Jakob Bengel, Oberstein: From Art Industry to Jewellery Design

The discovery in the early 2000s of the Idar-Oberstein company Jakob Bengel as a prominent German jewellery manufacturer liberated Oberstein from the stigma of being the ‘underdog’ of the jewellery industry in Germany. In establishing the Jakob Bengel Stiftung (JBS), the old factory was given a new lease of life: it became both a monument to itself and a museum. Its inventory helped transform it into a treasure trove of Idar-Oberstein industrial history in the very place that jewellery and metal goods had once been produced.

As a research institution, it set the task of concomitantly reappraising Idar-Oberstein’s manufacturing past. Two publications (now out of print) featured the more than 350 objects comprising the extensive Bengel jewellery collection belonging to Drs Margarete and Heribert Händel. Over the course of the research, influences from French Art Deco were documented and German examples from the Bauhaus milieu discovered.

For the150th anniversary of the factory’s founding, Aurelia Händel-Weber gifted the collection of her parents, who have since passed away, to the Jakob Bengel Stiftung Idar-Oberstein – an occasion for further analysis and this current publication. The initial two catalogues were primarily concerned with providing access to the collection. Today, using Idar-Oberstein as an example, the current publication highlights the reform ideas and ‘new stylistic course’ pursued by the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907, and by its influential network. In it, Wilhelm Lindemann and Christianne Weber-Stöber grant different perspectives on Bengel’s unique contribution to the development of early German jewellery design between 1910 and 1933.