Franz Ernst Schütte (21 November 1836 – 1 February 1911) was a German entrepreneur-businessman who during his lifetime became celebrated for the extent of his wealth.
[6][8] The company had made its first foray into importing and marketing petroleum – at that time principally used as a lighting fuel and lubricant - from Pennsylvania in 1858.
In 1886, for the first time, a consignment of petroleum destined for distribution by Schütte crossed the Atlantic in the "Glückauf", the first German-owned (although it had to be "converted in England") ocean going oil tanker.
The "Glückauf", considered by German ship builders to be based on a fatally flawed concept, given the combination in close proximity of a cargo of combustible oil with a "fire powered" propulsion system, turned out to be the prototype for several generations of oil tankers and "super tankers" that would ply the world's oceans through the twentieth century and beyond its end.
[9] By 1889 there were fifteen oil tankers, and the traditional practice of storing petroleum in barrels in warehouses had been superseded by the use of large purpose-built oil-reservoirs.
The next year saw the foundation in Venice of the "Società italo-americana del petrolio" (SIAP) by Benedetto Walter, jointly with Rockefeller.
With others, he used the site to set up what now became the "Bremer Vulkan Schiffbau und Maschinenfabrik in Vegesack" with an initial share capital of 300,000 marks.
Another major shareholder, with 8% of the company, was the ambitious engineer Victor Nawatzki, who was installed to run the business as "Generaldirektor", a position he would fill with conspicuous success through two decades of profitable expansion before assuming the chairmanship of the supervisory board.
[14][15] The business remained profitable through much of the twentieth century, but then, following two decades of mergers, acquisitions and increasingly frantic restructuring across the European shipbuilding sector, collapsed in a high-profile bankruptcy in 1996/97.
[17] In 1896 he teamed up with Friedrich Bischoff to set up the Argo Steamship company which concentrated on routes connecting Bremen with Scandinavia and the Levant.
In 1899 Bremer Vulkan delivered Argo's first passenger ship, the eleven-passenger steam yacht "Andrej Perwoswannij", designed and built for a long-term charter to the imperial Russian government.
[19] In 1881 he took on the role of "Bauherr" for building and maintenance of the city's churches and especially, in this instance, for the cathedral, which had become degraded, through the passage of time, and through neglect.
[24][25] In 1904 Schütte made a plot of land of slightly more than 4 hectares (9.9 acres) by the Osterdeich available for a term of 25 years for the creation of a Botanical Garden alongside the river on the edge of the city.
The garden was set out by the young botanist Friedrich August Georg Bitter and the Swiss horticulturalist Ernst Nußbaumer.
When it came to planning the memorial Schütte found himself in intense disputation alongside the "progressive" museum director (and art critic) Gustav Pauli and opposed to the more traditionalist approach represented by the respected conservative artist Arthur Fitger.
In the end the sculptor finally appointed by Schütte in 1902 to produce the statue, Louis Tuaillon, seems to have taken matters into his own hands.
[28][29] Schütte also took the lead, alongside the city's mayor Alfred Dominicus Pauli, in fund-raising for Bremen's Bismarck monument.
In 1902 he spent 100,000 marks to set up and endow the "Bremen Schiller foundation" ("bremische Schillerstiftung") to provide access for state school pupils to several theatre performances each year.
Five years after he died, in 1916, his heirs set up the "Franz Schütte Foundation" which continues to fund a range of education and arts-related projects, targeting in particular young people with exceptional talents but without the money necessary to develop these properly.