Wilhelm Klein building decoration

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Wilhelm Klein building decoration
legal form
founding 1872
resolution 2001
Seat Elisabethenstrasse 68
Darmstadt GermanyGermanyGermany 
Number of employees up to 500
Branch Construction related trades

Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Painting GmbH
legal form GmbH
founding 2001
Seat Im Tiefen See 75
Darmstadt GermanyGermanyGermany 
Number of employees 45
Branch Construction related trades
Website www.wilh-klein.de
As of December 31, 2015

The company Wilhelm Klein Baudekoration is a craft enterprise for the painting and finishing trade founded by Wilhelm Klein in Darmstadt in 1872 . The family business has existed for over five generations, was at times the second largest painting company in the Rhine-Main region and is now part of the Hamburg- based HPM group as Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Malerei GmbH .

history

Wilhelm Klein building decoration (1872–1913)

Exhibition building on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt
Today's Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg-Haus in Darmstadt
Stadtbad in Darmstadt, interior
Catalog of the State Exhibition for Fine and Applied Arts from 1908 lists for each room which trade and which company carried out the interior fittings of the exhibited rooms. These index pages list the work of the Klein company.

In 1872, the Edenkoben- born white weaver and trade teacher Wilhelm Klein opened a painting shop in Darmstadt in Erbacher Straße 12 and two years later moved to a building on the corner plot of Saalbaustraße / Waldstraße. In 1891, Wilhelm Klein relocated his business under the Wilhelm Klein Baudekoration company to the former Thurn and Taxis'schen Poststation , Elisabethenstrasse 68, which was acquired for this purpose and expanded and built on in the following ten years through acquisitions of land up to the Landgraf-Philipps-Anlage.

From 1888 Wilhelm Klein's two sons received their training in their parents' business, Philipp as a plasterer and Heinrich as a painter and white binder. The older one, Philip Klein, then graduated from the sculpture school in Munich. The painting business quickly established itself in the economic awakening phase of the Hessian royal seat . In 1899 Wilhelm Klein received the title of Hofweißbinder from Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig . The Klein company also carried out extensive stucco and plastering work for the exhibitions of the Darmstadt artists' colony on Mathildenhöhe (1904, 1908, 1914). A fountain and various stucco, artificial stone and white binder work on various buildings in the exhibition, such as the exhibition building for free art or the Wagner-Gewin house, are mentioned in the exhibition catalog from 1908, as is the painting of turned animal figures by Conrad Sutter. At the suggestion of the jury of the artist colony exhibition of 1914, Wilhelm Klein was awarded the Great Golden State Medal of the Grand Duchy of Hesse .

Wilhelm Klein oHG (1913-2000)

On January 6, 1913, Wilhelm Klein and his two sons, as personally liable partners, converted the family business into the legal form of a general partnership (oHG) . Philipp Klein became managing director . In 1914, in recognition of his work as a site manager and artistic advisor in the design of Haus Hagenburg (today's Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg-Haus ) with Art Nouveau elements, Prince Otto Heinrich zu Schaumburg-Lippe gave him the title of “master builder”.

Until the dismissal of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1918, the Klein company continued to carry out orders from the grand ducal court. She was commissioned with the expansion, renovation and design of numerous representative buildings in the residential city of Darmstadt, which are now a listed building. These include the Court Theater , the New Palace , the State Museum , Heiligenberg Castle in Seeheim and the Stadtbad Darmstadt , which was built in 1909 according to a design by city planning officer August Buxbaum and restored to its original state in 2008 with great effort. Around 1918 the Klein property comprised the buildings and open spaces at Elisabethenstrasse 68-74 and the adjacent Landgraf-Philipps-Anlage 58, 60 and 60½ as well as Hügelstrasse 87.

During the First World War , the Wilhelm Klein company was commissioned by the Schütte-Lanz -Luftschiffbau company to paint combat aircraft and maintain the hangars in their branch in Königs Wusterhausen . Philipp Klein spent the war years there as a site manager with 350 employees. His brother Heinrich had to go to the front.

Until the Second World War , Klein was the only company in Darmstadt that offered the execution of seamless gypsum slag walls, so-called Lugino walls , in accordance with the state building regulations for public buildings. Wilhelm Klein had permanent construction offices at the automobile manufacturer Opel in Rüsselsheim, at the pharmaceutical company Merck in Darmstadt and a branch in Gutleutstrasse in Frankfurt am Main . In addition, church building was another focus of the order.

Wilhelm Klein died in 1933 at the age of 86. From 1940 Heinrich Klein left the company step by step and died in 1945. Between 1936 and 1945 the business activities were no longer worth mentioning. Overall, the company was rather critical of the Nazi regime. For example, employees protected Jewish families in the houses on Elisabethstrasse during the pogrom night . Other passive resistance has also been proven. When downtown Darmstadt was bombed on September 11, 1944 , the company's headquarters and private apartments on Elisabethenstrasse were completely destroyed.

After the end of the war, the company was rebuilt by Philipp Klein and his son-in-law Hanns Nothhelfer, who was previously a sales representative for Hildebrand Rheinmühlenwerke , with the remaining 60 employees. Nothhelfer brought in his good business relationships and all of his personal fortune. Since he had joined the NSDAP in 1937 , he had to go through a denazification process, which ended in a panel proceedings in 1947 with the classification of fellow travelers . Philipp Klein died in 1949 at the age of 74. The Klein company under the management of Hanns Nothhelfer with the authorized signatory Hans Bentz carried out the plastering, interior fitting and painting work on 70 percent of all destroyed buildings in Darmstadt's inner city in the following years. In 1963 the branch in Frankfurt was reopened. The company retained its leading position in the painting and plastering trade until the 1990s. She was a recognized specialist in the restoration of sacred buildings (including the Catholic Church of St. Maria Magdalena in Gernsheim, the Catholic Church of St. Michael in Bürstadt , the Catholic Church of St. Mary in Offenbach , Ludwig Church in Darmstadt ) and continued to maintain close business relationships with industrial customers such as Opel, Merck, Wella and Carl Schenck AG .

During the time of the economic miracle, the focus was on public projects such as schools, churches, hospitals, department stores, banks and insurance companies, but increasingly also on residential construction. In 1951, the Wilhelm Klein company entered into a cooperation with the building association for workers' housing and built a contiguous block of flats with 32 apartments on the adjacent property. From 1954, Luisa, a granddaughter of Philipp Klein, was the first woman in the whole of Hesse to learn the plastering trade in her grandparents' business and passed her journeyman's examination as the best in the guild . In 1958 she married the Frankfurt entrepreneur's son Wolfgang Haldy. After Hanns Nothhelfer's death in 1962, his wife Barbara and her mother Luise Klein inherited the company. Hans Bentz took over the management. In 1988 he was followed by Reinhard Günther as managing director, who from 1964, like his father Friedrich Günther before, worked as site manager and from 1984 as authorized signatory in the company. In 1999 Hanns-Michael Haldy, grandson of the owner Barbara Nothhelfer, took over the company as managing partner.

Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Painting GmbH (from 2001)

Until 1999 the company Wilhelm Klein Malergeschäft e. K. as a family company spanning five generations with at times a core of up to 500 permanent employees, the largest painting company in the Darmstadt guild district and the second largest in the Rhine-Main region . During this time, the company was active throughout Germany. On November 19, 1999 the branch in Frankfurt was given up. On December 14, 1999, the Wilhelm Klein Malergeschäft e. K. as part of the spin-off of the entire assets into Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Malerei GmbH & Co. KG . The general partner was Wilhelm Klein Projektmanagement GmbH , managing director Jens Rothermel.

The company still had around 250 employees in the 1990s. In March 2001 around 50 workers were laid off as part of a comprehensive restructuring process. In the decades up to then, the Darmstadt company had taken on a large number of orders for work in and on public buildings. These included the town hall , the castle , the state museum, the Ludwig Church, the Alice Hospital and the State Theater . The companies Merck and Röhm also commissioned the craft business. The work in the DG Bank building in Frankfurt am Main was also one of the company's special references.

In 2001, the owner family sold the painting business to the Hamburg-based HPM Verwaltung und Service GmbH , which founded today's Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Malerei GmbH on March 6, 2001 . The business was continued at the historic headquarters in Darmstadt's Elisabethenstrasse 68. In 2008 the company relocated its headquarters with around 45 employees to the Darmstadt Nord industrial estate .

At the old headquarters of the Klein company, Hanns-Michael Haldy, a descendant of the company's founder, set up studios and workshops for artists and creative craftsmen and created living space for student shared apartments (the Kleinschen Höfe). In 2016 he sold the area to Iber Immobilien GmbH in Darmstadt, which plans to build apartments on the site.

Web links

literature

  • Ernst-Ludwig-Verein Darmstadt, Hessian Central Association for the Construction of Cheap Apartments (Ed.): The small apartment colony at the Hessian State Exhibition for Free and Applied Arts in Darmstadt. Darmstadt 1908.
  • Jürgen Bredow, Johannes Cramer: Buildings in Darmstadt. An architecture guide. Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 3-7929-0106-4 .
  • City of Darmstadt (ed.): The Darmstädter Mathildenhöhe. Architecture on the move to modernity. (= Contributions to the protection of monuments in Darmstadt , Volume 7.) Darmstadt 1998.
  • City of Darmstadt (ed.): The Mathildenhöhe, a work of the century. Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt. 100 years of planning and building for the city crown 1899-1999. Volume 1, Darmstadt 1999, ISBN 3-89552-063-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Locations , handicraft group Philip Mecklenburg
  2. ^ Silvia Dominguez: The birth of the Kleinschen Höfe. In: The story of Eva Klein (1848-1925). Die Kleinschen Höfe, March 23, 2013, accessed June 7, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i time travel. In: Wilh. Small. Retrieved June 8, 2016 .
  4. ↑ G. Römheld: artist colony exhibition, Darmstadt 1914, May 16 to October 11, Mathildenhöhe . Ed .: Mathildenhöhe artists' colony. Darmstadt 1914. on Google Books
  5. ^ Illustrated catalog of the Hessian State Exhibition for Free and Applied Art, Darmstadt 1908. In: Internet Archive. Retrieved June 7, 2016 .
  6. ↑ K. Gruber: New wooden toys. In: Art and the beautiful home. Monthly books for free and applied arts. Vol. 20, p. 125 f.
  7. ^ State medal for exhibitions (Grand Duchy of Hesse, 1903–1918). In: Award list. German Society for Ordinance, accessed on June 7, 2016 .
  8. ↑ a b fate. In: Wilh. Small. Retrieved June 8, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Martina Noltemeier: Colorful jewel. In: Malerblatt. November 3, 2008, accessed June 10, 2016 .
  10. ^ Painter and varnishers guild Rhein-Main. Felix Diemerling, accessed on May 3, 2016 .
  11. ^ Wilhelm Klein stucco painting branch Frankfurt a. M. In: Company profile. moneyhouse, accessed June 7, 2016 .
  12. ^ Wilhelm Klein painter shop e. K. In: Company profile. moneyhouse, accessed June 7, 2016 .
  13. ↑ 50 layoffs at a painting company. In: Darmstädter Echo from March 2, 2001.
  14. ^ Wilhelm Klein Stuck-Putz-Painting GmbH. In: Company profile. moneyhouse, accessed June 7, 2016 .