Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik

Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik, the Vienna armaments company headed by Fritz Mandl, enters the story through a proposed partnership with Landauerovy Zádovy. The discussions connect the Landauers’ modernist house to the burgeoning military-equipment market, exposing how commercial ambition shares a landscape with the political violence that will later transform the house into an instrument of racial classification.

Company and proposed partnership

Fritz Mandl has already met with Viktor to discuss a joint venture in military equipment. He brings suggestions, projects, and contacts, and argues that German and Italian demand is growing: armoured cars are the latest thing, he says, and the opportunity requires swift action before a competitor moves first. Hirtenberger is therefore presented not as an abstract corporate name but through its director’s practical case for entering a market shaped by rearmament.

The proposed venture would join the Vienna company to Landauerovy Zádovy. Its appearance in the narrative ties Viktor’s industrial interests to Mandl’s armaments business at a moment when military equipment is becoming a major commercial opportunity. The evidence establishes the negotiations and Mandl’s advocacy, but does not report whether the partnership is completed.

The meeting in the Glass Room

Mandl visits the Landauer House and crosses the Glass Room to shake Viktor’s hand. The room’s polished abstraction impresses him after Liesel has described the house; its modernist openness becomes the setting for a conversation about weapons and business. The contrast is pointed: a space associated with light and architectural innovation hosts a proposal driven by the expanding market for armoured vehicles.

Mandl’s wife, Eva, accompanies him and draws Viktor’s attention. Her watchful, nervous expression and striking appearance are reflected in the chrome pillar beside her, which multiplies and distorts her image. She tells Viktor that the house is beautiful and modern, and he replies that he likes modern things. The scene situates Hirtenberger’s business approach within the Landauers’ social world, where commercial introductions and aesthetic admiration share the same room.

The house’s changing uses

The proposed arms venture is one episode in the history of a house whose uses change radically. During its construction, the growth of the building proceeds more slowly than that of the baby: steel beams are laid, concrete poured, and spaces enclosed, while delays over materials and labour stretch through summer and autumn. When the shell is finally complete in winter, the family enters a bare, warehouse-like structure rather than a finished home. That early image of the house as a capacious, adaptable shell anticipates its later transformations.

Under Nazi occupation, the house is refitted as a biometric research centre. Upstairs rooms become offices, kitchens are converted into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. The Glass Room is divided by curtains; its onyx wall stands beside weighing scales, a height-measuring stand, callipers, and a chair fitted with steel rulers. The dining area becomes a photographic studio, while Hollerith machines and boxes of files occupy the garage and main building. The piano remains, its tones restored by a Jewish tuner. The conversion gives the house’s carefully designed modern spaces an imposed institutional purpose entirely different from the commercial and domestic life once imagined there.

Legacy and significance

Later, the Landauer House serves as a children’s gymnasium and physiotherapy space. Tomáš calls it the Glass Room, a phrase that also carries the sense of glass tranquillity; he values it as a place of light and stillness after work. A newspaper debate over the building’s use identifies it as the Landauers’ former home and Rainer von Abt’s masterpiece, weighing architectural preservation against the treatment of sick children.

By 1990 the house has become a preserved architectural site, with some furniture returned from the Moravian Museum and the Glass Room’s plate glass restored. Visitors arrive in groups, while architecture students and tourists encounter the building as both a modernist landmark and a place marked by its successive uses. Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik’s brief appearance belongs to the early commercial history of that space; the later transformations make clear how a private home and a setting for business can be appropriated by radically different political and social purposes.