Eduard Pfeiffer

Eduard Gotthilf (von) Pfeiffer (24 November 1835 – 13 May 1921) was a German banker, social reformer, and pioneer of the co-operative movement.

Life

Early years Born in 1835, Eduard Pfeiffer was the thirteenth recorded child of Marx Pfeiffer, a top bank director, and one of the first Jewish citizens to have been granted the right to live in Stuttgart. Marx Pfeiffer's first two wives had died young, and Eduard's mother, born Pauline Wittersheim, was Marx's third wife. His first book, which appeared in 1863, set out his thinking on the subject. Pfeiffer identified an urgent need for social reform, and saw a guided and targeted programme of self-help as providing an ideal route-map for it. His efforts in this respect remained consistent through his life: he worked to achieve steady improvements in working class living standards in order to bind people into a bourgeois social structure, and to distance them from Socialist and Communist ideas. Pfeiffer insisted that solutions for the social questions of the time could be found only through co-operation between the propertied and working classes. He pursued similar themes in his second book, which appeared in 1865, and in which he set out practical steps for the establishment and running of consumer co-operatives. Further publications on economic themes followed. He was also quick to put his ideas into practice, setting up in 1863 the Stuttgart Consumer and Savings Association, which became a model for most of the consumer co-operatives in Germany.

In 1867 Pfeiffer organised a conference in Stuttgart which would lead to the creation of the League of German Consumer Associations. The league was to be tasked with bulk purchasing of individual article for sale through co-operative associations across Germany. For most articles categories for shared purchasing should be created. In this way, Pfeiffer produced the structure for what became the national .

Association for the welfare of the working classes The Association for the welfare of the working classes ("der Verein für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen") was founded at Pfeiffer's instigation in 1866: between 1876 and 1921 he headed it. The Association was established to promote the interests, and to advance of the economic and moral condition of the working classes. Although the association had more than 100 influential and rich members, but the goals and activities were in large measure down to Pfeiffer himself who saw to most of the Association's work, through personal donations, gifts and other funding initiatives, involving his own contacts with entrepreneurs, banks, the royal court and the city authorities. Pfeiffer brought to the Association's range of activities his own ideas and theories, along with his personal experiences.

This Association provided a channel for Pfeiffer's thinking and experience in a singular combination that remains influential in Stuttgart and beyond. Most of the Association's projects have been integrated into Stuttgart's social and physical infrastructure. The most important of its socio-political, financial and organisational efforts took Pfeiffer and The Association into issues involving social housing for the rapidly growing city.

Social housing An extensive survey of housing conditions in Stuttgart, undertaken in 1887, disclosed shocking results in respect of the health and social conditions in much of the city's "old town" residential housing. In November 1890 the association, under Pfeiffer's leadership, decided on a project to create, in the language of the times, "cheap housing for little people". The project title indicates that the project target group extended beyond the city's industrial working-class, also including the less prosperous people from all classes, including craft workers and artisans. What resulted was, successively, four large-scale housing developments in different parts of Stuttgart:

1891–1901 Siedlung Ostheim (Ostheim estate): 1,300 apartments 1901–1904 Siedlung Südheim (Südheim estate): 140 apartments 1902–1904 Siedlung Westheim (Westheim estate): 100 apartments 1911–1913 Siedlung Ostenau(Ostenau estate): 260 apartments

These developments did not enable Pfeiffer, and other developers of the time, to solve every one of Stuttgart's housing problems, but they did take care of most of the issues. Priorities for the new accommodation included sufficiently large floor areas, domestic gardens and, subject to necessary costs constraints, plot sizes large enough to permit adequate light and air circulation. There was also a stress on practical floor plans and the avoidance of "prison cell" rooms. Frontages applied the neo-classical style of conventional middle class houses of the time, sometimes incorporating bay-windows, pediments and "half-timbered" features. Tenants were offered the chance to buy their apartments, paying by installment, which many eventually did, becoming members of the propertied classes as they did so.

The Ostheim, Südheim and Ostenau estates were all constructed under Pfeiffer's close supervision in collaboration with the Stuttgart architect Karl Hengerer, who produced the plans and took practical responsibility for the construction. Hengerer also planned and managed other projects for Pfeiffer, including the Infant Clinic and "Single's Hostel" (both in 1910/12) and the redevelopments in the Stuttgart "old centre" between 1906 and 1909.

"Altstadt renovation" Apart from the Ostheim development (above) Pfeiffer's most extensive project was the "Altstadt renovation", undertaken between 1906 and 1909, for which he received honorary citizenship of the city. Although sources refer to it as the "Altstadt-Sanierung" (literally "Old town renovation") it was not a renovation in the twenty-first century sense, but a large-scale tearing down and replacement of approximately 10% of the old city centre, using contemporary concepts and plans. The new buildings which replaced the old dilapidated structures were constructed in a fashionable style for urban residential and commercial use, not dissimilar in outward appearance to the late-renaissance frontages to be found in the heart of Innsbruck, Salzburg or Bozen (today, for English speakers, known as Bolzano). The elegant facades were combined with wider streets and a larger main square than hitherto. The result was somewhat romanticised when viewed by purists as a vision of the past, but it was nevertheless neat and homely when compared to the old more genuinely late medieval streetscapes it replaced, and it corresponded with the ideas (at this time) of the hugely influential (in southern Germany) architect and city-planner, Theodor Fischer.