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From Peter Ufer
Radebeul. For the celebration of the 125th birthday of Koenig & Bauer in Radebeul all employees were invited at the end of September. Although Frank Sparbert is no longer a member of the workforce, he is still there. The retiree still follows the development of his old company, because without his family, the printing press manufacturer would not exist.
Frank Sparbert is delighted with the company's development and listens carefully at the anniversary celebration. There, Ralf Sammeck, Koenig & Bauer's Executive Board member responsible for the Sheetfed segment since 2007, takes stock and says: "Today, more than 1,800 people work at our site in Radebeul." He is responsible for the segment with the highest sales, which offers a wide range of sheetfed offset presses under the "Rapida" name, from half to large format for the packaging and commercial printing market. "The Sheetfed segment recorded a 30.5 percent increase in sales to €352.4 million in the first half of 2023. At 9.4 million euros as of June 30, 2023, EBIT was significantly higher than in the same half of the previous year," says Sammeck.
On the occasion of the anniversary, he also points out that none of this would be possible without Saxony's long tradition. "We have the experience of almost 30,000 working years in our industry." Frank Sparbert is not astonished at this addition of tradition, and is also a little proud. However, for a long time he knew very little about the story that began 125 years ago with his grandfather Alfred. The grandson never met his ancestor either. He was born on May 21, 1944, when his grandfather was already dead. He died in 1940, but the two are still very close.
Rooms full of the past
The first reason for the proximity: Frank Sparbert lives in Radebeul, in the Niederlößnitz district, in a villa built in 1907 by master builder Eugen Pönisch. With the house, his grandfather laid the foundation for an estate that still belongs to the family today. Like the Radebeul printing press company, the property survived two world wars, socialism, the peaceful revolution, several currency reforms and today, freshly renovated, stands like a monument to the legacy of a bygone era. A fountain with the initials AS, Alfred Sparbert, bubbles in the front garden.
"I grew up in the midst of these rooms full of the past," says the 79-year-old. "Unfortunately, my father Werner didn't tell me much about who my grandfather was and what he created." There was a reason for the silence. After World War II, most people were primarily concerned with reordering and rebuilding their lives. There was little need to look back, and in addition, private businesses were expropriated in the GDR. Their history was consigned to the dustbin of history. If they were not reported privately, they were forgotten. Father Werner seemed to take little interest in it, no longer worked in the printing industry but in the tire industry, and died in 1984.
The second reason for the closeness: "There was still my uncle Hellmuth, who occasionally came to talk about his father, my grandfather Alfred. He said that the old man had been a real Saxon with the gene of a far-sighted engineer," says Frank Sparbert. As a youngster, he often visited his uncle, who lived in Kötzschenbroda. Hellmuth lived for many years in the front house of the factory site at Uferstraße 11. The old factory was demolished after reunification. It also had to do with the grandfather. The entrepreneur manufactured small printing presses there until 1928. His uncle studied mechanical engineering and worked for many years in his father's company. Through him, the grandson learned that the grandfather was from Lunzenau, born on July 9, 1860. In 1874, he began an apprenticeship as a locksmith in Limbach, and from 1879 studied at the Royal State School in Chemnitz. In 1884, his grandfather started his career at Albert & Cie. in Frankenthal, constructing lithographic high-speed presses. There he met Joseph Hauss and Carl Nack, whom he would later meet again.
On the property behind the Radebeul villa, Frank Sparbert also renovated a garden house a few years ago. In his room, with its large windows and view of the garden, there is an expansive table. When talking about the past, the 79-year-old places all the documents on it that he has collected about his grandfather in recent years.
He has owned part of it since 1980. After his uncle died in 1971 and later his aunt, he found a box, an archive of Alfred's, in the household clearance in his apartment. But it did not come to the profound research at that time. He put the box in the attic of the villa and there it stood around unopened for years.
His grandfather left documents in the Alfred archive in which he described his professional development in detail. At the beginning of 1898, he started working for Rockstroh & Schneider Nachfahren, in Dresden-Löbtau. Here he met Joseph Hauss again as a foreman and Carl Nack as a correspondent. Just a few weeks later, Sparbert and Hauss founded the Dresden Schnellpressenfabrik, and Nack was also a partner for a short time. "The factory later became Planeta-Druckmaschinenwerke and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, today's Koenig & Bauer AG plant in Radebeul. So my grandfather is one of the founders of a company that still manufactures printing presses. It took time to understand this and to respect this remarkable history. But now it has, and I'm extremely pleased about that," says Frank Sparbert. After several attempts, the company founders invented the so-called planetary drive as a "device for moving the pressure foundation of high-speed presses." Alfred Sparbert wrote: "On Sundays after work in my apartment in Dresden, Hainsberger Straße, we designed and detailed the new type of high-speed press 'Columbia'. Only after four different designs did we finally arrive at the planetary drive designed in 1901 and used permanently." The entrepreneurs applied for a patent for this, and in 1902 it bore the number 135138 with the reference: Device for moving the pressure foundation of high-speed presses. The name Planeta was born.
Letterpress fast runner
Frank Sparbert has not only researched the history in detail over the past twenty years, but has also written several articles about it. That's why he knows that a new factory was built in Brockwitz around 1900, where letterpresses were produced in larger numbers. In 1910, the Dresdner Schnellpressenfabrik was incorporated as a joint stock company, and Hauss and Sparbert were given a five-year contract as board members. This period saw the development of a letterpress high-speed press, the later Planeta Fixia, as well as the factory expansion on the site of Plant 1 in Radebeul-Naundorf. Alfred Sparbert did not support the demand for conversion to wartime production and left the company as a result. In 1915, he founded Sparo-Maschinengesellschaft and produced small-format presses, letter printers and cutting machines in Kötzschenbroda, exactly where Uncle Hellmuth lived for many years and where Frank Sparbert first heard more about his ancestor.
The third reason for the proximity: Frank Sparbert recounts that he began an apprenticeship at Planeta in 1960. When he went to Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1963 to study engineering, the student only suspected that he might be continuing down the path of a remarkable tradition. It was not until the Radebeul printing press company, where he had been employed for years in the meantime, celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1998 that the engineer immersed himself intensively in the family history. He fetched the box with the partially unopened Alfred archive from the attic of the villa. When he had read everything, his personal career path suddenly seemed absolutely logical to him. "I actually move in the footsteps of my grandfather to this day, and my sons do the same. I hope their children continue on this path."
Street named after the founder
According to Sparbert, he himself began working at the KAMA cardboard packaging machine plant in Dresden after completing his studies, on the recommendation of Planeta. He worked there for 25 years, working very closely with the printing press plant in a process based on division of labor. In the GDR, the Planeta plant belonged to the Polygraph combine, had seven plant sections and, as one of the 10 export promotion companies, was an important foreign exchange procurer. In 1985, the Kama plant was then assigned to the printing press plant as Plant 7. "At the end of 1989 after the peaceful revolution, I became plant manager of KAMA. This was an honor on the one hand, and a burden on the other, because when it became clear that the old structure of the company could no longer be relevant to the market economy, I had to lay off many employees and close the plant after 3 years. I even had to send my own former boss into retirement," recalls the man from Radebeul.
He experienced the transition from a nationally owned company to its sale to Koenig & Bauer. Frank Sparbert worked as Head of Quality Management at Koenig & Bauer in Radebeul until 2009, when he retired after 49 years with the company. Frank Sparbert has remained a restless spirit, one who, like his grandfather, is always setting out for something new.
His ancestor may have passed this energy on to him. The grandson is particularly pleased that since 2016 there has even been a street at the Koenig & Bauer factory site bearing the name Alfred Sparbert. "Even if it is only a small street, the truck access to the plant, my grandfather is not forgotten in the public sphere as a result," says the descendant. Because there are obviously enough reasons to remember Alfred Sparbert.
