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Name
Fürst and Hausner weaving mill and knitting factory -
Address
U Dlouhé stěny 549/4, Jihlava -
Date
1890, 1928 -
Authors
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Trails
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Code
57GH -
GPS
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Type
Industrial Object -
Monument preservation
Buffer zone of the Jihlava urban conservation reserve
After the First World War, the factory was acquired by new owners – business partners Fürst and Hausner – who operated a weaving and knitting mill called Istra. The owners Ferdinand Hausner (1883–1957) and Josef Fürst (unknown – 1927) also had a business in Vienna and their Jihlava factory specialised in fashionable knitwear and chenille goods, mainly in the Parisian and Viennese styles. The plans for the reconstruction have not survived, but there is correspondence about looms with Josef Vítek, a manufacturer and wholesaler in Postřelmov. After the death of Josef Fürst in 1927, Siegfried Bloch became the new business partner. At the end of the 1920s, the factory building was raised by two floors featuring large industrial-style windows.
This superstructure can be seen in the amateur film made by Walter Hausner (1914–2003), son of Ferdinand Hausner and Wilhelmina Bloch, a member of the Amateur Film Club in Austria. In order to preserve the film heritage, the film reels were smuggled out in textile crates along with other family belongings when fleeing Nazism. Wilhelmina Bloch did not live to see this, as she succumbed to cancer in 1937. Ferdinand Hausner and his son Walter left Vienna by air in March 1938, just before the Anschluss of Austria. To get out of Austria, Ferdinand married his girlfriend, fashion designer Claire Rennai, who had a visa to the United States. Walter, on the other hand, travelled to England with a plan to set up another factory for the family textile company, but was interned as an enemy alien. Later, when Walter was serving in the British Army, he met the singer Irene Jones (1921 London – December 2014 Oxford, USA) performing for the troops. They married, emigrated to America in 1948, and settled near New York. The business partner Siegfried Bloch died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1941, while his wife Irma survived the war in Prague.
In 1939, the factory still employed 150 workers (8 Germans, 68 Czechs and 1 Jew) and had a turnover of CZK 4,368,365 and a profit of CZK 391,061. Subsequently, in 1940, the factory Istra Edmund Steinhauer, Emanuel Massni a spol. was Aryanized and the production continued to focus on knitted, fashionable, and chenille goods and scarves. Steinhauser and Massni lost their factory in 1946, and as early as January 1947, plans were drawn up for a new lift, along with a boiler room and showers. Water was still flowing through the millrace in front of the factory. The private ownership of the company ended in 1948 with its nationalisation and incorporation into the national enterprise Knitting Factories (Pletařské závody) Jihlava. There is no more record of the millrace during the 1961 remodelling of the factory into a warehouse – it probably disappeared when Höck's mill was demolished. The factory was then used by the nearby Bytex company, and in approximately 2014, it was converted into flats and offices.
FK
Literatura:
Lukáš Beran – Vladislava Valchářová – Jan Zikmund (eds), Industriální topografie – Kraj Vysočina, Praha 2014, s. 43.
Ostatní zdroje:
Státní okresní archiv v Jihlavě – Stavební archiv, čp. 549.
Státní okresní archiv v Jihlavě, fond OÚ–ONV Jihlava do r. 1949, kart. 828, inv. č. 3221.
Lenka Vítková, Josef Vítek, továrník a velkopodnikatel v Postřelmově v 1. polovině 20. století, nepublikovaná bakalářská práce Filozofické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity, Brno 2012, s. 18, dostupné z https://theses.cz/id/dp15sz, vyhledáno 20. 10. 2022.
Adam Dvořák, Anna Gűmplová, Soupis židovských podniků v Jihlavě v letech 1939 až 1940 a jejich historický vývoj, nepublikovaná seminární práce Gymnázia, Jihlava 2013, s. 21, dostupné z https://socv2.nidv.cz/archiv35/getWork/hash/7ec045ea-7f8c-11e2-b1f8-faa932cbcfda, vyhledáno 20. 10. 2022.
Hausner family in England, postwar – About this film, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn714690, vyhledáno 20. 10. 2022.
Irene Hausner Obituary, dostupné z https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/dailylocal/name/irene-hausner-obituary?id=18182730, vyhledáno 20. 10. 2022.