Peter Paul Gaedt

Peter Paul Gaedt (born November 15, 1867 in Rostock , † January 23, 1948 in Glauchau ) was a trained plumber . When he married the daughter of the cutlery manufacturer Carl August Wellner from Aue, he first became a co-owner of the Wellner company and later its general manager. He played a major role in the successful continuation of the company after the death of the company founder.

Life

Peter Paul Gaedt's grandparents and parents came from Rostock. Grandfather and father were tanners there and had a tannery at the tannery. Due to the declining trade, the son completed an apprenticeship as a plumber after graduating from school . Afterwards Paul Gaedt joined the then usual companions - years of travel , which it on 2 January 1890 onwards Aue led. Here he found work in the sheet metal and metal goods factory Max Böhme and made the acquaintance of the sons Ernst and Hermann of the factory owner Carl August Wellner . This led to a relationship with Carl August's daughter Ida Marie. Gaedt gave up his position at Max Böhme and from then on worked at Wellner .

After becoming engaged to Ida Marie in 1890, Gaedt continued his wandering on behalf of his future father-in-law, primarily to acquire special knowledge as a belt maker. He came to Vienna via Karlsbad and Prague . A relative found Paul Gaedt a job here at the cutlery company Arthur Krupp, which was founded in 1843 . He got to know modern cutlery manufacturing processes and then wanted to perfect this knowledge at Christofle in Paris . However, Carl August Wellner called Gaedt back to Aue that same year because his son Hermann had died of blood poisoning. Hermann Wellner had carried out accounting and administrative tasks in his father's company, which were now transferred to Gaedt from 1891. On October 3rd, 1891 Paul Gaedt married Ida Marie Wellner and became a co-owner of the meanwhile prosperous cutlery factory. The couple lived in neighboring Schneeberg for a year , and in October 1892 they moved to Aue.

Economic difficulties that threatened the Wellner company due to an existing sole agency agreement with an entrepreneur from Leipzig were overcome on Gaedt's initiative: The previous company August Wellner was deleted from the commercial register in 1892 and re-entered as the new establishment of Sächsische Metallwarenfabrik August Wellner & Söhne . The open-ended agency contract was thus invalid. This was an important step for the continued existence and economic and material expansion of the company. In a later commemorative publication from 1924 it says: “... [Gaedt could claim the fame for himself,] the founding of his father-in-law was only thorough and, through the creative organization of the commercial and industrial operations, gave the company the bold momentum of its own great soul to have. ”By transferring the power of attorney , Gaedt now received full commercial rights for the Wellner company.

At the age of 71, August Wellner handed over management of the company to his sons and son-in-law in 1895. Gaedt was responsible for the economic part. Under his leadership, new factory buildings were built, machines were purchased and the sales network was expanded throughout Europe. In 1913, Gaedt initiated the transformation of the previous private company into a stock corporation (AG).

In 1912 Gaedt had a house built for his family on a plot of land on Schneeberger Straße , which expressed his love for the Mecklenburg homeland and especially for the poet Fritz Reuter . Apparently Paul Gaedt was also a music lover and art collector, because around 2008 several pictures from his property were auctioned on the Internet, such as an oil painting by Carl Maria von Weber dated 1824 , an oil painting by the painter August Holmberg Munich, in the old abbey or Kneeling Girl in front of cross with skull . Each of the pictures had the note “ Provenance : Peter Paul Gaedt, General Director of the Saxon metal goods factory”.

For the celebrations taking place on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Carl August Wellner, the Gaedt family donated a bronze statue of August Wellner, which bears the inscription “The eternal way to the goal and victory”.

Peter Paul Gaedt was for many years a member of the Chamber of Commerce in Plauen , a commercial judge at the Zwickau Regional Court , at times a city councilor in Aue and a board member of the Auer Higher Commercial School and, from 1926, first chairman of the administrative board of the Higher German Technical School for Metalworking and Installation in Aue.

Gaedt's 60th birthday in 1927 was celebrated with a big party. In the following years of the global economic crisis, Gaedt was able to secure the continuation of the company by obtaining bridging loans from large banking companies. In 1936 Paul Gaedt handed over the management of the company to the previous chairman of the supervisory board, Franz Cramer, who now became general director. Gaedt retired and soon had to take note that the Wellner cutlery factory partially produced war products and was expropriated after the end of the Second World War . His house in Aue and that of his daughter were then confiscated by the Soviet occupying forces . Gaedt first lived in his garden house, later he moved to his daughter's family in Glauchau.

Gaedt had two sons, Werner (who died in adolescence) and Hans Otto Gaedt, who became a member of the supervisory board of August Wellner Söhne in the 1930s, and two daughters. Gaedt's wife Ida Marie died in 1943, and Paul Gaedt also died on January 23, 1948. He is buried in the family grave in Glauchau-Reinholdshain.

One of the descendants of Peter Paul Gaedt is the musician Michael Gaedt, the grandson of Hans Otto Gaedt .

swell

• Information from Jana Hecker, press officer for the city of Aue from May 2009
• Information from family members based on your own documents

literature

• Hans Gaedt:  Gaedt, Peter Paul. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 17 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Festschrift for the 70th birthday of Peter Paul Gaedt
2. ^ Michael Schäfer: Family businesses and entrepreneur families. On the social and economic history of the Saxon entrepreneurs 1850–1940 (= series of publications on the journal for corporate history. Vol. 18). Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56211-2 .
3. ↑ Brief information about an art auction; Retrieved June 6, 2009
4. ↑ Brief info of an art auction - No. 985 with illustration; Retrieved on June 27, 2009 ( Memento of the original from April 1, 2010 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. (PDF; 4.8 MB) 
5. ↑ Brief information about an art auction; Retrieved June 27, 2009
6. ↑ Address book for the cities of Aue, Eibenstock, Lößnitz, Schneeberg and 21 rural communities in this district. 1930, ZDB -ID 2363031-0 , p. VII.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Information from Zschorlau citizen Gerd Reich from Oct. 2009