Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory
The Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory was a German cigarette manufacturing company that existed from 1906 to 1929. The Astor cigarette brand he introduced still exists today.
history
Foundation, growth
The company was founded in the legal form of a GmbH by Emil Molt and other shareholders on January 1, 1906 with headquarters in Hamburg and Stuttgart . The company was derived from the world-famous New York Hotel Waldorf Astoria , whose name goes back to the founding family of the Astor hotel and the town of Walldorf in Baden, from which Johann Jakob Astor came to the USA. The trademark rights to the Waldorf-Astoria brand brought the Hamburg cigar wholesaler M. Müller jr. as a partner in the newly founded company, she had acquired it a year earlier from the American Waldorf-Astoria Cigar Store Company .
The company was initially very successful and was appointed purveyor to the royal Württemberg court . On May 2, 1918, it was retroactively converted into a stock corporation with a capital of 7 million marks at the beginning of the year . In 1919 it employed around 1,000 people.
Waldorf school, anthroposophical group
On September 7, 1919, Emil Molt founded the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in collaboration with Rudolf Steiner as a company school for the children of the workers and employees of the cigarette factory. Steiner, who took on the training and advice of the teaching staff, made the school the starting point of anthroposophical Waldorf education .
From 1920 the company belonged to the anthroposophical group "Der Kommende Tag", a stock corporation for the promotion of economic and spiritual values , which however had to be liquidated in early 1925 . Thereafter, the majority of the share capital, which had been converted to 1,005,000 Reichsmarks , was in the hands of the Viennese tobacco wholesaler Kiazim Emin , presumably due to high arrears in payments for tobacco deliveries . Emil Molt continued to manage the company.
Downfall, takeover
In the second half of the 1920s the company ran into difficulties due to the continued difficult economic situation in the tobacco industry and outdated production methods. It was finally taken over and liquidated in 1929 by the Reemtsma Group , which bought up competitors without considering short-term losses in order to consolidate its dominant position. Astor cigarettes with the portrait of Johann Jakob Astor on the pack are still manufactured by Reemtsma today.
The main building at Hackstrasse 11 in Stuttgart-Stöckach has largely been preserved and is used as a commercial and residential building.
literature
- Gabriele Kreuzberger: Factory buildings in Stuttgart. Their development from the middle of the 19th century to the First World War. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-608-91629-6 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anneliese Hermann: Molt, Emil. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 9 f. ( Digitized version ).
- ↑ a b Handbook of German Stock Companies , 30th edition 1925, Volume 2, p. 4364 f.
- ↑ The Coming Day AG in anthrowiki , accessed on August 17, 2019
- ↑ Reemtsma in the brand lexicon www.brandslex.de , accessed on August 17, 2019
- ↑ Gabriele Kreuzberger, p. 403 f. (see literature )