Otto Conc

Otto Friedrich Karl Konz (born May 24, 1875 in Tübingen ; † June 15, 1965 in Stuttgart ) was a German hydraulic engineer who is considered the creator of the Neckar Canal . From 1908, Konz headed the hydrographic office of the ministerial department for road and hydraulic engineering in Stuttgart, which planned the Neckar Canal. From 1917 he was in charge of the sewer construction department and from 1921 as a board member of Neckar Aktiengesellschaft, responsible for carrying out the work. Although he had already retired in 1938, he returned after the Second World War to continue to rebuild the destroyed Neckar bridges and continue the Neckar canalization as head of the Southwest German Canal Construction Association and President of the Stuttgart Waterways Directorate.

Life

origin

Otto Konz was born in Tübingen in 1875 as the first of four children of the baker and innkeeper Gottlieb Christoph Konz (1848–1916) and his wife Luise Ernestine (1849–1905). He attended the Realschule in Tübingen, then from 1891 the Oberrealschule in Reutlingen and from 1893 to 1897 the Technical University of Stuttgart , where after seven semesters he passed the first state examination in civil engineering with the title of government building supervisor ( trainee lawyer ). During his studies in 1893 he became a member of the Ulmia Stuttgart fraternity . Immediately after the exam, in May 1897, Karl von Leibbrand , the President of the Württemberg ministerial department for road and hydraulic engineering, assigned him to the road construction inspection in Ellwangen as assistant to construction officer Stapf. Here he was initially entrusted with the planning of road construction projects . In November 1899, Konz was transferred to the road construction inspection in Calw , where he was the construction manager for the improvement of the state road from Calw to Pforzheim . From March to July 1900, Konz came to the higher authority, the ministerial department for road and hydraulic engineering in Stuttgart. He then prepared in Tübingen for the second state examination, which included the planning of a dam in the catchment area of ​​the Enz above Wildbad.

Young government builder

From March 1901, the newly qualified government architect ( Assessor ) Konz was independently commissioned to plan a new road between Gechingen and Gärtringen . From September 1901 to June 1902 he planned the improvement of the Nagoldtalstraße and in the late summer of 1902 he was entrusted with safety measures for the Kochertal near Künzelsau, which was partially devastated as a result of a storm . From autumn 1902 to July 1903 he was assigned to the road construction inspection in Cannstatt to plan the relocation of the state road 42 Stuttgart - Ulm with new bridges and changes to the course of the Neckar near Plochingen . Then until June 1905 he supervised the implementation of this work.

On July 8, 1903, Konz married Antonie Weißenburger (born August 11, 1880 in Cannstatt; † March 2, 1966). The young couple rented a new building near Plochingen. On April 30, 1904, their son Fritz was born.

Konz's life's work: The Neckar Canal

In September 1905, Konz was transferred to the hydrographic office of the ministerial department for road and hydraulic engineering, where he came into contact with his actual life's work: the construction of a major shipping lane on the Neckar between Mannheim and Heilbronn and on to Plochingen . In the course of the initial planning, a study trip lasting several days took place in September 1906 to inspect barrages and lock systems on the canalized Vltava and the upper Elbe as well as the first roller weirs on the Main in Schweinfurt .

On May 11, 1908, Konz was appointed head of the hydrographic office. In addition to drafting and dealing with water law issues, Konz's tasks also included participating in government negotiations between Bavaria , Prussia , Alsace and Württemberg in 1910 on the introduction of shipping taxes. After five and a half years, the technical commission was able to submit a final report on February 17, 1911 with a construction draft for a 113 km long canalization of the Neckar. From 1909 to 1912, Konz was also a technical advisor to the Stuttgart city office for the tasks of water management there .

In May 1912, Konz moved with his family to Cannstatt. In the same year he was appointed deputy director of the Ulm Road and Hydraulic Engineering Inspectorate for six months , where he managed the repair of the Iller between Ferthofen and Ulm, which was badly damaged by flooding . At the urging of the President of the Ministerial Department, he reluctantly applied for the unpopular position of technical councilor in the government of the Black Forest District in Reutlingen , to which he was unexpectedly appointed, so that he and his family moved there in January 1913. The purely bureaucratic civil servant activity was not much fun for Konz and became all the more stressful when his three employees were drafted into the army in the summer of 1914. The war pushed the idea of ​​the Neckar Canal into the background, and more than four years passed in Reutlingen before Konz could return to expanding the Neckar.

Head of the Canal Construction Office and Neckar AG

While Konz was still a government official, the Südwestdeutsche Kanalverein founded in 1916 under its chairman Peter Bruckmann successfully promoted the implementation of the Neckar canalization with the Baden and Württemberg governments with a significant reduction in the number of locks planned in the 1911 draft. In October 1917, the Stuttgart ministerial department set up a sewer construction office, the head of which was Konz, who, due to the war, had to continue his Reutlingen work three days a week until April 1918 and these strenuous five months of commuting between Stuttgart and Reutlingen as saw the worst part of his career. By September 1919, a draft for the canalization of the Neckar for operation with 1200-tonne ships from Mannheim to Plochingen with 34 barrages and 35 locks was made, which could be simplified to 26 barrages and 26 locks by 1921, including the Mannheim– Heilbronn 12 and on the Heilbronn – Plochingen 14 barrages and locks were eliminated. In addition to planning aspects, Konz also took part in the negotiations between the states on the transition of the waterway to the ownership and administration of the empire. On April 1, 1920 he was appointed senior building officer in Württemberg.

On August 4, 1920, the Neckar Building Directorate, based in Heilbronn, was directly subordinate to the Reich Ministry of Transport . The rented office space was located in the administration building of the Heilbronn company Knorr .

In 1920, Konz undertook a tour of the newer North German shipping routes, from where he brought with him important ideas for the construction of more effective and safer locks, which could already be implemented with the third new lock in Ladenburg-Feudenheim.

After the founding of Neckar Aktiengesellschaft , on July 2, 1921, Konz became its provisional board member alongside Otto Hirsch , and the founding meeting formally elected the two of them to the office despite a hundred other applicants. At the beginning of March 1922, the official headquarters of the Neckar Building Directorate were relocated from Heilbronn to Stuttgart to a property rented by Count Zeppelin's heirs in Herdweg, from where the expansion of the Neckar Canal and the construction of weirs based on designs by Paul Bonatz were coordinated.

The Hirschhorn barrage is one of the Neckar weirs between Mannheim and Heilbronn, which was completed between eleven and 1935

The inflation and the economic misery of the 1920s had an impact on the channel construction projects: The construction already started barrages was temporarily shut down and Konz fell occasionally in labor disputes. Numerous disagreements also flared up about the details of the canalization: In Heidelberg there were concerns about the planned canalization, which earned Konz the nickname "Melac II" after the city who destroyed the city. In Wimpfen he was (innocently) suspected of having set fire to the old Wimpfen mill on New Year's Eve 1929, as the fire accelerated the ongoing compensation negotiations due to the lack of a flow gradient due to the damming of the Neckar. In Cannstatt, the Neckar work impaired the filling of the mineral springs there, so that the Mayor of Cannstatt, Lautenschlager Konz, threatened to have it hung up if the springs dried up.

In 1925, Konz was offered the chair for hydraulic engineering at the Technical University of Stuttgart, which he had to refuse for reasons of time, although this activity would have appealed to him. On the occasion of the centenary of the technical university in 1929 he was awarded an honorary doctorate as a doctoral engineer . Lecture tours have taken him to numerous cities in Württemberg, Switzerland and Austria. From 1929 to 1933 he was deputy chairman of the Association of German Engineers (VDI), as such he succeeded in March 1933 in avoiding Gottfried Feder's appointment as VDI chairman in favor of a moderate party and VDI member , which the NSDAP demanded .

Since Konz was skeptical of the National Socialists, he was given leave of absence on June 2, 1933 until further notice, but was able to return to the Neckar Building Directorate in October 1933, which celebrated the completion of the first eleven Neckar barrages from Mannheim to Heilbronn-Unterwasser in 1935. Since Konz's wife was classified as "non-Aryan", Konz was denigrated variously in publications by the Gauamt für Technik. In May 1937, he applied to Berlin for his temporary retirement. This application was initially not granted for half a year, but the denigrations ended.

First retirement from 1938

When Otto Konz finally retired on April 1, 1938, he remained with the Neckar and its administration as a freelancer in the planning of a Neckar-Danube Canal in 1938/1940 and a Danube-Lake Constance Canal in 1940/1942 . Admittedly, work on ongoing construction projects came to a standstill in the course of the war. In the winter of 1942/1943, Konz completely distanced himself from further projects of the Neckar Construction Office, which was now almost completely occupied by party comrades, and its often inexperienced representatives, who were high in the party hierarchy. After the air raids on Stuttgart , the party tried to expel him from his unscathed house on the Sonnenberg , which he successfully opposed.

Resumption of the canal construction

Immediately after the end of the war, the new Stuttgart mayor, Arnulf Klett, commissioned him on May 7, 1945 to chair the Southwest German Canal Association, whose main task was to clear the bridges from the Neckar bed that had been destroyed in the urban area and to build new ones. Konz took on this task on a voluntary basis from rooms in the tower of the Stuttgarter Tagblatt. On July 17, 1945, the American occupation troops Konz offered the management of a new general waterway directorate for all waterways in the American occupation zone , which Otto Konz and, after him, his son Fritz refused. On October 25, 1945, a volunteer bridge advisory board was appointed under Konz, to which all drafts of new bridges in Württemberg that had already been built since the end of the war were to be submitted. The supervisory area of ​​this advisory board, which existed until December 1949, was later extended to include northern Baden. On November 9, 1945, the Americans even offered Konz the management of all waterways in all four occupation zones, which Konz decidedly refused in view of his age of now 70 years despite the prospect of "salary as desired".

When the Americans were about to confiscate the assets of Neckar Aktiengesellschaft in December 1945 , Konz agreed to assume responsibility for the continuation of operations as trustee . He found some of the buildings that he had begun in 1938 and that had survived the war, still unfinished, and had to take urgent measures to safeguard the buildings so that the buildings were not destroyed by ice and floods. In addition, there were old claims from companies that had to be paid off. In the course of 1946, Konz formed the Neckar-Aktiengesellschaft advisory board with the Württemberg transport minister and men from the state and business. By the end of 1946 he succeeded in liberating the company from Allied asset control, with which Neckar Aktiengesellschaft was able to resume its business in January 1947 with the election of a new supervisory board, and Konz's activity as a trustee ended. At the same time he was appointed to the executive board of the supervisory board.

President of the Waterways Directorate

In November 1946, Konz also agreed to take over the management and reopening of the Stuttgart Waterways Directorate. At first he had rejected this request of the head of the head office of the inland navigation of the American and British occupation areas, von Feeden, again because of his old age. Under the impression of the joy of reuniting with old acquaintances on a Neckar inspection trip organized by Feeden from Stuttgart to Gundelsheim, he nevertheless agreed. He was officially appointed President of the Stuttgart Waterways Directorate on February 1, 1948. Otto Konz held this office until June 30, 1949, before he was retired from civil service for the second time.

Second retirement, honors and death

On January 28, 1952, on the occasion of his resignation from the management board of Neckar Aktiengesellschaft , he was presented with the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany , which had already been awarded on December 28, 1951 . In the same year the Neckar Canal to Stuttgart was completed. Until January 31, 1953, Konz was a member of the Supervisory Board of Neckar Aktiengesellschaft . He then worked on plans for the Stuttgart port, which was completed by 1958 . In 1955 he was awarded the title of professor ( titular professorship ) by the Stuttgart state government , in 1958 he received the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Konz held the office of chairman of the Southwest German Canal Association until March 15, 1963, on that day he was appointed an honorary member for life.

A celebration for his 90th birthday in May 1965 had to be canceled due to a cold and hospitalization. When Konz wanted to leave the hospital on June 15, 1965 for a board meeting, he died unexpectedly. He never saw the completion of the Neckar Canal, which has ended in Plochingen since 1968. His grave is in the forest cemetery in Stuttgart-Degerloch .

In Stuttgart, Heilbronn and Plochingen an Otto-Konz bridge is named after the planner of the Neckar Canal, in Bietigheim, Lauffen and Esslingen an Otto-Konz-Straße , in Ludwigsburg the Otto-Konz-Weg .

literature

• Otto Konz: Memoirs . Wittwer, Stuttgart 1967
• Arthur Röhnisch:  Otto Konz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 561 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Directory of the old men of the German fraternity. Überlingen am Bodensee 1920, p. 227.

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Konz in the catalog of the German National Library