Rawe (textile)
| B. Rawe & Co | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Limited partnership |
| founding | 1896 as a weaving mill Bernard Rawe & Co |
| Seat | Nordhorn, Germany
|
| Branch | Textile |
B. Rawe & Co. was a Nordhorn spinning and weaving mill . Founded by Bernard Rawe in 1896 as the B. Rawe & Co. weaving mill and as the Bussmaate spinning mill in 1911 , the company, together with Ludwig Povel & Co and NINO AG, also based in Nordhorn, was one of the leading textile companies in the city in the 20th century .
After the renovation measures initiated in 1997 were unsuccessful and the company's last production area also ended in 2001, a shopping center and a hardware store were built on a part of the property and opened in 2007. The area remaining to the west of the city ring only found a new use years later. For almost 10 years, an industrial wasteland with a ruined building remained in the middle of the city center . The new construction around the partially preserved and now listed factory building with water and dust tower, office, turbine and boiler house was completed in 2013.
history
Beginnings
The 22-year-old textile merchant Bernard Rawe (1864–1950) from Münster met Ella Kistemaker at a dance class in 1886, the daughter of the Nordhorn manufacturer Hermann Kistemaker, who he married in 1888 and with whom he settled in Nordhorn. In the same year he became a partner in the mechanical spinning mill Kistemaker founded by his father-in-law and his brother Friedrich, which had emerged in 1871 from the spinning and weaving mill Povel & Kistemaker . The cotton mill, which employed 50 people working on 3000 spindles, was now called Kistemaker & Rawe .
In 1889, Rawe went into business for himself and built a new spinning mill on Hangkamp that had 8,000 spindles and employed 80 workers. In 1890 he founded the company Kistemaker, Rawe & Schlieper with his brother-in-law and son of the same name, his late father-in-law Hermann Kistemaker (1866-1917) and his friend Kurt Schlieper (1868-1953) from Elberfeld , with whom he ran the spinning mill on Hangkamp. In 1896, Nordhorn's only raw nettle weaving mill was added to the business, for the purpose of which the company B. Rawe & Co. was founded, followed in 1911 by cotton spinning mill Bussmaate GmbH , the Rawe with Willem van Delden from Gronau, who was born in Nordhorn, and his son-in-law Engelbert Stroink founded.
The name Bussmaate comes from the plot no.57 of the Bussmaate corridor acquired by farmer Busch from Altendorf for the purpose of building the factory, a field name that was mentioned as early as 1603. The construction work, consisting of a spinning mill building, stair tower, office building, shed hall as well as boiler and turbine house took place from 1911 to 1913.
Ascent
The company quickly became successful. 22,000 spindles were already running here in 1913. By 1938 the number of employees rose from 250 to 1,600.
The Bussmaate spinning mill was built in 1911/1912 according to the plans of the Dutch industrial architect Gerrit Beltman from Enschede and was celebrated by the press: “As a new symbol of the flourishing textile factories, this new industrial palace can also be handed over to its intended purpose”.
Like the other two leading textile companies in Nordhorn, Rawe was involved in the social sector, in particular in the provision of company apartments . The construction of 19 company apartments had begun in 1900, then 155 new apartments were added in 1913 following the factory expansion and the company had 191 apartments in 1921, most of which were in contiguous development in the form of small terraced houses on the area near the factory "Bussmaate" were built. Furthermore, the employees were insured in an in -house health insurance company until the Second World War . This corporate social policy was part of the patriarchal leadership style that was cultivated in all three large Nordhorn textile companies and to which the entrepreneurs stuck into the 20th century. Qualified permanent staff should be bound to the company through various social measures, but at the same time any attempt to represent their interests independently should be prevented by unpopular employees being dismissed without further ado and not reinstated in any company through mutual agreements.
Rawe overcame the consequences of the global economic crisis from 1928 to 1930 relatively unscathed and bought several clothing and linen companies in Rheda , Castrop-Rauxel , Münster and Metelen , which were grouped under the company name Rawe - Rheda / Wiedenbrück . Rawe thus developed into a textile group that combined the entire production from raw fibers to finished goods.
In 1937 a long weaving mill was built behind the spinning mill building along the banks of the Vechte , which enabled Rawe to become the third large company in the Nordhorn textile industry. In 1938 Rudolf Beckmann became managing director and main partner who led the company through the war. It was now mainly women who had to replace the Dutch textile workers who had either been dismissed in the course of the economic crisis in 1930/31 or the German workers who had been drafted for military service. During the Second World War , there was an increasing change in production to meet the needs of the German Wehrmacht , also with the use of forced laborers , in addition to Dutch forced laborers, several hundred women from Ukraine, Belarus and Poland.
After the end of the World War, the British military command appointed Rudolf Beckmann, the managing director, as district administrator for the Grafschaft Bentheim district .
The clothing wave of the post-war period led to a renewed expansion of the Rawe facilities in 1951, but also to layoffs after a textile workers' strike in 1953, which affected the Rawe works councilor Heinz Deymann , at that time one of the leading figures in the Nordhorn KPD .
In 1949 Rawe took part in the New York export fair "Germany 49" together with Niehues & Dütting . While Rawe had around 2000 employees in Nordhorn that year, the number rose to 2600 by 1957.
In the 1950s, the industrialist family Rawe left their extensive parks to the city of Nordhorn, which were redesigned as a publicly accessible city park.
The company mainly produced fabrics for work clothes, underwear, pajamas, nightgowns and aprons. The Westphalian clothing company had a further 1,400 employees.
As of 1962, Rawe sold - as the big Nordhorn competitor NINO had shown - clothing made of Rawe fabrics with the trademark of a raven and the name "Original Rawe" as a branded item . Dresses, shirts and lingerie items were made up in the Rawe-Rheda / Wiedenbrück clothing factories belonging to the company and given the appropriate labels. Annual expensive advertising campaigns should drive sales.
Recession and decline
As a result of the economic recession that began in 1966, which heralded the end of the German economic miracle , Rawe experienced a dramatic decline in sales. The advertising campaigns attracted attention and recognition in the industry, but no longer paid off financially. Soon unsaleable stocks worth several million German marks were stored in Rheda. In 1966, Rawe sold all of the ready-to- wear companies to the Vereinigte Bekleidungswerke R. + A. Becker from Stuttgart , which continued to declare the goods as original Rawe and also sourced ready-made Rawe fabrics in Rheda.
In 1968 the company seemed to be able to recover again. Rawe rose to become the leading manufacturer of highly fashionable printed fabrics in the women's clothing sector. At the Frankfurt trade fair Interstoff in 1968, the company presented its collection made from the transparent “Precios” fabric, which was developed together with other textile companies and which was successfully marketed.
As part of a reorganization of production, Rawe specialized in the manufacture of fabrics using the color printing process from the late 1960s and was one of Germany's leading producers in this area until the 1990s.
In 1989 the Rawe shareholders sold the traditional Nordhorn company to the Frankfurt Wisser Group (Wisag). The company, which continues to be run independently, recorded sales of almost DM 240 million annually between 1988 and 1991. Rawe-Veredlung, which specializes in color prints, benefited from a boom in the printing sector that had lasted for years, but ended in 1992/93. The competition from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe led to a massive drop in the price of yarns, so that Rawe had to close 1992 with a loss of 12 million DM. Between 1994 and 1997 the market for printing materials collapsed. Rawe was in the red and urgent investments had to be avoided. The 1990s were marked by the workforce's struggle against job losses. In 1992, 500 Rawe workers paralyzed through traffic on the Nordhorn city ring when they protested against the intended closure of the spinning mill with its 240 jobs.
Between 1991 and 1997 the number of employees fell from 1,300 to 800. Further drastic restructuring measures followed, such as a state guarantee to secure investment loans and a wage waiver by the workforce in the millions. The city and the district bought various Rawe properties.
In 1999 the company held a costly open day. The Rawe collection for the spring / summer 2000 season was shown at an elaborate fashion show. Shortly thereafter, however, it became clear that the renovation had failed. The spinning mill was closed at the end of 1999 and the weaving mill was shut down on June 30, 2000. On June 30, 2001, production in the fabric printing shop also ended.
With Rawe, the last large Nordhorn textile company closed its doors.
Reuse
After the factory finally closed in 2001, a huge industrial area with decaying buildings and contaminated floors remained in the inner city of Nordhorn and threatened to become an industrial wasteland because for almost ten years no sensible suggestions for use were made for which investors could be found.
In 2007, a shopping center and a hardware store with approx. 23,400 m² sales area and a large car park at ground level were opened on a 50,000 m² site.
The area remaining west of the city ring was only used years later by the EWAR development company . The new development around the factory building, which is now under monument protection , with water and dust tower, office, turbine and boiler house is to be completed in 2014.
In the former boiler house, a coffee roastery and a café were set up, which is run by the Nordhorn community.
literature
- Steffen Burkert: The county of Bentheim. Heimatverein der Grafschaft Bentheim, 2010. ISBN 3-922428-87-8 .
- August Crone-Münzebrock: Contributions to the history of the Rawe - Kistemaker families. Osnabrück 1940.
- Stephanie Kohsiek: Bussmaate - a building complex of the company Rawe & co. Development and analysis of the building history of the Nordhorn textile company from 1912 to 1952. Master's thesis from November 2004, submitted in the subject of art history to obtain the degree Magistra Artium.
- Udo Schwabe: Textile industry in the county of Bentheim, 1800–1914. Publishing house of the Emsland landscape for the districts of Emsland and Grafschaft Bentheim, 2008. ISBN 3-9250-3443-9
- Clemens Wischermann : Bernard Rawe (1864–1950). In: Hans Jürgen Teuteberg (Hrsg.): The West Munsterland textile industry and its entrepreneurs (= Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiographien . Volume 16). Aschendorff, Münster 1996, pp. 39-59.
Web links
- EWAR revitalization RAWE West
- Lebenshilfe Nordhorn
- Textile factory Rawe in the Lower Saxony Monument Atlas
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stephanie Kohsiek: Bussmaate - a complex of buildings of the company Rawe & C.
- ↑ Mention in the camp book of the Protestant church community Nordhorn from 1603 (after G. Plasger: Bussmaate - an old textile workers ' settlement . In: Bentheimer Jahrbuch 2002. S. 182.)
- ^ Bentheimer Zeitung in June 1912.
- ^ Clemens Wischermann : Bernard Rawe (1864–1950) . P. 55.
- ^ Burkert: The county of Bentheim. P. 463.
- ^ Burkert: The county of Bentheim. P. 465.
- ^ Burkert: The county of Bentheim. P. 465.
- ^ Burkert: The county of Bentheim. P. 466.
- ^ Burkert: The county of Bentheim. P. 471.
- ↑ Grafschafter Nachrichten of May 16, 2013: Rawe-Areal in great demand: start of frame construction.