Oscar Troplowitz

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Oscar Troplowitz

Oscar Troplowitz (born January 18, 1863 in Gliwice , Upper Silesia , † April 27, 1918 in Hamburg ) was a German pharmacist , entrepreneur and patron of the arts .

Life

Gleiwitz, Ring No. 26; The postcard (around 1900) shows the grandparents' wine shop.

Troplowitz was the offspring of the assimilated Jewish family Troplowitz, who lived in Upper Silesia and who ran a wine wholesale business in Gleiwitz and became wealthy. The Troplowitz family was very well known in the city and owned a wine bar on the Ring , the town hall square . Oscar was one of two children of Simon Ludwig (Louis) Troplowitz (1825-1913) and Agnes Mankiewicz (1838-1912), who came from Lissa . The father Louis Troplowitz was a builder and owned his own construction company . He built z. B. 1861 the New Synagogue in Gleiwitz based on the plans of the architect Salomon Lubowski, which was destroyed in the Reichspogromnacht 1938.

In 1870 Oscar Troplowitz moved with his parents from Gleiwitz to Breslau . There he attended the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium and, at the request of his father, completed a three-year apprenticeship as a pharmacist with his uncle, who later became councilor Gustav Mankiewicz. After working as an assistant in Berlin and Poznan , he studied pharmacy from 1884 at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University in Breslau . In 1888 he earned his doctorate in philosophy and master's degree in liberal arts from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . In 1890 he moved to Hamburg , where he bought the "factory of dermotherapeutic preparations" founded by Paul Carl Beiersdorf in 1882 with eleven employees. He continued the collaboration begun by Beiersdorf with Paul Gerson Unna , the nestor of German dermatology , and on his recommendation hired the chemist Isaac Lifschütz , who invented the emulsifier Eucerit . In 1911 he acquired the Eucerit patent from Isaac Lifschütz - by buying the Eucerin factory Hegeler & Brünings AG in Aumund near Bremen . A new type of cream was produced in just a few months: it looked snow-white - its name Nivea was derived from the Latin word “niveus”, meaning snow-white.

Oscar Troplowitz was married to his cousin Gertrud Mankiewicz († 1920); the marriage remained childless.

Franz Nölken: Portrait of Oscar Troplowitz (detail), 1916

In the last decade of his life he developed a strong interest in art after meeting the young Hamburg painter Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann in 1909 , and became a sponsor of Arthur Siebelist students such as Ahlers-Hestermann, Fritz Friedrichs and Franz Nölken , who also portrayed him in 1916 .

When Oscar Troplowitz died of a stroke on April 27, 1918 at the age of only 55, the small factory had already developed into a global company with over five hundred employees. The company was first converted into a GmbH and on June 1, 1922 into a stock corporation. This started the further development into an international company and the targeted expansion into a leading manufacturer of branded goods .

Tomb at the Ohlsdorf cemetery

Troplowitz was buried in the main cemetery Ohlsdorf in Hamburg. The artistically designed grave complex by Fritz Schumacher , which was modeled on his parents' grave in Wroclaw, is a listed building . The sculptor Arthur Bock was involved in both cases .

The Hamburger Kunsthalle received twenty-six paintings with major works by French and German artists of the 19th and 20th centuries from his estate . Highlights of his collection included pictures such as Auguste Renoir's Madame Hériot , Max Liebermann's Eva , Max Slevogt's Fleet at the Hopfenmarkt in Hamburg and the atmospheric landscape panorama of the Seine near Billancourt by Alfred Sisley .

During the Nazi era , Beiersdorf AG was exposed to hate campaigns from party newspapers and competing companies that threatened its existence on several occasions due to the Jewish origins of the founding family and some members of the management - above all the managing director and chairman of the board, Willy Jacobsohn . The descendants of Oscar Troplowitz - alongside Allianz AG and Maxingvest AG - are still the third largest shareholders in the Beiersdorf Group.

The Troplowitzstraße between Hoheluft-West and Lokstedt in the Eimsbüttel district is named after him.

Services

In 1901 Troplowitz developed the medical adhesive bandage, for which he created the term leukoplast . The Labello lip balm followed in 1909 . He introduced the rotating sleeve housing from which the pen is unscrewed for use and then sunk again. At the end of 1911, Troplowitz launched the world's first fat and moisturizing cream - Nivea Creme . The so-called Beiersdorf rubber adhesive film was created in 1896, but it was not until 1936 that it conquered the market under the name Tesa-Film .

Oscar Troplowitz was an enlightened entrepreneur with a strong social mind. He introduced achievements such as a free lunch, a kind of company kindergarten and, as early as 1897, maternity leave . As early as 1912, he was one of the first entrepreneurs in Hamburg to reduce working hours to 48 hours with full wages, paid his workers Christmas and holiday pay and in 1916 founded a pension fund . He could rely on the absolute loyalty of his employees, while Troplowitz's time only one employee quit.

From 1903 Troplowitz was also involved in local politics in Hamburg, he was a member of the building deputation from 1906 to 1917 and also volunteered two days a week for the building authorities.

The Troplowitz Villa, seen from the side of the Alster

In his Hamburg villa, Agnesstraße 1, at the head of the Outer Alster with its idiosyncratic architecture, designed in 1909 by the Berlin architect William Müller , artists came and went in addition to friends, business people and politicians. Oscar Troplowitz, who was interested in art, became a well-known art collector thanks to his prosperous business. He was the first German private collector to purchase a Picasso . Advised by the painter Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann, he bought the painting The Absinthe Drinker ( Buveuse assoupie ) from the artist's Blue Period at the Caspari Gallery in Munich . From 1906 to 1913 the picture was owned by Gertrude Stein , who ran a famous salon for artists and writers in Paris . After Troplowitz's death, his wife initially bequeathed the work to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 1937 it was considered " degenerate ", was confiscated and auctioned in Switzerland in 1941. Today it hangs in the Kunstmuseum Bern .

Diana with dogs , sculpture by Arthur Bock ; It was installed in the city park in 1912 as a gift from the patron.

Troplowitz was also active as a patron outside of his own company. As a founding member of the Stadtpark-Verein, Hamburg owes it to him that there is a city ​​park in the middle of the city . He supported the local Protestant, Catholic and Jewish hospital equally.

Troplowitz was a member of the Left Center parliamentary group in the Hamburg parliament from 1904 to 1910 and was thus a decisive voice in Hamburg's local politics for education, cultural renewal and the beautification of Hamburg in the early 20th century. "With him, two strands came together, the Zedaka commandment and the Hanseatic principle of doing good and not talking about it."

His great niece Dagmar Westberg (1914–2017) was also a patron of art and culture, whose sister Ebba Simon became known as the founder; a great-nephew was ex-Beiersdorf boss Georg Wilhelm Claussen , who died in 2013 at the age of 100 .

Exhibitions

literature

  • Ekkehard Hardly: Oscar Troplowitz. Researchers, entrepreneurs, citizens. Wesche, Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-923968-00-0 .
  • Carsten Meyer-Tönnesmann : The Hamburg artist club from 1897. Publishing house atelier in the farmhouse, Fischerhude 1997, ISBN 3-88132-255-8 .
  • Katrin Cura: From the pharmacy to the chemical factory. 125 years of Beiersdorf. In: Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau , Volume 60, 2007, 11, pp. 579-581, ISSN  0028-1050 .
  • Jesko Dahlmann: Innovative entrepreneurship in the sense of Schumpeter: theory and economic history. Metropolis Verlag, Marburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-7316-1269-8 , pp. 231-271.

Web links

Commons : Oscar Troplowitz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Troplowitz grave complex at Ohlsdorf cemetery , accessed on March 22, 2013
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ [2]
  4. ↑ [3]
  5. ↑ Video with tomb interior views on YouTube
  6. ↑ a b Frank Keil: The man who invented Nivea cream. The Jewish Museum Rendsburg pays tribute to the entrepreneur and patron Oscar Troplowitz.
  7. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt, August 2, 1986, p. 9.
  8. ^ Thomas Buomberger: Looted art - art theft. Switzerland and the trade in stolen cultural goods during the Second World War. Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-280-02807-8 , p. 60 ff.
  9. ↑ A life for Hamburg. Oscar Troplowitz ( Memento from April 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), hamburger-kunsthalle.de, accessed on April 14, 2014
  10. ↑ http://www.dorstenerzeitung.de/staedte/dorsten/Juedisches-Museum-Westfalen-Eine-Ausstellung-ueber-den-Erfinder-der-Nivea-Creme;art914,2304420
personal data
SURNAME Troplowitz, Oscar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pharmacist and entrepreneur, MdHB
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Gleiwitz , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH April 27, 1918
Place of death Hamburg