, alongside the factories of Johann and Georg Egestorff, was one of the engines of industrialization in the Kingdom of Hanover . The "Lindener Velvet " produced on the Ihme in Linden became world famous . The company existed until 1961. After the last factory building was demolished in 1972, the Ihmezentrum was built in its place .
history
19th century
Photograph (detail) from 1890
The “mechanical” weaving mill was founded in 1837 by the bankers Adolph Meyer and Alexander Abraham Cohen and the soon-to-be-retired businessmen Carl Domeyer and Georg Wessel . Machine-driven fabric production on a large scale was intended to rationalize human labor, as was previously done by whole families on small, wooden looms in "home work", for example in Weberstrasse in Hanover . The company was relocated between Ihme and Blumenauer Strasse because of the large amount of water it consumed . The first looms, which were only suitable for coarse fabrics, came from Alsace and initially caused difficulties. In 1840 and 1844 the mechanical weaving mill was awarded gold medals for its products. The factory was boosted by modern looms from England from the end of the 1840s: in 1852 the company had 108 employees, most of them women.
In 1857/58 the company was converted into a stock corporation, the production facilities were enlarged by remarkable industrial buildings by the architect Ludwig Debo .
After the shortage of raw materials caused by the American Civil War , Wilhelm Berding (1833–1918) took over the management of the AG in 1865; especially the production of cotton velvet was expanded; now the triumphant advance of the "Lindener Samt" (Velvet) began.
In the 1870s the company won awards at exhibitions in Vienna (where it was the only company from the now Prussian province of Hanover to receive an honorary diploma), Philadelphia and Hanover.
In 1871/72 an own workers' colony was built between Pfarrlandstrasse and Velvetstrasse , consisting of 27 semi-detached houses, each with a small garden. The former settlement on today's Pfarrlandplatz was demolished in 1970 in favor of the construction of the Werner-Blumenberg-Haus senior citizens ' home .
While other companies in England still produced separately as weaving , tailoring , dyeing or finishing , the mechanical weaving combined these branches of business with the success of a consistently high quality. In 1874, the company was already the largest manufacturer of its kind on the European continent: around 1,500 people were employed here, including 787 men, 592 women, 31 girls and 22 boys. By 1885, the total number of employees had doubled to around 3,000, including a large number of immigrants from Eichsfeld , the Harz and the East Elbe region .
In 1890 the mechanical weaving mill was one of the largest industrial companies in Hanover, with the company headquarters at the time in the neighboring village of Linden. Every year around 7,000,000 meters of velvet and around 1 million meters of "English leather" (a type of fabric leather) were produced. However, the production led as well as the north of Spinnereistraße neighboring Hanover cotton spinning and weaving into a strong pollution of Ihme and Leine .
20th century
In 1902 the mechanical cotton spinning and linen weaving mill in Ludwigshafen am Rhein in Oggersheim was taken over, and later three more. In 1913 the manufacturing site between the Black Bear and the Leinert Bridge (later named as it was) had an area of around 10 hectares. A further possibility of expansion at the location was not possible because the area was closely surrounded by residential buildings. In the same year, according to self-promotion "factory of the famous Lindener clothes employed velvets , Velvets , velveteens, Cords and Moleskins " about 2,400 people.
In 1929, the year of the Great Depression, mechanical weaving also ran into considerable internal and external difficulties. In 1932 a settlement procedure had to be carried out. It was not until 1934 that operations could be resumed, albeit on a modest scale. The air raids on Hanover in the Second World War resulted in the almost complete destruction of the company.
In the years of reconstruction it was possible to resume operations with funds from the Marshall Plan , the federal government and the state of Lower Saxony , but to a much smaller extent in the legal form of a GmbH . Although the "Lindener Velvet" was produced again for the domestic market and exported abroad, it was not possible to build on earlier achievements and importance: in 1961 the factory was shut down. The rest of the buildings in the Linden-Mitte district were demolished in 1972 to build the Ihmezentrum there.
literature
- Town Hall Festschrift 1913, p. 93
- Hanover / Big City in the Green , p. 265f.
- Helmuth Plath , Herbert Mundhenke , Ewald Brix : Heimatchronik der Stadt Hannover , Cologne 1956, p. 384f.
- Albert Lefèvre: The contribution of the Hanoverian industry to technical progress. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series 24 (1970), pp. 163-298, here: pp. 296f.
- Walter Buschmann : Linden trees. History of an industrial city in the 19th century. In: Sources and representations on the history of Lower Saxony , vol. 75, Hildesheim 1981, pp. 80–84 u. ö.
- Ludwig Hoerner : agents, bathers and copists. Hannoversches Gewerbe-ABC 1800-1900 , ed. from Volksbank Hannover , Hannover 1995, pp. 35-39
- A. Kühn, I. Thörner: The mechanical weaving mill in Linden , 1988
- Waldemar R. Röhrbein : Mechanical weaving. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 434.
Web links
- Postcards with a factory view as well as a historical aerial photo of the factory and velvet clothing - Andreas-Andrew Bornemann (private) - at www.postkarten-archiv.de
- Building sketch of the factory - Andreas-Andrew Bornemann (private) - on www.postkarten-archiv.de
- Early documents and newspaper articles on mechanical weaving in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Coordinates: 52 ° 22 '14.4 " N , 9 ° 43' 2.2" E