Skip to main content

Wilfried Feldenkirchen (1947-2010)

With sadness we report the death of longtime BHC member Wilfried Feldenkirchen.  He died in  a car accident on June 21, 2010, while test driving a replica of Siemens' 1905 electric car, the Victoria, a project for which he was the manager.  He was professor of economic, social, and business history in the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.  A former trustee of the BHC and a member of the editorial board of Enterprise & Society, Professor Dr. Feldenkirchen specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century corporate and financial history, focusing particularly on Siemens.
In addition to numerous articles and essays, his works include:
The Banks and the Steel Industry in the Ruhr: Developments in Relations from 1874 to 1914 (1981)
Werner von Siemens: Inventor and International Entrepreneur (1994)
Siemens, 1918-1945 (1999)
Siemens: From Workshop to Global Player (2000)
"Vom Guten das Beste": Von Daimler und Benz zur DaimlerChrysler AG (2003)
Die Siemens-Unternehmer (2005)
His article, "Big Business in Interwar Germany: Organizational Innovation at Vereinigte Stahlwerke, IG Farben, and Siemens," in the Autumn 1987 Business History Review won the Newcomen Prize for the best essay in the BHR that year.
A fuller CV may be found here, and obituaries here and here.  A video of Professor Feldenkirchen inspecting and discussing the Victoria (in German; audio begins c. 2 min. in) is available on YouTube.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese

New resource available: Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography

Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography The Business History Conference is working to facilitate the creation of a bibliography of scholarly work on race and business history. We hope that the bibliography will serve as a resource for those seeking to create more inclusive syllabi and understand the historical context for our present moment of reckoning with structural racism in the United States and across the globe. The bibliography is crowdsourced and draws on the collective expertise of the BHC membership. The BHC wishes to expand the list of references already curated and invites your contributions to the bibliography (The current list of references contains 154 titles). Submit your suggestions by (a) emailing additional references to Anne Fleming of the BHC Electronic Media Oversight Committee <acf80 at law.georgetown.ed> or BHC Web Editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez <padelacruzf at gmail.com>, (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews or (c) adding it