Hotel Sacher

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Sacher Hotels Betriebsgesellschaft mbH

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legal form GmbH
founding 1876
Seat Vienna , AustriaAustriaAustria 
management Families Gürtler and Winkler
Branch Hotels
Website www.sacher.com

The Hotel Sacher seen from Albertinaplatz

The Hotel Sacher Wien is located in Vienna's 1st district, Innere Stadt, behind the Vienna State Opera . A well-known specialty of the house is the original Sacher cake . The hotel is a member of the Leading Hotels of the World .

history

Anna Maria Sacher

On the grounds of the demolished Kärntnertortheatre , directly opposite the newly opened imperial court opera , one was Maison meublée built. The restaurateur Eduard Sacher acquired the building, which was modeled on a Renaissance palace, and opened the Hôtel de l'Opéra with a restaurant in 1876 . The son of Franz Sacher , the inventor of the Original Sacher-Torte, had already made a name for himself as a restaurateur and quickly renamed the hotel the Hotel Sacher .

In 1880 he married the 21-year-old Anna Fuchs, who from then on worked in the hotel and quickly took over the business as her husband's health deteriorated. Eduard died in 1892, and Anna Sacher now ran the hotel as a so-called widow's business. The woman, extremely emancipated by the circumstances at the time, who was always to be found with a cigar and her beloved French bulldogs (in Vienna: “Sacher-Bullys”), ran the business with rigor, but also with kindness. Even back then, she ran a company health insurance scheme for her employees.

Right from the start, the Sacher was one of the best addresses in town and in 1871 it was appointed supplier to the royal court for the wine and delicatessen trade . This privilege was granted again to his widow Anna after the death of Eduard Sacher. Before the opera, people enjoyed the exquisite cuisine, met in the legendary booths , and high-ranking representatives from politics also used the always discreet house for meetings. The exclusive hotel was already a social institution. But even the economically difficult years after the First World War did not leave the house unscathed.

Shortly before her death in 1930, Anna Sacher retired from the management. Only after her death did it become known that the hotel was heavily in debt and that there was not much left of its former fortune. In 1934 it finally went bankrupt .

The lawyer Hans Gürtler, his wife Poldi and the hotelier couple Josef and Anna Siller acquired the now run-down house and extensively renovated it: From the heating system to the electrical system and running cold and hot water in all rooms, everything was adapted to modern needs. From now on, the money earned should always flow back into the house. For the first time, the Sachertorte was not only offered for consumption in its own premises, but also sold on the street.

The house increasingly became a meeting place for society again. But the annexation of Austria to Hitler's Germany in 1938 brought this to an abrupt end. Swastika flags now waved in front of the hotel. During the Second World War , the house was largely spared from damage. Immediately after the liberation of Vienna , it was occupied by Soviet soldiers, but Vienna's first district around the hotel was soon managed jointly by the Allies and so fell into British hands for six years.

In 1951 the Siller and Gürtler families got their property back. Josef Siller had died in 1949. Again the hotel had to be extensively renovated. This is how new gastronomic locations were created in the Sacher. Hans Gürtler also laid the foundations for the art collection of the 19th century. Anna Siller died in 1962 and the hotel became the property of the Gürtler family. In 1967 the company received the state award and has been allowed to use the federal coat of arms in business transactions ever since . The son Rolf Gürtler took over the business in 1970, but died shortly afterwards in an accident, whereupon his son Peter Gürtler succeeded him. In 1989 he also took over the Hotel Österreichischer Hof in Salzburg . This was later renamed Hotel Sacher Salzburg . Since his death in 1990, his wife Elisabeth Gürtler-Mauthner, who was divorced from him in 1983, has been running the family business with her daughter Alexandra.

In 2006, the building, which consists of a total of six townhouses, was completely thermally renovated under the direction of the Frank & Partner architectural office, and the loft extension, in which a spa area was housed, was given a striking, bright aluminum roof.

offer

The entrance to the café seen from the opera

As a member of the hotel association The Leading Hotels of the World , which ensures quality control in the five-star hotel sector, Hotel Sacher is one of the best addresses in Austria. Since the expansion in 2006, it has also met the criteria of a leading spa .

In the house you will find the Green Bar , the Red Bar , the Blue Bar , the Confiserie, the Café Sacher , the Sacher Eck and the Salon Sacher . The cafe was the 2004 Golden Coffee Bean by Jacobs excellent.
Also in the building, but not as part of the hotel, is the former kuk court and chamber supplier Wilhelm Jungmann & Neffe .

The Original Sacher-Torte has been made in its own production facility in Vienna-Simmering since 1999 , from where it is exported all over the world. After years of legal dispute with the kuk sugar bakery Demel , only the dessert from the house of Sacher is allowed to adorn itself with the title “Original”. The Sachertorte is imitated by many coffee houses, bakeries and pastry shops.

  • The Vienna Philharmonic Suite in the Hotel Sacher Vienna

  • Sachertorte

Known guests

Main entrance of the hotel in the evening

The house on Philharmonikerstrasse counted numerous prominent guests. Anna Sacher had a photo gallery of her guests in her boudoir. She embroidered all of the signatures on a tablecloth herself. In the very center that of Emperor Franz Joseph .

Crowned heads, statesmen, diplomats and politicians stayed in the Sacher: Edward VIII. , Wallis Simpson , Elisabeth II. , Prince Philip , Prince Rainier , Gracia Patricia , John F. Kennedy , Kofi Annan and many more.

Due to the close proximity of the opera house, many artists were of course among the guests: Herbert von Karajan , Leonard Bernstein , Leo Slezak , Plácido Domingo , José Carreras and Rudolf Nurejew . The music critic Marcel Prawy even stayed at the Sacher as a permanent guest until his death in 2003.

Graham Greene got the idea for the script for the film The Third Man here . A British officer told him about the underground passages in Vienna, whereupon Greene immediately wrote down the first ideas in the bar.

Romy Schneider owed her role in the Sissi films to her resemblance to the bust of the Empress, which stands in the hotel and which the director Ernst Marischka noticed. During the shooting, she lived with her mother Magda Schneider in the Sacher.

In April 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono invited to an unusual press conference at the Sacher. They held one of their legendary “ Bagism ” campaigns in their hotel room in front of press representatives (including André Heller , who reported for Ö3 - Musicbox ) to express their ideas about world peace.

Traditionally, all of the hotel's suites are named after operas and composers (e.g. La Traviata, Carmen, Idomeneo, Die Zauberflöte, Madame Butterfly, Nabucco, Rigoletto, Leonard Bernstein etc.). The new suites on the top floor of the house are named after contemporary operas such as Lulu and Billy Budd .

Hotel Sacher in film and on stage

The Hotel Sacher has been immortalized in numerous films and plays.

literature

Web links

Commons : Hotel Sacher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roland Mischke: The Kaiser was a customer here. Handelsblatt, July 12, 2003, accessed on February 4, 2009 (Austria's monarchy abdicated in 1919, but there are still exclusive shops in Vienna that were once imperial and royal purveyors. Today they fight against “brand madness” with customization and quality. ).
  2. ↑ Nothing more is known about the inheritance of Gürtler's future wife Helene von Damm .
  3. ^ Hotel Sacher Vienna. (flash) In: Projects → Hotels. Frank & Partner, accessed April 20, 2010 .
  4. ^ Hotel Sacher Vienna. (No longer available online.) In: architects Information System (AIS). Heinze, December 19, 2006, archived from the original on November 5, 2011 ; Retrieved April 20, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ais-online.de
  5. ^ Goldene Kaffeebohne 2004. (No longer available online.) Jacobs, 2004, archived from the original on September 6, 2007 ; Retrieved February 23, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jacobs.at
  6. ^ Horst Koegler, Helmut Günther: Reclams Balletlexikon , Stuttgart 1984, p. 210
  7. ↑ The trees are blooming again in the Prater. 1958, Retrieved July 5, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Carol Reed: The Third Man. In: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_dritte_Mann . 1949, accessed July 5, 2020 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Formerly, more precisely, also called Hotelcafé Sacher , because the actual Café Sacher , originally owned by the Sacher family like the hotel, was located as a Ringstrasse café (with a guest garden) at Opernring 11, Vienna-Innere Stadt . Eduard Sacher (1883–1956), son of Eduard (1843–1892) and Anna Sacher (1859–1930), sold the coffee house in May 1925 to Desider Löwy, operator of Café Westminster ( Mariahilfer Strasse 57–59, Vienna-Margareten ) . In 1927 Eduard, now incapacitated , tried to have his mother declare the sales contract null and void, because in 1925 he was no longer in full possession of his intellectual powers and, not least because of his economic hardship at the time, he had assessed the sales value as too low. - See: From the courtroom. The fight for the Café Sacher. A lawsuit by the incapacitated Eduard Sacher. In:  Neue Freie Presse , Abendblatt, No. 22621/1927, September 8, 1927, p. 3, bottom right. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp.

Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 14 ″  N , 16 ° 22 ′ 10 ″  E