III · 1898 – 1909 · Bischwiller
The Letter from Bischwiller
An old Alsatian family sent its letter into the chalk.
At the end of the 19th century, the house formed a connection that would accompany it to the end of its first history: a letter from Bischwiller, in northern Alsace.
Bischwiller lies twenty kilometres north of Strasbourg, a small textile town with a Jewish community that had rebuilt its synagogue in 1838. The family that sent this letter belonged to the old Alsace-Lorraine diaspora.
What grew between the two houses was not a marriage in the legal sense and not a business connection in the commercial — it was a correspondence that reached through two generations and outlived the First World War.
Letters can last. The houses that wrote them cannot always.