Biography | Friedrich Joussen — The Templergraben Building Where He Took the Diplom-Ingenieur

People who meet Friedrich Joussen as a tour-operator chief tend to skip the engineering degree.

The degree was taken here, on Templergraben.

A TUI Group listing document records that he studied electrical engineering and graduated from RWTH Aachen in 1988 as a Diplom-Ingenieur.

Munzinger and the German biographical record agree on the faculty and the qualification.

RWTH's own alumni magazine later printed the same sequence: Elektrotechnik at Aachen, then twenty years in telecoms.

The main building at Templergraben 55 is the public face of that campus.

Robert Cremer designed it between 1865 and 1870 as the home of the new polytechnic.

The facade still faces the old city wall line.

The electrical-engineering institutes sat, and sit, in the same inner-city cluster rather than on a greenfield satellite.

He arrived from Duisburg after the 1982 Abitur at Landfermann-Gymnasium.

He did not linger as an academic.

After the diploma he spent a short period as a software engineer at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon.

In 1988 he joined Mannesmann AG in Düsseldorf, just as that steel group was preparing a GSM mobile licence.

Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH followed in 1989.

The Aachen years are the hinge between a Duisburg schoolboy and the technician later nicknamed FritzD2 inside the mobile unit.

When he took the TUI chair in February 2013, the same alumni magazine treated the move as a break after two decades in that industry.

The pin is the Hauptgebäude on Templergraben, not an unnamed lab.

A visitor still finds the same stone front and the SuperC block next door.

This is a working university building, not a private office.

The date on this memory is the graduation year recorded in the TUI prospectus: 1988.

Photo: Hendrik Brixius, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons