The house was left empty for many years. But now, nearly 90 years later Josef Frank and the Beers are being honoured in the city of Vienna with the opening of the magnificently renovated Villa Beer to the public in March.
Villa Beer (Photo: Villa Beer)[Missing Credit]
“The owner wanted to honour the contribution made by the Jews who culturally drove Vienna forward in the early 20th century,” says Katharina Egghart, managing director of the new Villa Beer Foundation. She oversaw research into the house prior to its €10 million renovation by Lothar Trierenberg, who had known nothing of the house’s history when he bought it. He’d previously moved into Frank’s former home and become fascinated by the architect.
Julius and Grete Beer (Photo: Beer Family)[Missing Credit]
When Trierenberg bought Villa Beer, which had been on the market for a decade, he commissioned artisans from all over Europe – glaziers in Germany, radiator technicians in Poland and manufacturers of rubber flooring in Italy – with the expertise to repair or reproduce the pre-war originals. Cutting-edge technology was employed to replace fine details – light switches that click with the same sound they did in the 1930s and new copper windowsills. But imperfections were left in the floorboards. “I told the carpenters to keep them because they tell the story of the house,” says Trierenberg. The finishing touch was a 1910 Bosendorfer piano, just like the one Grete played.
Trierenberg is now offering more than a tour of the building by allowing guests to stay in the house after it opens to the public on March 8, and setting up artist residencies there too.
The interior has been lovingly restored by artisans from all over Europe (Photo: Villa Beer)[Missing Credit]
While Julius, Grete and Hansi escaped to New York, their daughters Lene and Liesl were trapped in Vienna. Lene was warned by the Nazi-controlled Vienna police not to leave Austria, but she did not tell her husband, Rudi, who left for London to organise their own departure. “The police took my mother into custody and imprisoned her when she refused to sign a blank sheet of paper,” says their son, George Sternschein. The price of her release after six months imprisonment was the transfer of ownership of a block of flats and Rudi’s leather goods business.
The family entered Britain in September 1938 and George was born in Glasgow three years later, followed by a sister, Barbara.
Liesl, a talented photographer, was unluckier. She had polio as a child and walked with a limp,” recounts Sternschein. “Despite all the efforts of my parents and grandparents, she was never granted a visa for either the US or the UK”. Liesl was ultimately deported to Minsk and murdered in Maly Trostinec, an extermination site where thousands of Jews were shot or gassed.
Liesl Beer (photo: Beer family)[Missing Credit]
Rudi Sternschein re-established a leather business in Glasgow, and the family were joined by Grete, who had been widowed soon after arriving in the US. “I have memories of her in Glasgow, playing the piano which had been in Villa Beer,” recalls George.
The lure of Austria was strong though. Lene and Grete moved back to Baden, and in retirement George and his wife Pamela moved there too where, he says, they “enjoy many of the same pleasures the Beer family experienced before they so harshly came to an end”.
The dazzling white exterior of Villa Beer (Photo: Villa Beer)[Missing Credit]