Hotel de France (Vienna)

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Hotel de France in Vienna
Hotel de France around 1900 on an advertising postcard

The Hotel de France in Vienna is a hotel on Schottenring 3 that still exists today and was built in 1872 in the Wilhelminian style.

history

The hotel is part of an ensemble of buildings that was built in 1872 by the architects Franz Fröhlich (1824–1889) and Anton Ölzelt . One year after the opening, on the occasion of the world exhibition in Vienna in 1873 , the name Hotel des France was given to the new hotel , which was considered chic and elegant at the time. The owner was initially the Viennese Lombard and Escompte Bank , founded in 1873 , which opened its first branch on the ground floor, but the hotel operators quickly changed. The composer Anton Bruckner , whom the architect Ölzelt sponsored and who dedicated his sixth symphony to him, stayed in the hotel for a while in the summer of 1895 or took his lunch there.

In 1917 the Hotel de France Ges.mbH and with it the hotel concession came into the possession of the Gisela, Ella and Ernst Herzog family. In the 1920s they converted the house into a middle-class hotel and set up a restaurant and coffee shop on the ground floor. In the basement a small theater was opened, which in 1932 showed the preview of Faith, Love and Hope , a play that had just been written by Ödön von Horváth (and Lukas Kristl). From 1938 the Jewish Herzog family came under pressure from the National Socialists in Vienna and the family members tried to leave. Ernst Herzog escaped to Czechoslovakia in 1938, Ella Herzog is said to have emigrated to South America, and Gisela Herzog was able to travel to New York in 1940. The hotel was then Aryanized and in 1940 the property was assigned to the Viennese wine merchant and NSDAP member Adolf Knorr. The transaction was processed through Creditanstalt .

After the conquest of Vienna by the Allied troops in 1945, the Hotel de France served the French occupying forces as a military hospital and headquarters. "In the course of the denazification process , the owner Knorr was classified as 'less encumbered ' [...]" and charged with an atonement. In 1947 the hotel was acquired by the Jewish merchant Nuchem (Norbert) Wachtel (1882–1957), who had survived the Holocaust in various hiding places in Vienna from 1939 to 1945. For the first time since its construction in 1872, ownership of the house and the hotel was in one hand. Since Wachtel was unable to get the French to move out, he gave the hotel to his daughters. Their husbands Ernst Stock and Kurt Horowitz continued the hotel. In 1972 the family sold the hotel and Ernst Stock became the managing director of the Hofburg conference center.

building

The facade of the Schottenring 3 hotel building with its stone- square side projections and additional gable windows emerges slightly with giant Corinthian pilasters. The wider of the windows are divided into two by caryatid herms in the mezzanine and the attic . Furthermore, the facade is characterized by shallow balcony floors.

In the years 1986 to 1988 renovation and reconstruction work was carried out, three conference rooms, two restaurants and additional guest rooms due to the loft extension. The atrium was created by roofing the inner courtyard with a steel and glass construction. However, the change in the exterior facade was criticized. In 1993, when the historical windows were replaced with plastic windows, important decorative elements such as the caryatid bath were lost.

literature

  • Felix Czeike: Vienna, Inner City: Art and Culture Guide , Youth and People, Vienna, 1993 ISBN 978-3-85058-088-5 , p. 155
  • Maria Braun: The Austria Hotels: Historical Business Analysis , 1988, Vienna
  • Irene Etzersdorfer: Arized , Kremayr & Scheriau, 1995 ISBN 978-3-218-00604-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.austria-hotels.at/de/hotel-de-france/about-us/hotel-history.html
  2. ↑ Günter Fritz: CA also handled Aryanizations ( memento from September 18, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). In: Wirtschaftsblatt from September 17, 1998
  3. ↑ Hanspeter Lussy, Rodrigo López: Financial relations of Liechtenstein at the time of National Socialism : Study on behalf of the Independent Historical Commission Liechtenstein Second World War, Part 2: Financial relations of Liechtenstein at the time of National Socialism, Historical Association for the Principality of Liechtenstein, 2005 ISBN 978-3-906393-36 -0 , p. 206
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Czerny, Ingrid Kastell: Vienna: District - Inner City Volume 1 of Vienna, A. Schroll, 2003 ISBN 978-3-85028366-3 , p. 833
  5. ↑ Irene Etzersdorfer: Arisiert , Kremayr & Scheriau, 1995 ISBN 978-3-218-00604-0 , p. 148
  6. ↑ Interview with Stella Semenowsky
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Czerny, Ingrid Kastell: Vienna: District - Inner City , Volume 1 of Vienna, A. Schroll, 2003 ISBN 978-3-85028366-3 , p. 833
  8. ↑ Dieter Klein , Martin Kupf , Robert Schediwy : Stadtbildverluste Wien: A look back at five decades , LIT Verlag Münster, 2005 ISBN 978-3-8258-7754-5 , p. 138 f.

Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 52.3 "  N , 16 ° 21 ′ 46.6"  E