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| Two Zeiss Factories in Germany |
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| (Original appeared in 1996 in a publication issued by the Regional Center for Political Education, Thuringia. Reproduced here with the kind permission of the authors: Wolfgang Mühlfriedel and Edith Hellmuth.) |
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The reconstruction of the production facilities in Jena started in the summer of 1947. On 4 October 1946, the Heidenheim-based Zeiss Group founded – with the support of Jena – the company Opton Optische Werke Oberkochen GmbH which operated under the name Zeiss-Opton Optische Werke Oberkochen GmbH with the approval of the Jena management.
After the nationalization of the Jena factory, the people in Oberkochen were afraid that the Americans could confiscate the Zeiss assets in the ally-held zones. This was why the Oberkochen management did its utmost to ensure that, due to the fact that the Carl Zeiss Foundation no longer existed in Jena, the foundation bearing Abbe’s unmistakable stamp was re-created in the Western federal state of Wurttemberg. On 23 February 1949, the government of this state ruled that the foundation’s legal domicile should be Heidenheim in the West. On 15 January 1951, the firm Carl Zeiss was entered in the Commercial Register of Heidenheim district court. Initially, it only marketed precision-mechanical and optical products, but then took over Zeiss-Opton GmbH on 1 October 1953.
In the late 1940s and during the 1950s, not only the traditional production spectrum was resumed at both Zeiss locations, but the scientists and design engineers of the companies also devoted their attention to new fields of development. Examples include electron microscopes or the nuclear track microscope that Jena built for nuclear research institute near Moscow. Both companies started to produce large astronomical instruments again. The astronomy department in Jena constructed planetariums and 2 m telescopes for the observatories in Tautenburg and Hamburg. In Oberkochen the 150 mm Coudé refractometer and the 650 mm refractor were produced in the 1950s.
With their increasingly similar production lines, the two Zeiss factories became competitors on the German and international markets. Both claimed the trademark rights granted to Carl Zeiss Jena or the Carl Zeiss Foundation for Germany and other states in the period before 1945. The Oberkochen management held the opinion that only Heidenheim/Oberkochen could now rightfully claim these rights. As Jena did not share this view and offered their products on international markets with the trademarks that had existed before 1945, a fierce dispute began between Oberkochen and Jena in spring 1954. It was not until 1971 that both parties managed to reach an agreement in London whereby – provided that their respective location, i.e. Jena or Oberkochen, was appropriately highlighted – each firm was entitled to use the name Carl Zeiss and the lens trademark in specific agreed markets. For example, VEB Carl Zeiss JENA was permitted to offer its products in the Eastern Bloc countries, Syria, in the Lebanon and Kuwait using the agreed trademarks. Carl Zeiss Oberkochen, on the other hand, had the right to distribute the products bearing the name Carl Zeiss in West Germany, West Berlin, the Benelux countries, Italy, Greece and the USA.
From the 1960s onwards, the advances being made in electronics and information technology increasingly offered new possibilities to the field of optical instrument design. The combination of optical, precision-mechanical and electronic principles led to products featuring totally new properties. These new possibilities were pursued by both Jena and Oberkochen. However, the conditions available for such combination processes in instrument design were totally different at the two locations. Oberkochen had a powerful electronic and IT industry at its side and was able to use international developments without restriction.
VEB Carl Zeiss Jena, on the other hand, often had to compensate for missing or defective deliveries from East Germany or other Eastern Bloc states by developing expensive solutions of its own. This led to the inception of such world innovations as the laser micro-spectral analyzer, with which the industrial use of lasers was implemented for the first time in 1964, or the first industrial electron beam lithography system developed in the mid-1970s.
Both Zeiss locations rose to new challenges resulting from the progress being achieved in space research and microelectronics. Oberkochen provided the electronic industry with microelectronic optics, and Jena produced instruments for microelectronic technologies.
In 1987, VEB Carl Zeiss Jena employed 32,378 people, while Oberkochen had a workforce of 8,278. Despite the similarity of the two Zeiss locations in the field of science and technology, it must be stressed that their workforces worked under totally different political, economical and social conditions.
VEB Carl Zeiss Jena, which since the 1960s had formed the core of a combine that eventually encompassed an entire sector of industry, was integrated into a central administrative system whose inadequacies became increasingly apparent in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result of the political change taking place in East Germany from fall 1989 onwards, the combine VEB Carl Zeiss Jena was dissolved. The privatization of VEB Carl Zeiss Jena began at the end of June 1990. The companies JENOPTIK GmbH and die CARL ZEISS JENA GmbH emerged from this process in 1991. The Oberkochen-based Zeiss company acquired Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH. When Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH was integrated into the Carl Zeiss Group, the precision engineering and optical industry in the western world was in the midst of a recessionary downturn. As a result, the Jena enterprise not only suffered the negative impact of the structural change in Eastern Europe, but also had to seek a new place on the international markets under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable. A large percentage of the Zeiss jobs in Jena were lost between 1990 und 1995. In 1995, a restructuring process took place in the Carl Zeiss Group, as a result of which Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH assumed responsibility for clear-cut business units.
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