Kurt Walter Bachstitz

Kurt Walter Bachstitz (4 October 1882 - 1949 in The Hague) was a German-Austrian art dealer. He died shortly before his naturalization to the Netherlands.

Bachstitz was born as the child of the Jewish couple Liber Jacob Bachstitz and Mathilde Markowitz. His place of birth is arguable. All contemporary sources mention the formerly German Breslau (the present-day Polish Wrocław) as his place of birth. But Bachstitz requested for himself the Austrian village Raipoltenbach as his place of birth when he claimed at the U.S. Department of Labor for an extension of his temporary stay in 1931. He studied architecture in Paris, London and Vienna where he finished his studies with a diploma. On the outbreak of the First World War he was called up for military service and served between 1914 and 1918 as an officer, lastly in the rank of a troop captain. He served actively in the field until 1916, when he was severely wounded. He married Elfriede Pesé (died in 1918) with whom he had two children – a son Walter Werner Michael who died in 1943 by tuberculosis in Switzerland and a daughter, Margit Martha who died in South Africa in 1982. On 19 December 1918 he married his second wife Elisa ("Lilly") Emma Hofer. Lilly was a Protestant. Because of her Bachstitz converted to the evangelic faith. In 1919 he apparently lived and traded in Munich. In his diary Thomas Mann wrote about a meeting in Bachstitz' Munich apartment, where Mann bought a work from Bachstitz. He described him quite perogatively as a "blond-Jewish" example of an "international culture-capitalistiic profiteer". In 1920 he established an art dealership in the Hague named Kunsthandel K.W. Bachstitz (Bachstitz Gallery N.V.). Surinamestraat 11, He lived in Vienna and in Berlin and he created an internationally known company with art galleries in The Hague, New York City and Berlin. Lilly was the sister of art dealer Walter Andreas Hofer who had managed the Gallery in The Hague for a while and subsequently became an art buyer for Hermann Göring.

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