Emil Jellinek - The Diplomat and Businessman (1872 To 1893)

The Diplomat and Businessman (1872 To 1893)

In 1872, when 19 years old, he moved to France. There, through his father's connections, Schmidl, the Austro-Hungarian Consul in Morocco, requested his services getting Jellinek diplomatic posts at Tangier and Tetouan successively. In Tetouan he met Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert an African born lady of French-Sepharadi descent.

In 1874 he was called up for military service in Vienna but was declared unfit. He resumed his diplomatic career as Austrian vice-consul at Oran, Algeria and also began trading Algerian grown tobacco to Europe in partnership with Rachel's father.

He also worked as an inspector for the French Aigle insurance company and traveled to Vienna briefly in 1881 at the age of 28 to open one of its branch offices. Returning to Oran, he finally married Rachel, and their first two sons Adolph and Fernand were born there.

Two years later in 1884, Jellinek joined the insurance company full time and moved with the family to Baden bei Wien, Austria, where they lived in the house of a wine dealer named Hanni. In Baden in 1889 his first daughter, Adrienne Manuela Ramona Jellinek, was born on September 16, and called Mercédès, the name Mercédès meaning "gifts" or "favors" in Spanish. Rachel died 4 years after the birth of her daughter. Even so, Jellinek came to believe the name Mercedes brought good fortune and called all his properties after it. One of his sons wrote: “He was as superstious as the ancient Romans.”

Emil Jellinek, a successful Austrian dealer and racing driver on the French Riviera who greatly admired Maybach's work, promised to buy a shipment of 36 automobiles for 550,000 goldmarks if Maybach could design a great race car for him following his specifications. The prototype was finished in December 1900 and, in 1901 went on to have a string of racing successes. Its engine was baptized Daimler-Mercedes (Spanish for mercy) after Mercedes Jellinek, Emil's 10–year–old daughter.

Jellinek's insurance business and stock-market trading became very successful, and they started to spend the winters in Nice on the fashionable French Riviera, eventually moving there and establishing links with both international business people and the local aristocracy.

It was in Nice that Jellinek became enthralled by the automobile, studying any information that he could gather about it and purchasing successively: a De Dion-Bouton, a Léon-Bollée Voiturette, both tricycles, and a four-seat Benz motorized-coach.

Helped by his diplomatic career, he became the Austrian Consul General in Nice, Jellinek began selling automobiles, mainly French makes, to European aristocrats spending winter vacations in the region. Associated with the automobile business were Leon Desjoyeaux, from Nice, and C. L. “Charley” Lehmann, from Paris. He acquired a large mansion which he named Villa Mercedes to run the business from and by 1897 he was selling about 140 cars a year and started calling them Mercedes. The car business was by now more profitable than his insurance work.

Rachel died in 1893 and was buried in Nice. In 1899 he married again to Madelaine Henriette Engler (Anaise Jellinek), and had four more children Alain Didier, Guy, Rene and Andree (Maya).

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