Biography
Carl Borgward was of modest extraction, the son of a coal retailer, Wilhelm Borgward, and had twelve brothers and sisters. He undertook mechanical engineering studies, and obtained his engineering diploma in 1913.
He was wounded during World War I. In 1919 he became one of the partners of Bremer Reifenindustrie. The company was restructured and in 1920 became Bremer Kühlerfabrik Borgward & Co.
In 1924 and 1925 the company started to produce the small three-wheel trucks Blitzkarren and Goliath. With his partner Wilhelm Tecklenburg, in 1928 he created the company Goliath-Werke Borgward & Co. When the two associates took over Hansa-Lloyd-Werke in 1931, this became the Borgward Group.
On September 23, 1938, the Carl F. W. Borgward Automobil- und Motorenwerke factory was opened in Sebaldsbrück near Bremen. At that time, 22,000 people were working in the company. Till the end of the war the production of Borgward was mostly military vehicles and trucks.
When the factory was destroyed by bombing in 1944, half of the workers were prisoners of war and forced laborers. Carl Borgward was interned till 1948. Finally, just one year after being freed, he was already again member of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Bremen.
In 1949, the first Lloyd LP 300 had been designed and produced. In Germany this car was nicknamed the Leukoplastbomber (Band-aid Bomber). The small car with a plywood body on a wooden chassis had a two-stroke engine and was in the market segment under the Volkswagen Beetle, and kept this position for more than a decade.
In 1949 Borgward had also presented the large Hansa sedan, which was the first European car with a pontoon body. He had taken ideas from American magazines, which he read when under detention.
The largest success came in 1954 with the Borgward Isabella. The Borgwards met the spirit of the time: the German customers wished for American type styling and rich chrome decoration with European compact dimensions. Borgward participated in detail in the design of all the car models.
Increased competition on the segment of mid-sized cars, and the too broad and uneconomical range of models, as well as wrong financial and tactical choices by the management, led the company into crisis at the end of the fifties. The new model Borgward-Lloyd Arabella should have eased the difficulties, but it was handicapped by quality problems.
In 1961, Borgward was one of the most spectacular bankruptcies in the history of Germany. The company went to the Land of Bremen, which had it liquidated, and part of the factory went to Hanomag. Years after the bankruptcy was closed, it came out that it had not been reasonable: all debts were paid to the last cent.
Carl Borgward died of a heart attack at the age 72 on July 28, 1963.
His life work might continue: 50 years after closing down there are new plans from his grandson to resume building cars under the name of Borgward.
Read more about this topic: Carl F. W. Borgward
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)