Otto Lagerfeld

Contents

Otto Christian Ludwig Lagerfeld (20 September 1881 – 4 July 1967) was a German businessman, who in 1919 founded the German company Lagerfeld & Co, which imported evaporated milk.

He was the son of a wine merchant from Hamburg, Tönnies Johann Otto Lagerfeld and his wife Maria Wilhelmine Franziska Lagerfeld (née Wiegels).[1]

Personal life

In 1930, Lagerfeld married firstly to Theresia Feigl, who died while giving child birth to their only daughter:

  • Theodora Dorothea "Thea" Lagerfeld (1922–2007), who married Count Thomas Friedrich Hans von der Schulenburg (1919–1944), without issue.[2]

In 1930, he married secondly to Elisabeth Josefa Emilie Bahlmann, daughter of the Catholic Centre Party local politician Heinrich Maria Karl Bahlmann, and they had two children:

  • Martha Christiane "Christel" Lagerfeld (1931–2015), married American-born Robert Arthur Johnson (1922–2014), the former tax collector of Wethersfield, Connecticut, with whom she settled in Portland, Connecticut and had three children.[3][4]
  • Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019), without issue.[5][6][7]

His family was mainly shielded from the deprivations of World War II due to his membership in the Nazi party and his business interests in Germany through the firm Glücksklee-Milch GmbH.[8][9][10] Otto Lagerfeld had been in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.[11]

References

  1. 1."Obituary notice". Hamburger Nachrichten. 24 June 1931. Retrieved 21 February 2019 – via The European Library.
  2. 2."Family tree of Theodora Dorothea 'Thea' LAGERFELD". Geneanet. Retrieved 12 November 2022.
  3. 3."Robert Johnson Obituary (1922 - 2014) - Portland, CT - Hartford Courant". Legacy.com. Retrieved 11 May 2026.
  4. 4."Met Gala snubs Karl Lagerfeld's blue-collar American family". 29 April 2023. Retrieved 11 May 2026.
  5. 5.Kopitzsch, Franklin; Brietzke, Dirk (2001). Hamburgische Biografie-Personenlexikon. Vol. 2. Wallstein Verlag. p. 234. ISBN 978-3-7672-1366-1.
  6. 6.Jaeger, Hans (1982). Lagerfeld, Otto. Retrieved 21 February 2019.
  7. 7."Family tree of Elisabeth Josefa Emilie BAHLMANN". Geneanet. Retrieved 31 May 2020.
  8. 8.Kaiser, Alfons (2022). Karl Lagerfield A life in Fashion. Thames and Hudson Ltd. p. 348. ISBN 978-0-500-77730-5.
  9. 9.Sahner, Paul (2009). Karl (in German). mvg verlag. p. 15. ISBN 978-3-86882-015-7.
  10. 10.Encyclopedia of World Biography. Vol. 9. Gale Research. 1998. p. 161. ISBN 978-0-7876-2221-3. Retrieved 7 January 2012. Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was born on 10 September 1935, in Hamburg, Germany.
  11. 11.Horyn, Cathy, "Why Fashion Films Are Usually Cartoons," The New York Times, Sun. 6 October 2013, p. 13