Pausa (company)
The Pausa was a German textile company based in Mössingen .
history
The company was founded in 1911 by the Stuttgart brothers Artur and Felix Löwenstein in Pausa in Vogtland . In 1919 the brothers took over the Mössinger weaving mill founded in 1871 and relocated the company there.
In addition to the production of fabrics for everyday use, the company also produced artistically sophisticated decorative fabrics, for which its own printing department was set up in 1921. In order to obtain the designs, she was in contact with the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus . In 1921, the Pausa organized a competition for a printed tablecloth in cooperation with the State Trade Museum in Stuttgart, with the jury mainly composed of members of the German Werkbund such as Adelbert Niemeyer and Gustav Pazaurek .
There was also contact with Emanuel Josef Margold , who had designed a fabric. The Stuttgart architect Richard Herre, who had worked for the company since 1922, designed numerous fabrics for the break. Herre also designed advertisements for the company. At the “Werkbund exhibition of Württemberg products”, which was headed by the Stuttgart architect Richard Döcker , the Pausa exhibited, among other things, decorative fabrics based on designs by Adolf Hölzel . From 1922 to 1925, Döcker built a new building for the hand printing department of the school in Mössingen. A modern shed hall followed in 1928. In 1927 Pausa was also represented at the Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart with its own fabric designs. It is possible that the first contacts with the Bauhaus came about here, possibly also through the Stuttgart couple Lily and Hans Hildebrandt . At the end of the 1920s, three Bauhaus graduates designed fabrics for school breaks: Friedl Dicker (1898–1944), Lisbeth Oestreicher (1902–1989) and the Latvian-born Ljuba Monastirskaja (1906–1941), who was even hired as the head of the weaving design office has been.
In addition to the break, the Bauhaus also worked with other weaving mills to carry out the fabric designs. The Pausa, in turn, requisitioned not only members of the Bauhaus but also employees from other arts and crafts schools.
In 1933, the Pausa workforce played a central role in the Mössing general strike , one of the few protests in Germany against the Nazi seizure of power. In 1936 the Löwenstein brothers were forced to sell their company well below its value and to emigrate. The buyer was the Burkhardt-Greiner group of companies. In 1951 a new company building was built, designed by Manfred Lehmbruck . Up until 1960, the company building was expanded in several phases. As in the prewar period, the company worked with major artists who designed fabric samples, for example with Willi Baumeister and HAP Grieshaber . In 2001 the company had to file for bankruptcy. The company buildings have now been partially restored, and the extensive collection of fabrics has been restored and cataloged.
literature
- Dieter Büchner / Michael Ruhland: Uncompromising consistency in good taste. The textile company Pausa in Mössingen (Tübingen district) , in: Denkmalpflege in Baden-Württemberg Vol. 34 No. 3 (2005), pp. 142–150. ( pdf )
- Dieter Büchner: Endless material. The inventory of the company collection of the textile printing company Pausa in Mössingen , in: Denkmalpflege in Baden-Württemberg, vol. 42, 2013, issue 4, pp. 256-257 ( pdf )
- Dieter Büchner: Bauhaus fabric. The Mössing textile company Pausa and its relationship to the Bauhaus . In: Monument Preservation in Baden-Württemberg, vol. 48, 2019, issue 4, pp. 215–220. ( pdf )
- Grit Koltermann (ed.): Fabrics without end. The collections of the former textile printing company Pausa in Mössingen , Konrad Theiss Verlag, Darmstadt; Regional Council Stuttgart, State Office for Monument Preservation (Workbook 32), Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-8062-3267-7 .
- Anne-Christin Schöne: Bauhaus meets Pausa. The repair and conversion of the workshop building and canteen of the Pausa in Mössingen . In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg, vol. 48, 2019, issue 4, pp. 221–228. ( pdf )
