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People always say that someone should remember, either for the dead or the actions they took or did not take, or as object lessons about something terrible or wonderful. If one is going to keep the flames alive for the victims, no doubt someone else will keep the flames alive for the perpetrators.
Thomas d. lonner / my blood strangers
“Chic Parisien” ca. 1925
Published by Atelier Bachwitz
Founded in 1894 and dissolved in 1958, Atelier Bachwitz / Bachwitz AG was an international publishing house that produced and distributed fashion and lifestyle magazines from the Palais des Beaux Arts building at Löwengasse 47 in the third district of Vienna. Arnold Bachwitz founded the house and its first title appeared in 1898. By 1938 the company published around fifty magazines with print runs of up to 60,000, drew 95 percent of its turnover from exports, and employed about 320 people.
Arnold Bachwitz died in 1930, and by the late 1930s the shareholders were his widow Rosine, their daughter Alice Strel, and the estate of their daughter Grete Lebach. In 1938, after Austria was annexed by the German Reich, the company and the building were "Aryanized." The entire board, most of it the Bachwitz family, was struck from the commercial register on May 11, and in November 1940 the company's 20,000 shares passed to the publishing house of the German Labour Front. The fashion journals themselves did not stop, and went on appearing until at least 1943.
Rosine Bachwitz died in Theresienstadt in 1942; Alice Strel did not survive a deportation from Prague the same year. No restitution claim was ever filed, and the building was never returned to the family's descendants.
Over the years, we've been working to reattach the narrative to the building, which still carries the name. What follows is what we've been able to establish about people who are not here.
“Chic Parisien” ca. 1910
Published by Atelier Bachwitz
The company’s titles included Der Modezeichner, its first, from 1898; Chic Parisien (1898–1929); Die große Mode (1900–1922); Die elegante Frau (1900–1929); and The Coming Season (1920–1929). Others appeared under English or French titles, among them The Fashion Designer, Revue Mondaine and Les Tailleurs de Luxe. Three further titles ran on well past the founder’s death: Wiener Blusenmodelle, Beaux Arts de Modes and Le Grand Tailleur, the last of which was still appearing in 1943. Many were issued in trilingual editions, and distribution partners were listed in Vienna, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Minsk, New York, Auckland and Melbourne.
Moderne Welt, founded in October 1918 and edited for its first eight years by Ludwig Hirschfeld, is often listed among the company’s titles up to 1939. Bachwitz sold it in 1927–28, and its imprints then name Adolf Luser in Vienna, the Adolf Luser Verlag in Berlin from 1929, and from 1931 a succession of other owners in Vienna. It ceased publication at the end of 1939.
“Chic Parisien”
Published by Atelier Bachwitz
“Chic Parisien” ca. 1925
Published by Atelier Bachwitz
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1894
Arnold Bachwitz founds a fashion publishing house, later known as Chic Parisien, as a sideline while a partner in the firm Freudenthal & Bachwitz. Born at Neustadt an der Dosse in Prussia on June 3, 1854, he had come to Vienna in 1876.
1898
The house issues its first title, Der Modezeichner, followed by the magazine Chic Parisien (1898–1929), whose name the house itself came to carry. As the business grows it takes extensive premises over several floors at Hoher Markt 7, and Bachwitz leaves Freudenthal & Bachwitz to devote himself entirely to the publications.
1900
Bachwitz’s fashion journals take the highest awards at the Paris world exhibition. About the same time Alexander Byk takes over the direction of the company, then still very small, and stays more than thirty years as vice-president and general director, until his death in 1933.
-1908
-1909
Palais des Beaux Arts is built on Löwengasse 47, in the third district of Vienna (Landstraße). Designed by architects Anton and Josef Drexler and built to Bachwitz’s own specifications and plans, the Art Nouveau building is the new home of Atelier Bachwitz / Bachwitz AG, with workrooms for more than three hundred people. Bachwitz has the words “Chic Parisien,” and later “Palais des Beaux Arts,” placed above the entrance portal, and the façades lettered “Wien,” “London,” “New York” and “Paris.” It is meant to embody the spirit of the ‘Beaux Arts’.
-1918
Bachwitz founds the illustrated magazine Moderne Welt and engages Ludwig Hirschfeld of the Neue Freie Presse as its editor-in-chief. Over the next decade it carries Schnitzler, Zweig, Hofmannsthal, Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Freud, and the work of many of Vienna’s leading photographers, including Madame d’Ora.
-1924
-1925
The picture gallery, until now a business registered to Bachwitz personally, passes to the company.
-1927
Bachwitz is awarded the title of Kommerzialrat, reported in January. The Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung describes him as having made the firm one of the leading fashion journal and magazine publishers in Europe, and as among the first to promote Austrian fashion design abroad. Around this time he sells Moderne Welt to the Viennese publisher Adolf Luser.
1930
Arnold Bachwitz dies on November 12th in his 76th year, after a long illness, in Vienna. He is buried four days later at the Central Cemetery. The company’s board, its atelier, its works council and its commercial staff each send a speaker to the grave; the printers Friedrich Jasper and Alfred Leithe-Jasper are among the mourners.
The company’s 20,000 shares pass to a number of people, whom the City of Vienna’s later restitution report does not name. Trade obituaries credit him with having stimulated the Viennese art market by creating the sales gallery “Palast der schönen Künste.”
1938
Adolf Strel, husband of Alice, dies in Vienna on March 18th, six days after the Anschluss. The company, in serious financial difficulty since 1937, falls under the rule of the Nuremberg Race Laws and undergoes Aryanization. The Vermögensverkehrsstelle appoints Ernst Kuhn as commissarial manager to conduct the negotiations.
As a result of this seizure, the board – comprised mostly of the Bachwitz family – is replaced. A register notice of May 11th records the deletion of all six members and the entry of six new ones, among them the printers Friedrich Jasper and Alfred Leithe-Jasper.
Grete Lebach (b.1885 to Arnold and Rosine Bachwitz), entered on the management board on January 11th, dies of cancer at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna in August.
The Bachwitz family lives in the building, which it has owned since at least 1926. When Rosine leaves the building is not recorded; by 1942 her address is Aspernbrückengasse 1, in the second district, Leopoldstadt.
In November the firm sends 45 of its fashion magazines to the City of Vienna at the instigation of the Vermögensverkehrsstelle.
1939
The eighteen months of Aryanization negotiations end. Adolf Luser and the commissarial manager Ernst Kuhn are appointed to the board with sole authority to represent and sign for the company. Luser had bought Moderne Welt from Arnold Bachwitz eleven years earlier.
1940
At a shareholders’ meeting on November 4th the purchase of the company’s 20,000 shares is resolved, and the publishing house of the German Labour Front becomes the owner of Bachwitz AG. The existing supervisory board is compelled to resign and a new one elected, composed entirely of Germans from the Reich. On November 20th Adolf Luser is removed from the board.
1941
The company is renamed Wiener Weltmode-Verlag, and its registered business is widened well beyond fashion publishing. In June, the Vienna Chamber of Commerce writes to the firm that it is charged with carrying out "measures of an educational-political nature in the field of fashion."
1942
Rosine Bachwitz (b.1863), wife of Arnold Bachwitz, is deported from Vienna on July 14th and murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp on October 30th.
Alice Strel (b.1887 to Arnold and Rosine Bachwitz) is deported from Prague to Ujazdów on June 10th, and does not survive. Neither the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance nor Yad Vashem records a date or a place of her death.
1943
The company’s fashion journals are still appearing. Le Grand Tailleur names the Wiener Weltmode Verlag AG as its publisher.
1946
Atelier Bachwitz becomes the property of the Republic of Austria, existing almost exclusively on paper. On February 9th the Federal Ministry of Education appoints a public administrator; the appointment serves merely to secure the assets, and the Republic neither liquidates, sells nor manages the business.
1956
Public administration is lifted on October 20th. The Vienna provincial government gives its reason: the company's remaining assets have been consumed by the administrator's fees, and there is no capital with which to resume trading.
1958
Atelier Bachwitz is officially dissolved, struck off the commercial register on February 7th. The owners from before 1938 never filed a restitution claim, and the building was never returned to descendants of the Bachwitz family.
1990s
The building is renovated under its then owner, the Generali insurance company, and is thought to have been placed under monument protection around this time. When Generali acquired the building, and from whom, is not recorded in any source we have found.
2003
Restitution documents show that some 20,000 shares of the company’s stock were outstanding and never restituted.
A portion of the Atelier’s publications are returned to the Bachwitz’ great-grandchildren from the Vienna City Library: 45 fashion magazines, received from the firm in November 1938 and identified as having come from an “Aryanized” firm. The Vienna Restitution Commission recommends their return on February 18th, and they are handed over in June.
2014
Palais des Beaux Arts is reinstituted as an immaterial institution by Bernhard Garnicnig; producing and commissioning works for its collection.
2017
-2018
Bernhard Garnicnig invites Seth Weiner to continue the project as the artistic director based on their discussions about how different meanings and intentions behind the term ‘occupation’ collide in the Palais des Beaux Arts.
2021
On November 12, 2021, family member, friend, and spirited guide to the Palais des Beaux Arts, Thomas D. Lonner (b.1942, great-grandson of Arnold and Rosine Bachwitz) passes away peacefully at home on Bainbridge Island in the USA. Although Tom was never able to visit Vienna and meet his family’s building on Löwengasse, his words will continue to surround it. The Palais des Beaux Arts misses him deeply.
2022
Artist Antoine Turillon registers the Atelier Bachwitz brand to the Verein of the Palais des Beaux Arts as a 'memorial, not out of metal'.
2026
In June the Generali insurance company sells the building to Thalhof Immobilien, which plans a revitalization. It goes as part of a package with a second Viennese property, for a combined figure of around 45.3 million euros.
Seth Weiner invites Anna Weberberger to continue the project as the artistic director based on their discussions about how different meanings and intentions behind the term ‘public’ collide in the Palais des Beaux Arts.
Moderne Welt
1937 / Issue 1 / p. 7 Published by “Moderne Welt” Verlags-G.m.b.H.
Founded by Atelier Bachwitz in 1918, Moderne Welt (1918–1939) was available in wide release and covered a range of topics including: art, literature, fashion, music, theater, lifestyle, and travel. Primarily written in German, the magazine paid homage to the creative class of Vienna as well as reflecting global attitudes toward the major cultural transformations that were underway during its two decades of production. The Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) currently possesses the largest number of Moderne Welt fashion and lifestyle publications. Digitized only recently, physical copies are available for viewing from the library's reserve desk. Bachwitz sold it in 1927–28, and it passed through a succession of Viennese owners; by 1937 it was published from Führichgasse 6, and it closed at the end of 1939.
The Austrian book trade lost its own association at the Anschluss. Its journal, back in print in 1945, described what had happened: in March 1938 the trade "was completely robbed of its independence and its incorporation into the Reichsschrifttumskammer took place." The seven years that followed, it wrote, "can be passed over, for in that time there was no Austrian booksellers' association of its own."
Three months later the German Editors Law of the 4th of October 1933 was extended to Austria. Three papers carried the same syndicated explanation within a week, the trade being told the new rules. A responsible editor now held a licensed post, entered on a professional list, and had to furnish proof of "arischer Abstammung," Aryan descent, "nicht nur für sich selbst, sondern auch für seine Frau" — not only for himself but for his wife. The Kleine Volks-Zeitung explained what this had achieved: "Erst das deutsche Schriftleitergesetz hat der deutschen Presse die wahre Freiheit gegeben." Only the German Editors Law gave the German press its true freedom.
Femininity and Modernity:
The Changing Face of Moderne Welt
Hannah Marynissen is an art historian whose research into women photographers led her to Moderne Welt, where she found a bastion for female-led photography studios in Vienna, and specifically for those of Jewish descent. Her essay for the PdBA collection focuses a feminist lens upon how Aryanization affected both the photographers being commissioned and the representation of models being portrayed in the magazine's pages. Pepa Feldscharek, Edith Glogau, Kitty Hoffmann, Edith Barakovich, Trude Fleischmann, Trude Geiringer, Madame d'Ora, Grete Kolliner, Dora Horovitz, Hedda Walther, Yva.
Moderne Welt
1926 / Issue 22 / p. 3 Atelier Bachwitz
Moderne Welt
1926 / Issue 21 / p. 1 — cover missingAtelier Bachwitz
Moderne Welt
1933 / Issue 12 / coverPublished by “Moderne Welt” reg. Gen. m. b. H.
Moderne Welt
1933 / Issue 3 / coverPublished by “Moderne Welt” reg. Gen. m. b. H.
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Moderne Welt
1938 / Issue 7 / p. 7The editors greet the Anschluss, and write that the magazine is carrying current affairs "for the first time in its twenty years of existence." Arnold Bachwitz founded it in October 1918. He sold it in 1927–28, and by this issue it belonged to "Moderne Welt" Verlags-G.m.b.H.
“Moderne Welt”
1926 / Issue 8 / p. 15Atelier Bachwitz
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This is an essay in the form of the story of the family that built this confection of a building, hovered over its wonderful creations for half a century, and then died. In its death, it was both a microcosm of its apocalyptic time and insanely typical of millions of other deaths.
Thomas d. lonner / my blood strangers
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The great-grandson of Arnold and Rosine Bachwitz, Thomas D. Lonner (1942-2021) wrote an essay in the form of a story about his family, their company Atelier Bachwitz / Bachwitz AG, and the Palais des Beaux Arts building in Vienna. Based on all of the evidence that he could piece together from retold fragments, fugitive documents and books, the text represents the most comprehensive portrait of the Bachwitz family to date.