Robert Vollmöller

Robert Vollmöller

Robert Vollmöller (born October 29, 1849 in Ilsfeld ; † October 28, 1911 in Stuttgart ) was a German merchant and textile entrepreneur who manufactured the health linen propagated by Gustav Jäger .

He was also the owner of Hohenbeilstein Castle in Beilstein from 1898 and built the Lioba country house in Liebenzell , which later became the foundation of the mission house of the Liebenzeller Mission . He was made an honorary citizen there in 1906 and honored with a street name in 2016 for his services in rebuilding his home community of Ilsfeld after the major fire of 1904 . In 1910 he also became an honorary citizen of Vaihingen , where a street is also named after him.

biography

Robert Vollmöller was born as the second son of the businessman Rudolf Vollmöller (1818–1868) and Sophie Dallinger. Lust (1807–1874) born in Ilsfeld. He first attended the Latin school in Lauffen am Neckar , but then, due to meningitis and other ailments, he only went to secondary school and learned the trade in his parents' business. He then worked for various trading houses in Heilbronn, Stuttgart and Freiburg im Breisgau. After his father's death in 1868, he took over his parents' general store in Ilsfeld in 1871 and married Emilie Behr (1852-1894), the daughter of a merchant family from Balingen , on September 25, 1873 .

After he was unable to expand the business in his hometown of Ilsfeld, which has only 2,000 inhabitants, he ceded it to a brother-in-law and moved to Stuttgart, where he lived in close proximity to the banker Eduard Pfeiffer and the industrialist Robert Bosch and together opened a textile wholesale business with his brother-in-law Gustav Behr. Like his neighbor Robert Bosch, Vollmöller became a supporter of the health laundry propagated by Gustav Jäger . Vollmöller separated from Gustav Behr, in whose place the older brother Karl Behr stepped as a partner.

In 1881 Vollmöller and Behr in Vaihingen near Stuttgart took over Theodor Maier's jersey factory, which had got into financial difficulties , which they renovated and enlarged structurally and technically. The factory grew rapidly and after a few years had branches in Herrenberg , Plieningen and Untertürkheim .

Vollmöller separated from his brother-in-law Karl Behr in 1888 and ran the business alone from now on. After lengthy disputes, the company in Untertürkheim temporarily went to Vollmöller's son Rudolf (* 1874), who tried to compete with his father with changing business partners. After Rudolf failed to do so, Robert Vollmöller bought the company in Untertürkheim back in 1901. In the same year the company called itself Vereinigte Trikotagenfabriken AG . In 1910 Robert Vollmöller was the largest jersey manufacturer in the world with 3000 employees.

Vollmöller was characterized by great social commitment in the management of the company. 80 family apartments were built for the employees in Vaihingen, the Emilienheim for single girls, the Filderhof for the commercial staff and a nursing home for small children. King Wilhelm II appointed Vollmöller to the council of commerce .

Vollmöller acquired a plot of land on the Klosterbuckel in Liebenzell in 1897 and built Villa Lioba there , which he named after the niece of the German missionary Bonifatius and which was intended as a residence for the ailing son Hans. The villa later came to the China Inland Mission , from which the Liebenzeller Mission was formed in Liebenzell .

Memorial plaque on Hohenbeilstein Castle

1898 acquired Vollmöller via Beilstein situated castle Hohenbeilstein , which was then in ruinous state, and returns the recovery mainly to Vollmöller. He acquired numerous pieces of land on the hillside of the castle and initially had a country house built on the site of the old rectory of the Magdalen Church. In 1905 he also acquired the old office building, which was expanded into the Lower Palace as a stately villa from 1906 to 1908 according to plans by Albert Benz . Vollmöller had far-reaching plans to rebuild Hohenbeilstein Castle, for which he had planned for Benz as the architect. He published a book by August Holder about the history of Hohenbeilstein Castle , which contained numerous photos of the villa below the castle and made the reconstruction plans of the castle known to an audience interested in history.

After a major fire broke out in his home town of Ilsfeld in 1904, Vollmöller made large amounts of clothing available for fire victims. He also donated the wooden construction of a workshop, which was opened in Ilsfeld as an emergency church and existed there until 1965.

However, Vollmöller was no longer able to realize his further plans in Beilstein. The wealthy entrepreneur had drawn the resentment of the Beilsteiners through his massive property purchases, who now offered resistance. In 1908 there was an arson attack on some of the reconstructed buildings of Hohenbeilstein Castle, in the same year Vollmöller was denied the intended purchase of the old Magdalenenkirche to round off his property on Burgberg and his plan to set up a factory in Beilstein was not approved by the local council.

Vollmöller was made an honorary citizen of Ilsfeld in 1906, together with his brother Karl Vollmöller and four other people who were deserving of the reconstruction; In the spring of 1911 he suffered several strokes and died in the autumn of the same year. He was buried in the Prague cemetery in Stuttgart .

Vollmöller and his wife Emilie had four sons and five daughters, including the painter Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann (1876–1943), the writer and entrepreneur Karl Gustav Vollmoeller (1878–1948), the aviation pioneer Hans Vollmöller (1889–1917) and the antiquarian , Bibliophile and writer Kurt Vollmöller (1890–1936).

literature

• Eugen Härle : Vollmöller family . In: Ilsfeld in past and present. A home book for Ilsfeld, Auenstein and Schozach . Ilsfeld municipality, Ilsfeld 1989.
• Klaus Konrad Dillmann: Robert Vollmöller. Life and time of a Swabian textile entrepreneur. Dillmann, Ilsfeld 1999.
• Hermann Ehmer: From the Amthof to the factory owner's villa and the house of the children's church. In: History sheets from the Bottwartal , No. 9 (2004), pp. 16–24.