Richard Blumenfeld

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Richard Blumenfeld (born December 22, 1863 in Berlin , † August 25, 1943 in Berlin-Frohnau ) was a German entrepreneur .

Life

As the son of the Velten stove manufacturer Hermann Blumenfeld and his wife Käthe Blumenfeld nee. Hirschfeld grew up in Berlin, attended the Viktoria-Gymnasium in Potsdam and worked as a student in the chemical laboratory of director Langhoff.

After finishing school, he went to Hamburg and joined a Hamburg drug export and import business as an apprentice . He stayed in this company for five years as a buyer, seller and stock exchange representative. He then took up a position in a commission business in Brăila ( Kingdom of Romania ) until his father called him back in 1890 to manage the Velten stove factory.

Advertisement for Blumenfeld AG from 1912

Since 1890 Richard Blumenfeld was together with his brother Jean Blumenfeld (* December 4, 1871 in Berlin; † March 16, 1927 in Berlin, married. To Elise Richter from Velten) as directors of the stove factory founded in 1871, which his father together with Treuherz has been a partner since 1884 and was located in what was then Friedrichstrasse (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse) in Velten . In 1905, the oven and ceramic factory was under the company Veltener Richard Blumenfeld oven Fabrik AG into a joint stock company converted. Under the committed management of its director, the company developed into the largest pottery company in Velten. The level of sophisticated technical equipment put it at the forefront of stove, building ceramics and tile producers. The product range ranged from simple tiles and modern decorative tiles, through vessel and decorative ceramics to building ceramics for indoor and outdoor construction.

In particular, the further development of building ceramics was funded by the architect and sculptor John Martens , who was the company's artistic director from 1913 to 1916. Well-known architects such as Walter Gropius , Bruno Möhring , the Weißensee town planner Carl James Bühring , Otto Rudolf Salvisberg , Erich Mendelsohn , Peter Behrens , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Hans Bernoulli and the Friedenau town planner Hans Altmann worked with sculptors such as Paul Rudolf Henning and Richard Bauroth , Richard Kuöhl , Ludwig Isenbeck , Hans Schmidt , Walter Schmarje , Wilhelm E. Schade and Hans Schellhorn , who modeled ceramics and plastic jewelry for numerous public buildings and residential houses, which was then mostly fired by Richard Blumenfeld Veltener Ofenfabrik AG . The company became known throughout the country for the production of multi-colored glazed ceramic tiles for the subway stations in Berlin designed by the architect Alfred Grenander , for the ceramic furnishings of the buildings designed by Max Taut and Bruno Taut (including the Association of German Book Printers, Berlin-Kreuzberg, Dudenstrasse ) and the reconstruction of the glazed ceramic tiles of the Ischtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin .

Because of the great trust that Richard Blumenfeld enjoyed from other merchants and entrepreneurs, he was elected to the Potsdam Chamber of Commerce . He was proposed as commercial judge by the board of the Chamber of Commerce . He did this voluntary work for 25 years as a commercial judge at the Berlin District Court III, in the special chamber for unfair competition. He was also a member of the supervisory board of Triton-Werke and the Bank for Ceramic Industry . During the First World War, Blumenfeld was active in the district committee for oils and fats.

At the end of the 1920s, Blumenfeld tried, in collaboration with the workshops Puhl & Wagner - Gottfried Heinersdorf ( Berlin-Neukölln ) and John Martens ( Bunzlau ), to bring the decorative combination of clinker brick and mosaic onto the market as a new design option. This clinker mosaic , known as the Silesian mosaic and largely developed by John Martens in his Bunzlau ceramic workshop, was first executed in 1928 in the new building of the Berlin Oberpostdirektion in Berlin-Charlottenburg (architect, Oberpostbaurat Willy Hoffmann ). The global economic crisis prevented further development of these new types of ceramics .

Due to a stroke he suffered in 1930, Richard Blumenfeld had to withdraw from the management of his company and received a pension as a member of the board. After he had largely recovered from the effects of stroke, he tried again his post as executive director of the Richard Blumenfeld Veltener oven Fabrik AG to compete, but the part of some senior executive who before 1933 secretly a Nazi operating cell of NSBO was had established prevented . The National Socialists had already gained a great deal of influence in the Velten stove and ceramic industry. On August 15, 1933, Richard Blumenfeld Veltener Ofenfabrik AG was “ Aryanized ” by the National Socialists , and the company was changed to Veltener Ofen- und Keramik AG (VELTAG) . Richard Blumenfeld was forced to resign from the VELTAG supervisory board and to surrender all shares.

Richard Blumenfeld's wife Hedwig (Klara Bertha) Blumenfeld b. Kersten was a non-Jew (a so-called Aryan). Shortly before the wedding, Richard Blumenfeld was baptized in the Protestant Church of Grace in Berlin-Mitte out of consideration for his Christian in-laws . The baptismal certificate, the so-called entrance ticket , was of little use to him under the National Socialists. Her older son Werner Blumenfeld, chemist and authorized signatory of Richard Blumenfeld Veltener Ofenfabrik AG until 1933, was also married to a so-called Aryan, namely the daughter of the oven manufacturer Adolf Mönninghoff . He and his younger brother Heinz Blumenfeld were considered “ Jewish ” due to the so-called Nuremberg race laws Mischlinge first degree ”, the marriage of Richard and Hedwig Blumenfeld as a“ privileged mixed marriage ”.

Attempts by the family to emigrate from Germany to the Netherlands at the end of the 1930s failed. After the November pogroms in 1938 , the National Socialists pressed a large sum of money from Richard Blumenfeld for the so-called Jewish property tax .

Richard Blumenfeld was forced to apply to the police for a “ Jewish ID card ” and to use the additional name “Israel”. His son Werner was imprisoned in the notorious torture cellars of the Gestapo headquarters on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin-Mitte after the November pogrom . His second imprisonment by the National Socialists took place in 1943, because Werner Blumenfeld had refused to hand over his last shares. His brother Heinz also had to endure humiliation as a so-called " half-Jew ".

On August 25, 1943, Richard Blumenfeld died of a heart attack in the house of his son, the chemist Werner Blumenfeld, in Berlin-Frohnau, Horandweg 14.

After the liberation from the Nazi regime, Werner and Heinz Blumenfeld emigrated to the USA and Great Britain and changed their family names to Bentler.

References

See also

• History of the pottery industry in Velten

swell

• Berlin address book
• State Archives Berlin
• Brandenburg State Main Archives - holdings of the Oberfinanzpräsidium
• Archive in the oven and ceramic museum Velten
• CV Richard Blumenfeld
• Information from Prof. Dr. Peter Bentler (formerly Blumenfeld), grandson of Richard Blumenfeld, Los Angeles (USA)

literature

• Märkische clay art . Edition Cantz, Stuttgart 1992. (Catalog of the exhibition of the same name at the German Historical Museum , October 15, 1992 to January 5, 1993). Volume 1: Monika Dittmar: Veltener furnace factories. A contribution to the cultural history of heating. ISBN 3-89322-496-3 . / Volume 2: Berlin and Brandenburg. Ceramics from the 20s and 30s. ISBN 3-89322-497-1 .
• Christoph Brachmann: Light and color in the Berlin underground. Classic modern subway stations. Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-7861-2477-9 .
• Monika Dittmar: From ovens to subway stations. Richard Blumenfeld. Jewish stove manufacturer and building ceramist. Modern entrepreneur with a sense of art. In: State Office for Archeology Dresden (Ed.): Ceramics in Central Germany. 41st International Pottery Symposium Dresden 2008. Dresden 2012, ISBN 978-3-910008-99-1 / ISSN  0863-7687 .
• Nicole Seydewitz (Hrsg.): Art ceramics of the modern. For the 150th birthday of the Velten stove and ceramics entrepreneur Richard Blumenfeld. VV Veltener Verlagsgesellschaft, Velten 2013, ISBN 978-3-9813649-8-9 .