Life
Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy was the second son of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Cécile Jeanrenaud. He studied sciences at Heidelberg University, where Robert Bunsen was amongst his colleagues. After graduating in 1863 he went to Berlin to study with Wilhelm Hoffmann.
He volunteered as a soldier in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, taking part in the Battle of Königgrätz and becoming an officer. (He was later to be recalled for the Franco-Prussian War, where he won the Iron Cross).
After the Austro-Prussian War he met with Alexander Martius, a former student of Justus von Liebig, who had set up a dye factory in England. They decided to enter a partnership to manufacture aniline in Germany, setting up a factory at the Rummelsburg Lake near Berlin. In 1873 the firm took the name 'Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation', becoming in 1898 'AGFA'.
Mendelssohn Bartholdy married his cousin Elisabeth Oppenheim (grand-daughter of his great-uncle Joseph Mendelssohn). She died shortly after the birth of their son Otto. Paul later married Elisabeth's sister Enole, by whom he had four children.
In 1880, Mendelssohn Bartholdy died of a heart attack. After his death the company was led by his nephew Franz Oppenheim. In 1925 the firm was taken over by IG Farben.
Read more about this topic: Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“I think it beats the heck out of life after death, that’s for sure.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)