Porsche supports a research project on the third company founder alongside Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch. On behalf of Adolf Rosenberger GmbH from Munich, Prof. Dr. Joachim Scholtyseck from the University of Bonn to find out more regarding the racing driver and businessman Adolf Rosenberger. As a co-founder, shareholder and managing director, he was involved in the creation of the design office in April 1931.
The starting point is a work published five years ago by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Pyta with the title “Porsche – From design office to global brand”. It describes the beginnings of Porsche up to the immediate post-war period, when the fate of Adolf Rosenberger was presented for the first time in a scientific study. However, the non-profit Adolf Rosenberger gGmbH, founded in 2019, considered the work to be incomplete and therefore approached Porsche. Since then, Porsche and the representatives of Adolf Rosenberger’s descendants have been working together on a comprehensive and expanded study, taking into account all known sources and the Rosenberger archive. For the first time, previously unconsidered documents belonging to the Rosenberger family will be used for the research. All materials available to Porsche will also be available to the research team.
The focal points of the research financially supported by Porsche include Adolf Rosenberger’s childhood in Pforzheim and the encounter with Ferdinand Porsche before the design office was founded. A special focus is on the questions of why Adolf Rosenberger left Porsche in 1933 as managing director and in 1935 as a shareholder before emigrating to the USA in 1938 and starting a new life there under the name Alan A. Robert. The further contact with Porsche and the role of Ferry Porsche up to the death of Adolf Rosenberger in 1967 is also examined. The results will then be published in German and English as a book.
Prof. Dr. Joachim Scholtyseck is a renowned contemporary historian and has written on the entrepreneurs Günther Quandt (2011), Otto Beisheim (2020) and Reinhard Mohn (2020) as well as on the companies National-Bank (2011), Freudenberg (2015) and Merck (2018). researched. The non-profit Adolf Rosenberger GmbH represents the interests of the representatives of Adolf Rosenberger’s descendants, who want to fully understand the life and work of their Jewish ancestor. Behind this is also the concern to set an example once morest anti-Semitism, discrimination and exclusion in today’s world. (awm)
