Oskar Abisch

Oskar Abisch (born January 10, 1886 in Sniatyn , † December 18, 1948 in London ) was a German civil engineer and structural engineer.

Life

Oskar Abisch, originally probably Osias Abisch , moved with his family to Kutten in his youth and attended a yeshiva until 1906 . He then studied at the Technical University in Berlin -Charlottenburg and graduated with a diploma. His fiancée Toni (Taube) Tannenzapf, who had moved to Berlin with him, attended a boarding school in Berlin at the end of her schooling. In 1908 the couple married in frocks. The daughter Erna was born in 1912, the son Heinz followed in 1916.

Oskar Abisch passed the preliminary examination for a doctorate at the Technical University of Aachen in 1914 , but then volunteered for the military. However, he did not remain a soldier for long because of weak lungs. In the first years of the war he still lived in Charlottenburg, but found a job in Aachen in 1916 and received his doctorate there in 1919 under Gustav Schimpff with the thesis The multiple supported frame with rigid connections between beams and columns . In 1922 he moved to Cologne , where he became self-employed in 1924 or 1925 as a consulting engineer for steel and bridge construction.

Abisch, who employed up to eight engineers in his office, initially lived with his family in Gotenring 16 in Deutz , where he also had his office until 1928. Then he moved the office to Gotenring 1 and soon afterwards to the Goldschmidt house with the address Domkloster 1. He acquired the villa Aachener Str. 675 / Am Morsdorfer Hof in Braunsfeld , apparently very successful, for residential purposes . He lived there with his family from 1930 until he emigrated. In 1931 he was accepted into the AIV, but in 1937 this membership was revoked for racial reasons. In 1934 or 1935 he moved his office to the Ring-Haus at Hohenzollernring 22-24. He himself supplied the static calculations for this building. He was forced to move because his office was blocked during a National Socialist event. In 1937, after his orders had apparently declined, he moved his smaller office to 30 Habsburgerring.

Oskar Abisch's daughter married in Kraków in 1935 and later lived in Israel . He was looking for work permits for his son and himself in Great Britain; there he found out about the Reichspogromnacht . Nevertheless, he returned to his wife and son in Cologne and was arrested two days later. After the work permit was received from England, he was released from prison, but was ordered to leave Germany by the end of 1938. He was forced to sell his house, and most of the proceeds were paid into a blocked mark account. Abisch was able to emigrate with his wife and with the furniture; his son and daughter-in-law had already found accommodation in London beforehand. Through the mediation of a director of the Krupp company , Oskar Abisch received an order from the Blueband margarine factory , which was followed by further orders, so that Abisch was soon able to open an engineering office in London. In 1939 and 1940 he applied for a patent each together with an English company. He had to close his office again when the Second World War broke out; but he was not interned and could still do smaller jobs from his home. In 1947 he was naturalized.

The Oscar-Abisch-Weg has been named after Oskar Abisch in Cologne since 2006. The exhibition Cologne and his Jewish architects of the NS Documentation Center in Cologne in 2010 commemorated Abisch and many of his colleagues .

buildings

Abisch was involved in the planning of various important buildings. These included the parcel distribution hall of the Cologne main post office in Cologne's old town, the Ringhaus with Ufa Palace at Hohenzollernring 22–24 / Friesenwall 21–25a, the Fordwerke Niehl , a hall construction in Cologne's old town in Schwalbengasse, the reinforcement of the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, likewise the reinforcement of the south bridge , in Frechen a large-capacity bunker and a briquette stacking hall for IG Farben , a railway bridge in Mannheim and various buildings for Krupp in Essen .

literature

• Wolfram Hagspiel, Cologne and his Jewish architects , Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-7616-2294-0 , pp. 17-27.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The London Gazette , January 16, 1948, p. 411 ( www.thegazette.co.uk , accessed April 25, 2016.)
2. ↑ Remembrance of what was once diverse work. Wolfgang Hagspiel on important Jewish architects in Cologne , Gemeindeblatt, December 2006, p. 26 ( PDF at www.sgk.de , accessed on April 25, 2016)
3. ^ Exhibition builds a bridge in the past , Cologne News , May 27, 2010, on koeln-nachrichten.de ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed April 25, 2016.