Stop 3: Henriette Marx
Düsseldorfer Str. 49 – go to map – go to starting point
On 5 May 1879, Henriette Breuer was born in the village of Tetz which nowadays belongs to the district of Düren. Her parents were merchant Moses Breuer and his wife Sibilla. In 1904, Henriette married Louis Marx of Mönchengladbach. In February 1906, she opened a branch of the company “Gladbacher Fabrik-Depot” (literally “Factory Depot Gladbach”) at Düsseldorfer Str. 49 (at the time: 43) in Ohligs. She gave birth to son Fritz in Mönchengladbach on 14 September 1905, whereas her daughter Grete Luise was born in Ohligs on 4 April 1907.
Henriette Marx‘s move to Ohligs was probably also a way to flee from her abusive husband. The Royal District Court Cologne dissolved the marriage on 30 March 1907 and ruled that Louis Marx was guilty of abusing his wife. It’s remarkable that the court viewed Henriette’s second pregnancy as having been conceived under duress. If they had judged it to be a new tie between husband and wife, the prerequisites for a divorce would have become obsolete.
Although Henriette Marx’s personal circumstances as a single mother of two small children were surely not easy, she successfully established a new livelihood in Ohligs. In 1909, she temporarily ranked first among the Jewish merchants of Ohligs when it came to the amount of taxes due. In fact, her store that sold clothes, fabrics and bedding thrived so much that she extended her sales rooms several times over the course of the following years.
Henriette Marx got married to merchant Simon Meyerhoff, who moved in from Wiesbaden, on 7 November 1912. Simon had been born in the Westphalian town of Körbecke on 29 September 1875 and was the fifth child to his parents, butcher and cattle trader Jakob Meyerhoff and his wife Jenni. The couple’s witnesses were merchants Paul Steeg and Georg Davids of Ohligs. A few weeks afterwards, Henriette Marx announced her business’ rebranding in the “Ohligser Anzeiger”: it henceforth operated under the name of “S. Meyerhoff, Manufaktur- und Modenhaus” (literally “S. Meyerhoff, manufacture and fashion store”).
The clothing store, of which Henriette remained managing director, still belonged to the larger Jewish businesses in Ohligs, but it no longer reached top-ranking position. The range of products included women’s clothing, fabrics and linen.
According to his registration card, her son Fritz Marx moved to Duisburg in 1923. After having attended a school of higher education for four years, he was trained as musician at different places, including Leipzig.
On 1 July 1929, Henriette’s daughter Grete Luise married Dr. jur. Dr. rer. pol. Heinrich Rosenblatt in Ohligs. The jurist had been born in Nuremberg on 23 September 1898 and ran a solicitor’s office there from 1927 onwards. Their daughter Hella was also born in Nuremberg, on 24 December 1930. Later on, the young couple lived in Duisburg.
The Meyerhoff department store filed for bankruptcy in September 1931 and had to be closed down. It can only be speculated in how far the effects of the world economic crisis played a part in this development. In April 1932, Henriette Meyerhoff registered a business, operating under her name and selling manufactured goods as well as clothes, at Düsseldorfer Straße 17. That address is the penultimate stop of our tour, so we will learn more about the fate of the Meyerhoff family later on.