User:Eli185/Ephrussi &

Ephrussi & Co. was a private bank in Vienna 9, Wasagasse 2, which was Aryanized in 1938 and continued to be run by the Aryanizer under a different company name, as Bankhaus Steinhäuser, vorm. Ephrussi & Co.

History

The Ephrussi company was founded in 1856 by Ignaz Ephrussi (1829-1899), who was ennobled as Ignaz Ritter von Ephrussi in 1871, as a wholesale company in Vienna, but was only entered in the Vienna commercial register as a retail wholesaler in 1882. Ignaz Ephrussi came from Russia. He is said to have been involved in founding several banks in Odessa. In 1856, he transferred his assets to Vienna - allegedly due to anti-Semitic incidents in Odessa - and founded his own bank in the metropolis of the Danube monarchy in the same year, with branches in Paris and London. Ephrussi's specialty was trading with Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Ignaz Ephrussi pulled off a legendary coup in grain trading in 1867, when the harvest in Ukraine was excellent but very poor in Western Europe. In 1869 he was able to acquire a house and land in Vienna - when it became possible for Jews to do so - and in 1871 he was ennobled and married a daughter of the distinguished Porges family. Palais Ephrussi, built by Theophil Hansen on Vienna's Ringstrasse, represented the high point of his social advancement[1].

Ignaz von Ephrussi had intended his son Stefan to succeed him in the business. However, when he entered into a relationship with the wife of a business friend, who is also said to have been a mistress of Ignaz Ephrussi himself, he disowned him. As a result, Ephrussi's next younger son Victor had to take over the business, which was now run as a private bank. From the outset, the company had mainly conducted banking business, primarily with Eastern Europe and above all with Russia. According to the industrial magnate Rudolf Gutmann, the company enjoyed “the best reputation in Vienna and especially on the stock exchange”, but by 1921 it employed only one employee and had only served as the Ephrussi family's asset management company for years. When Victor Ephrussi had to take over his father's business in 1899, he basically only ran an asset management company; according to the commercial register, the company only carried out banking transactions. Around 1910, he ranked 258th among Vienna's 926 millionaires. The still considerable fortune, which he invested in war bonds from 1914, was devalued by inflation, and the old business relationships with Eastern Europe became obsolete. And Ephrussi could no longer earn anything with the bank without capital. In the opinion of an interested observer, the business was in the aftermath of the First World War - when the most incredible speculative transactions were being made during the wildest period of inflation.

But “Ephrussi” was still a good name in the business world. International financiers were always looking for renowned companies that were no longer active to take over as a “shell”. A major German bank, Disconto-Gesellschaft, took an interest in Ephrussi through a friend of the Gutmann family, coal merchants and bankers. However, Disconto-Gesellschaft - a predecessor of Deutsche Bank, with which it was to merge in 1929 - could only be interested in the 1921 investment in Vienna if it could find someone here who was able to track down any business that could still be done in the difficult times of crisis. It found this man in Alexander Weiner (1876-1956), who had started his career at Wiener Bankverein and continued at Allgemeine Österreichische Bodencreditanstalt. After leaving the Bodencreditanstalt in 1923 in a dispute with its president Rudolf Sieghart, he was hired by Disconto-Gesellschaft as head of the banking house Ephrussi & Co. When Disconto-Gesellschaft, which had meanwhile merged with Deutsche Bank in 1929, withdrew from Austria in 1933, Alexander Weiner was able to acquire the company shares together with two partners. He now owned 60 percent, Victor Ephrussi and Carl August Steinhäusser 20 percent each. Ephrussi & Co. continued to operate as a general partnership and was involved in foreign business on a large scale until 1938

Aryanization

In 1938, following the annexation of Austria by the National Socialist German Reich, the Jewish partners Alexander Weiner and Victor Ephrussi were forced out of the business and had to sell their shares to the remaining third partner, the “non-Jewish” Carl August Steinhäusser. At this time, the company employed four authorized signatories and was the third highest valued private bank in Vienna (after S. M. v. Rothschild and Bankhaus Rosenfeld & Co.)..

Ephrussi died in Great Britain in 1945 and his heirs received a modest sum as part of a restitution settlement. Alexander Weiner, on the other hand, succeeded in obtaining a much larger sum for his share in a restitution settlement concluded in 1954. After 1945, Carl August Steinhäusser, the Ariseur, became Vice President of the Bankers' Association, Vice President of the Stock Exchange Chamber and was appointed Kommerzialrat. He did not want to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ephrussi & Co.

In 1970, after Gustav Schickedanz & Co. became a shareholder in 1969, the bank was transformed into Quellebank. Around 2000, this company was merged into “Entrium Direktbank Austria”[1].

The banking house Ephrussi & Co. in the family history

Edmund de Waal, a great-grandson of Victor Ephrussi, published a family novel in the UK in 2010, which was also published in German in 2011 under the title Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen. The Hidden Legacy of the Ephrussi Family. This book lovingly and sensitively traces the history of the Ephrussi family. The bank is also mentioned in detail, as is the ariseur, “Mr. Steinhäusser”. However, the head of the Ephrussi & Co. bank, Alexander Weiner, is not mentioned - it remains a mystery why.

Literature

• Peter Melichar: Neuordnung im Bankwesen. Die NS-Maßnahmen und die Problematik der Restitution, (= Veröffentlichungen der Österreichischen Historikerkommission 11). Wien und München 2004.
• Peter Melichar: Bankiers in der Krise: Der österreichische Privatbankensektor 1928–1938. In: Geld und Kapital, Bd. 7 (= Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für mitteleuropäische Banken- und Sparkassengeschichte. Privatbankiers in Mitteleuropa zwischen den Weltkriegen 2003), Stuttgart 2005, S. 135–191.
• Peter Eigner, Peter Melichar, Das Ende der Boden-Credit-Anstalt 1929 und die Rolle Rudolf Siegharts. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 3/2008, S. 56–114 doi:10.25365/oezg-2008-19-3-4.
• Edmund de Waal, Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen – Das verborgene Erbe der Familie Ephrussi. Übersetzt von Brigitte Hilzensauer. Zsolnay, Wien 2011, ISBN 978-3-552-05556-8.
• Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, Tom Juncker (Hrsg.): Die Ephrussis. Eine Zeitreise. Zsolnay, Wien 2019, ISBN 978-3-552-05982-5.
• Peter Melichar: Wer war Alexander Weiner? In Edmund de Waals Erinnerungsbuch über die Familie Ephrussi fehlt einer für die Geschichte bedeutende Person. Eine Ergänzung, in: Wiener Zeitung, 30./31. Oktober 2021, S. 33;

References

[[Category:Companies acquired from Jews under Nazi rule]] [[Category:Companies established in 1856]]