Maxim Lurion

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Maxim Lurion

Maxime Lurion , also Max Lurion or Maximilian Lurion , (born February 12, 1875 in Baghdad , † May 26, 1948 in Harrow-on-the-Hill ) was an Austrian cyclist and restaurateur .

Maxime Lurion was born as the son of a Jewish merchant in Baghdad and grew up in Vienna . He had two brothers and two sisters; the family lived in Vienna between 1885 and 1894. At the age of 13 he learned to ride a penny farthing , and from 1891 he was active as a cyclist. On September 13, 1891, as an unknown driver in a race on the cycle race track in Vienna , he surprisingly came third behind the eventual world champion August Lehr and a driver named Finder. From 1893 he was able to win numerous victories across Europe; so he won, among other things, the championships of the Bohemian Crown Lands , Bohemia and Austria. In 1894 and 1895 he won three different titles as European champion - for example in Berlin in 1895 in front of Alex Verheyen and Arthur Heimann - and was Austrian-Hungarian sprint champion .

In 1894 Maxime Lurion declared his exit from Judaism. In 1901, in a discussion in the Viennese newspaper Die Welt Lurion founded by Theodor Herzl , Balduin Groller cited Lurion as one of the many Jewish athletes who proved that Jews are not physically inferior.

In 1897, Lurion retired from cycling as a wealthy man and opened a café in Vienna. In December 1903, the Neue Wiener Tagblatt reported that he had “ built a coffee house on the corner of Stubenring and Wollzeile, on the former old barracks grounds, whose location, equipped with exquisite luxury, will be a grand attraction of Vienna”. Two years later he sold the coffee house to the Prückel family, which has been called Café Prückel since then .

Maxime Lurion, who was married to the daughter of a restaurateur from Marienbad named Spitzer, moved to London, where he and his father-in-law ran an Austrian garden restaurant at the Imperial Austrian Exhibition in Earls Court in 1906 . Austrian cuisine was a hit with visitors so he stayed in London and opened Maxim restaurant at 30 Wardour Street. The restaurant was on three floors and was decorated mainly in white. Despite good reviews, the restaurant was not a commercial success and Lurion had to sell the place before 1914.

Lurion died in Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1948, apparently without an heir, because in 1950 lawyers wrote a note in the London Gazette to find the descendants of his siblings.

literature

  • Wheel world. Sports album. A cycling yearbook. 10. Vol., 1912, ZDB -ID 749618-7 , pp. 36-38.

Web links

Commons : Maxime Lurion  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c London Gazette . No. 38977, HMSO, London, July 25, 1950, p. 3845 ( PDF , accessed October 18, 2013, English).
  2. Anna L. Staudacher: "... announces the departure from the Mosaic faith". 18,000 exits from Judaism in Vienna, 1868–1914: names - sources - dates. Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-55832-4 , p. 384 .
  3. Todd Samuel Presner: Muscular Judaism. The Jewish body and the politics of regeneration (= Routledge Jewish Studies Series. Vol. 24). Routledge London et al. 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-77178-8 , p. 191 .
  4. Kulturcafé Prückel on Kulturverein.at ( Memento from September 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  5. 1906 Imperial Austrian Exhibition on studygroup.org.uk
  6. ^ Restaurant Maxim, London on jazzageclub.com