Wilhelm Merton

Wilhelm Merton

Wilhelm Merton at his desk

Wilhelm Merton in conversation with Mayor Franz Adickes in 1909.

Wilhelm Merton (until 1856: William Moses, 1856–1899: William Merton) (born May 14, 1848 in Frankfurt am Main ; † December 15, 1916 in Berlin ) was a German entrepreneur , social politician and philanthropist . The Wilhelm Merton Center at Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe University was named after him.

Life

He was the eighth of nine children of Ralph Merton , who immigrated to Frankfurt am Main from England in 1837 (until 1856: Raphael Lyon Moses) and his wife Sara Amelie Cohen. On November 5, 1855, Ralph Moses and his family received citizenship of the Free City of Frankfurt . On November 27, 1856, he received permission to use the name of his hometown Merton , now a part of London , as a surname. Ralph had applied for this name change on October 22, 1856 on the grounds that his brother Benjamin in Manchester had already adopted this family name and the first name Moses was not suitable as a family name.

William Merton attended the municipal grammar school in Frankfurt, then studied in Munich and completed an internship at Deutsche Bank in Berlin. In 1877 he married Emma Ladenburg (* 1859 in Frankfurt am Main, † 1939), a daughter of the entrepreneur Emil Ladenburg (1822–1902), co-owner of the famous Ladenburg bank , and Eugénie Halphen (1829–1866). The couple had five children, Alfred , Richard and Adolf, Walter Henry and Gerda.

In 1881 he founded the metal company together with Leo Ellinger and Zacharias Hochschild (1854–1912) and Philipp Abraham Cohen . In 1899 Merton and his children converted to the Protestant faith. In the same year, the Mertons were naturalized as Germans, who until then had still had English citizenship. From then on he carried the name Wilhelm Merton.

Wilhelm Merton died of a heart attack in Berlin on December 15, 1916 , after having had a heart condition for a long time. He was buried in the main cemetery in Frankfurt . His sons took over the management of the metal company: Merton's eldest son Alfred became chairman of the board of directors of the metal company, the second son Richard was later temporarily chairman of the board. Wilhelm Merton is the great-great-great-uncle of the singer Alice Merton .

Act

Wilhelm Merton is one of the most important German company founders of the Wilhelminian era , particularly because of his socio-political commitment . In the same way as in the economic field, Merton distinguished himself in the period up to the First World War as the initiator and founder of socio-politically important institutions, the aim of which was to contribute to the humanization of modern economic society on a scientific basis.

In 1890 he founded the Institute for the Common Good in Frankfurt am Main and in 1901 the Academy for Social and Commercial Sciences . Together with the then Lord Mayor of Frankfurt , Franz Adickes , he was the driving force behind the establishment of the Frankfurt University in the form of a foundation university in 1912/1914. From his own fortune he donated 2.3 million Reichsmarks , and in 1914 a chair for education in memory of his youngest son, the art historian Adolf Merton (* 1886, † 1914), who died in World War I.

reception

By incorporating Merton's ideas to create a scientific institution that met the requirements of modern business society in terms of education and research, what was later known as the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University became one of the most progressive in Germany at the time.

Today, Wilhelm Merton is remembered by the Wilhelm Merton Endowed Professorship and the Wilhelm Merton Center for European Integration and International Economic Order at the Goethe University in Frankfurt , the Wilhelm Merton Foundation and the Mertonviertel in Frankfurt-Niederursel on the former site of the United German Metalworks , a subsidiary of the metal company. A commercial vocational school and a street in Bockenheim are named after Merton . Since 2001, the Gontard & Metallbank Foundation has awarded the Wilhelm Merton Prize for European Translations, endowed with 25,000 euros, every three years (2001: Walter Boehlich ; 2004: Bernd Schwibs; 2007: Eva Moldenhauer and Grete Osterwald; 2010: Reinhard Kaiser ; 2013 : Klaus Reichert ; 2016: Andrea Ott ).

literature

• Hans Achinger: Wilhelm Merton in his time . Frankfurt am Main 1965
• Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . Second volume. M – Z (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 2 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7829-0459-1 .
• Ursula Ratz:  Merton, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 184-187 ( digitized version ).
• Ralf Roth: Wilhelm Merton: A citizen of the world founds a university , publisher: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Societätsdruckerei, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-7973-1245-7
• Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 1: Social politicians in the German Empire 1871 to 1918. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-86219-038-6 , p. 108 ( Online , PDF; 2.2 MB).

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Merton in the catalog of the German National Library
• Wilhelm Merton Center of the University of Frankfurt
• Literature on Wilhelm Merton in the Hessian Bibliography
• Wilhelm Merton in the Hessian biography
• Merton, Wilhelm in the Frankfurt Personal Lexicon
• Newspaper article about Wilhelm Merton in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

notes

1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 18, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Osterwald , member of the VdÜ , in the project Euregio-Schüler-Literaturpreis