Qualla: Schunck

Schunck: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk van der Made (en:User:DirkvdM, CC BY-SA 3.0. In August 1874 a German weaver named Arnold Schunck walked into a small Dutch town with three handlooms, a wife and a one-year-old son. Heerlen had 5,000 people, no railway and not yet a single coal mine. Anna Schunck-Kuppers sold cloth on one side of their one-room shop in the Willemstraat and packets of medicinal herbs on the other. Arnold, more artisan than businessman, wove. Within sixty years their descendants would commission a glass-walled department store that ended up on a list of the thousand most important buildings of the twentieth century. The story of Schunck is the story of how four generations of a single family, born in a Belgian weaving village, helped invent modern Heerlen.

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Image: Dirk van der Made (en:User:DirkvdM | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schunck: Wanderbursche

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ScoobyHugh, CC BY-SA 3.0. Arnold Schunck was born in 1842 in Eupen-Kettenis, in the German-speaking sliver of what is now Belgium, into a family of weavers whose name appears in the parish records as early as 1776. As a young master weaver he set out on his obligatory Wanderbursche journey, the travelling...

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Image: ScoobyHugh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schunck: Cloth for the Miners

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Romaine, CC0. Arnold Schunck arrived just as the regional ground was about to shift under his feet. There had been some prospecting for coal at the Valkenburgerweg that very March. He may have heard the rumours. The mines themselves would not really get going until after his death in 1905, but...

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Image: Romaine | CC0

Schunck: Peter and the Glass Palace

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kris Roderburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. Arnold's son Peter Schunck, born in Hauset in 1873, is the figure who looms largest in the family's memory and Heerlen's. He took over the firm in 1905 with sixty employees. By 1960, the year he died, there were six hundred. Peter survived two world wars and the catastrophic inte...

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Image: Kris Roderburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schunck: Pierre, and What Was Hidden

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arnold45, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Germans invaded in May 1940, Peter's son Pierre Schunck made a quieter and braver kind of decision. Pierre had taken up the family's old craft of weaving as a young man. During the occupation he worked in the Dutch resistance, sheltering people whose lives depended on no...

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Image: Arnold45 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Schunck: From Bankruptcy to Cultural Centre

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thea van den Heuvel, CC BY-SA 4.0. The good times did not last forever. In the 1970s, expansion into businesses outside the core - the kind of diversification Peter had pruned away after the First World War - almost cost the family the company. The firm eventually closed and the Glaspaleis fell into dilapidation. ...

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Image: Thea van den Heuvel | CC BY-SA 4.0