Otto Oppenheimer

Otto Oppenheimer (born September 7, 1875 in Bruchsal , † February 8, 1951 in New York City ) was a Jewish cloth wholesaler in Bruchsal.

Life

Otto Oppenheimer was born in Bruchsal as the seventh and last child of his parents Louis Oppenheimer, born in Michelfeld, and his wife Berta, née Bär, from Untergrombach . He was circumcised in the Bruchsal synagogue . His mother died when he was seven years old. He attended elementary school and the Bruchsal high school . He then probably joined his father's cloth wholesale company at Bahnhofstrasse 4. On April 27, 1901, he celebrated his bachelor party in what was then the Hotel Keller am Bahnhof. It was here that the song he wrote, “Brusler Dorscht”, was performed for the first time. Oppenheimer's friend Hans Albert Ebbecke contributed to the spread of the song through his concert tours through Germany. On May 6, 1901, he married Emma Wälder in Rottweil am Neckar . Their daughters, Suse and Annie, were born in 1903 and 1906.

After the death of his father in 1907, Otto Oppenheimer took over the business. In August 1915 he was drafted into the First World War as a soldier . After that he worked again as managing director. Otto Oppenheimer was a member of the Bruchsal Carnival Society and in 1923 co-founder of the municipal art association . Due to the conditions in National Socialist Germany, Otto Oppenheimer was removed from his position as a member of the advisory board of the Bruchsal penal institutions in April 1933 . In 1938 he had to sell the cloth business and emigrate to Switzerland with his wife .

From there they tried to emigrate to the USA. Presumably they were able to get seats on a passenger ship to Cuba in 1941 . The family traveled to the USA from Havana. They set foot on American soil on December 12, 1941. There they moved into an apartment on Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx , New York .

Otto Oppenheimer died of a heart attack on February 8, 1951 in his Bronx apartment and was buried the next day in Cedar Park Cemetery in Paramus , New Jersey .

Posthumous honor

In 2011, in honor of Otto Oppenheimer, the then wood market at the Technical Town Hall in Bruchsal was renamed Otto-Oppenheimer-Platz. Relatives of Otto Oppenheimer living in the USA took part in the celebration of the renaming.

Works (selection)

The Brusler Dorscht by Otto Oppenheimer

• The Brusler Cod
• Ten small Meckerlein - Modern paraphrase of Ten Little Indians from the "Third Reich".
• What is stilting on the roof there
• For the high school celebration

literature

• Jürgen Stude: History of the Jews in Bruchsal . (= Publications on the history of the city of Bruchsal , Volume 23) Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89735-441-8 .
• Rolf Schmitt: Otto Oppenheimer - A Bruchsal life story at bruchsal.org Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Debate in the municipal council and decision on the renaming ( memento of the original from August 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 25, 2014. 
2. ↑ Memories of Otto Oppenheimer, his brother Jakob and Bruchsal ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (with historical images) on archived copy ( memento of the original from January 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 25, 2014.  
3. ↑ Program for the inauguration of Otto-Oppenheimer-Platz on May 22, 2011 ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 25, 2014. 

Web links

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