Philipp Rosenthal

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Logo of the Rosenthal company

Philipp Rosenthal (born March 6, 1855 in Werl , † March 30, 1937 in Bonn ) was a German designer and industrialist .

Life

Rosenthal was the son of the porcelain dealer Abraham Rosenthal and Emilie Rosenthal, b. Meyer, and father of Philip Rosenthal and stepfather of Udo Franck-Rosenthal. Rosenthal was trained in his father's company and at the age of 18 went to the United States , where, after some auxiliary work, he became a porcelain buyer for the Detroit porcelain import company Jacob Meyer Brothers . On his business trips, he soon discovered that painted porcelain, as the American company was looking for, was in short supply. Therefore, in 1879, he decided to return to Germany and open a porcelain painting workshop. He began with two painters in Schloss Erkersreuth , for which he obtained white porcelain from the Lorenz Hutschenreuther porcelain factory in neighboring Selb . The unexpected breakthrough came with the ashtray "resting place for burning cigars". After a short time, Rosenthal had 60 employees, relocated the company to Selb and opened its own porcelain factory there in 1889. Rosenthal expanded the company through new foundations and acquisitions and converted it into Philipp Rosenthal & Co. AG in 1897 . The next bestseller was the octagonal and twelve-sided porcelain "Maria", which Rosenthal named after his second wife Maria Franck, who was the daughter of the royal lawyer Josef Frank. She had divorced in 1916 in order to be able to marry the much older Rosenthal.

During the Nazi era , the Catholic Rosenthal was ousted from the company because of his Jewish descent. In order not to damage the reputation of the export-strong company abroad, the rulers did not dare to take action directly against him after 1933. In spite of this, Rosenthal had to resign as chairman in 1934. Soon, encouraged by family quarrels, there was an opportunity to put Rosenthal down more inconspicuously. On the one hand, the daughters from their first marriage, Klara and Anna, feared they would miss out on inheritance disputes. On the other hand, Rosenthal granted his stepson extraordinary powers and intended to use him as the guardian of his interests. As a result, the sons of the Rosenthal daughter Anna applied to the court to incapacitate her grandfather. The board members joined the motion when Rosenthal asked them to add his stepson to the board. In 1936 Rosenthal was incapacitated and placed under guardianship. However, in order to be able to declare binding decisions of the dethroned general director null and void, Rosenthal's opponents had the head of the Munich psychiatric and mental hospital draw up a negative report. This summarized all earlier medical reports on February 15, 1937 in the judgment that Rosenthal had been continuously incapacitated since March 12, 1934 "as a result of severe changes in the age of the brain complicated by arterial changes".

In 1950 his son Philip Rosenthal joined Rosenthal AG after his exile in England. The company achieved international importance through its porcelain designed by modern artists such as Henry Moore , Friedensreich Hundertwasser , Salvador Dalí , Ernst Fuchs and HAP Grieshaber .

Leipzig Fair

For the first time in 1879 Rosenthal exhibited at the Leipzig Fair . Participation in the trade fair gave him the opportunity to make his products known around the world with relatively little effort, which resulted in a large increase in export business.

When the Leipzig trade fair came to a standstill after the outbreak of World War I and new trade fairs were launched abroad, he recognized the need to hold the trade fair during the war, as otherwise it would become further isolated and meaningless. As a result, Rosenthal became a committed sponsor of the Leipziger Messe. He strongly advocated the continuation of the trade fair during the war and in 1915 encouraged the establishment of an association of exhibitors and trade fair buyers , the central office for interested parties at Leipziger Messe e. V. , of which he became chairman.

On August 18, 1916, Rosenthal was one of the three signatories of the founding statute of the measurement office for the sample fairs , which began its work on February 8, 1917 and represented the end of the transition phase of the Leipzig fair from the goods to the sample fair . For the spring fair in 1917, Rosenthal formed an economic committee for the German peace industry . He was also significantly involved in integrating the technical fair into the general sample fair. Rosenthal was chairman of the working committee of the Leipzig measuring office.

In honor of his work in Leipzig, the City Council of Leipzig decided on February 6, 1926, to rename the previous Windmühlenweg, which led directly to the new site of the Technical Fair, to Philipp-Rosenthal-Straße during Rosenthal's lifetime. In the time of National Socialism, the street was called Kaiser-Maximilian- Straße since 1936 , on May 19, 1945 it was renamed again Philipp-Rosenthal-Straße.

Exhibitions

literature

  • Wolfgang Schilling:  Rosenthal, Philipp. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 79 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hermann Schreiber u. a .: The Rosenthal Story , Düsseldorf and Vienna 1980.
  • Jürgen Lillteicher : The restitution of Jewish property in West Germany after the Second World War. A study of the experience of persecution, the rule of law and politics of the past 1945–1971. Inaugural dissertation, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg 2002/03.
  • Philipp Abraham Rosenthal (1855–1937) entrepreneur. In: Ekkehard Vollbach: Poets, Thinkers, Directors. Portraits of German Jews , Leipzig: edition chrismon, ISBN 978-3-96038-243-0 , pp. 181–189.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Copy from the birth register for Jews in the Werl judicial district. Landesarchiv NRW, Ostwestfalen-Lippe Department, P 5, No. 175, 1855, accessed on June 27, 2017 .
  2. ^ A b c Horst Riedel: Stadtlexikon Leipzig from A to Z. Pro Leipzig, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-936508-03-8 , p. 510.
  3. ↑ Gina Klank; Gernot Griebsch: Lexicon of Leipzig street names. Verlag im Wissenschaftszentrum Leipzig, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-930433-09-5 , p. 167.
  4. ↑ Philip Rosenthal . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1985, pp. 175 ( Online - Aug. 26, 1985 ).
  5. ↑ Art belongs on the table. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 26, 2016, p. 12.
personal data
SURNAME Rosenthal, Philipp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Werl
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1937
Place of death Bonn