In the early 19th century, Jean Jaques Rousseau’s epistolary novel “Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise” (1761) provided a starting point for viewing the Alps as a kind of morally pure earthly paradise – for which the Swiss Alps became the “benchmark” (Jeschke, 2006, p.25). Villas were built by the nobility and upper middle classes in the style of historicism and its variant, the “Swiss Style,” as summer residences where they could cultivate a salon culture during their summer retreat and where artists and intellectuals such as Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Sigmund Freud, and Eugenie Schwarzwald could exchange ideas.

The 1873 Vienna World’s Fair and the pavilions such as the Swiss House, which were built cheaply and quickly for the exhibition using specific carpentry techniques, encouraged urban buyers to convert old farmhouses into summer villas and the local rural population to add verandas and balconies to their houses that would make them easier to rent out to summer guests (Schiefer, 2023, p.14f.).

Between 1938 and 1945, during the National Socialist era, 98 properties belonging to Jewish owners were seized in Bad Ischl alone. The subsequent process of reappraisal and restitution was extremely protracted and the salon culture of intellectual exchange was destroyed (Höllinger, 2011, p.5).