Emma Hellenstainer (sometimes Emma Hellensteiner or simply Frau Emma: born Emerentiana Hausbacher: 23 April 1818 - 9 March 1904) was a pioneer of Tirolean Gastronomy. She exhibited formidable talents, both as a businesswoman and in terms of what, during the twentieth century, would have become widely understood as marketing.
Biography Provenance and early years Emerentiana Hausbacher was born at St. Johann in Tirol during the economically troubled aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Both of her parents were ambitious and energetic. Johann Hausbacher, her father, is described variously as a tanner, a war commissary ("Marschkommissär"), a businessman and a retail grocer (or general stores keeper). Of more significance in terms of her own later career choice may have been her mother's work. Maria Hausbacher (born Maria Panzl) took over the running of the "Gasthaus zum grauen Bären" ("Grey Bear Guest House"), a popular restaurant in the main square at St. Johann, when Emma was fifteen. In 1832, Johann and Maria Hausbacher purchased the establishment. After Johann Hausbacher's death in 1838, his widow stayed on as the landlady.
Schooling and apprenticeship Emma started working in the restaurant at early age, serving the customers at their tables: this hands-on apprenticeship was interrupted when she was sent away to Innsbruck where she received from the Ursuline sisters a basic training in household management (which in this case included embroidery) and her first lessons in Italian. After that she was sent to Salzburg in order to master cookery and catering at the "Drei Allierten Hotel" ("Three Allies Hotel"). While still working her apprenticeship in Salzburg, Emerentiana Hausbacher found time to write her first book: it was, perhaps inevitably, a book of recipes. It is clear that Maria Hausbacher had a very clear career plan for her daughter, which at this stage involved taking over at the "Grauen Bären" in St. Johann. These plans changed, however, when Maria Hausbacher, unexpectedly acquired - in place of a substantial and otherwise irrecoverable debt - the brewery on the banks of the fast-flowing Rienz at Toblach (as Dobbiaco was known at that time). Johann Hausbacher had been gravely ill for some years before he died: Emma's mother already had more competing business responsibilities with which to cope than she could easily manage in St. Johann, even before she was widowed.
Toblach/Dobbiaco and brewery The brewery at Toblach represented both a challenge and a major opportunity. Emma's elder sister, Anna Hausbacher, would take over the running of the "Grauen Bären" on 1841. Meanwhile, still aged 20, accompanied by her childhood nurse, and pursued by helpful advice from her concerned mother including, memorably, "lachen darfst du nie" ("you should never smile"), Emerentiana Hausbacher moved in at Toblach. Armed with considerable experience of her mother's restaurant business and what was by now an extensive training in management and hospitality, Emma Hausbacher was able take charge of the brewing business in Toblach without apparent difficulty.
Marriage and a return to hotel management On 19 April 1842, soon after moving to the South Tyrol, Emerentiana Hausbacher married Joseph Carl Hellensteiner from Niederdorf (Villabassa in Italian-language sources), a village just over an hour's walk to the west of Hausbacher's recently acquired brewing business at Toblach. Hellensteiner was the son of the Niederdorf postmaster. He had also recently inherited, from an uncle, the "Schwarzadler" ("Black Eagle") guest house and of the Pragser Wildsee, a spectacularly sited small lake in the mountains a short distance to the south of the main valley. After a brief engagement, with the permission of the pastor at Toblach, the couple drove over to St. Johann. Here the wedding service was conducted by Johann Hausbacher, the assistant pastor from nearby Zell am Ziller, who was also the bride's brother. The marriage would be followed, between 1844 and 1856, by the births to the couple of at least five daughters and two sons. Following the wedding, and after securing her mother's agreement, Emma Hellensteiner oversaw the sale of the brewery at Toblach in order to concentrate, with her husband, on the "Schwarzadler" guest house in the next village.
Hotel hostess The commercial potential of the guesthouse had been greatly enhanced through the opening in 1833 of the Strada d'Alemagna (Road to Germany), now an imperial route linking Venice and the Mediterranean to Cortina and Toblach. Toblach was an important road junction (and from 1871 also the location an important railway station) where travellers could either turn east towards Vienna or west towards Brenner and the main route from Milan to Augsburg and the western German heartland beyond. The times were also propitious. The long period of economic stagnation that had followed a quarter century of warfare had given way to several years of cautious expansion. In Lombardy to the south and in Austria to the north, tentative industrialisation was leading to the expansion of a middle class which would accelerate through the nineteenth century, increasing the number of people with time and money for travel, whether for business or on vacation. Europe's first tourism boom was about to take hold in Austria. Joseph and Emma Hellensteiner were among the first alpine guest-house proprietors to improve quality and raise prices to levels closer to those being charged in the cities. Typical guests at had hitherto been carriers, merchants and others stopping off en route to other places; but increasingly, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the "Schwarzadler", perfectly located in the main square at Niederdorf/Villabassa was also welcoming tourists. Following the creation of an "imperial route" through the little town, a customs office had also been erected in the town square, close to the hotel, further increasing the number and diversity of well-funded guests for the hotel and its restaurant. "Frau Emma" (as she was becoming known) grabbed at the opportunity to move upmarket, building up from the basic Puster Valley cuisine to a broadened range of dining options, introducing the consistently high standards of the "Biedermeier Cuisine" about which she had learned during her apprenticeship in Salzburg. She also replaced the furniture and fittings in the rooms, raising the quality of the overall offering. If Emma Hellensteiner is remembered today for her reputation as a tourism pioneer, both for her insistence on raising standards and for her personality and the charm with which she unfailingly greeted and looked after the guests, that reputation was based in the first instance on the real-world experience of the hotel guests. (She was by this time completely bilingual in German and Italian.) Hotel guests - especially those motivated by tourism - ere appreciative of the trouble she took when making suggestions as to which way they should walk to find the most scenic routes, the bluest lake, the largest area of open meadow on which to sit and rest, or indeed where to go if they wished to pray in the little church with the best renaissance frescoes: accessing the little "Mooskirche", a fifteen minute stroll from the hotel, built and adorned with frescoes by Paolina Gonzaga, the gifted daughter of Ludovico III of Mantua by his marriage to Barbara of Brandenburg, involved walking past a stretch of uninvitingly marshy ground and would have been almost impossible to find without the detailed directions which "Frau Emma" patiently provided. Every guest was put at ease and made to feel important: each was made to feel at home. Sources insist that Emma Hellenstainer really was the perfect hotel proprietress and hostess.
Despite all this, she undoubtedly also had a rare awareness of the importance of publicity. She is frequently cited as the first hotelier to advertise in the international press. The anecdote concerning a postcard sent by a hotel guest from America, correctly delivered despite being addressed simply to "Frau Emma in Europa, Autriche", acquired a momentum of its own which contributed further to her fame.
As the local economy continued to prosper through the 1840s and 1850s, Joseph Hellenstainer, as the local postmaster, concentrated increasingly on "external matters", which meant addressing the growing need for transport services along the valley. He operated a scheduled carriage service connecting Brixen/Bressanone to Lienz, which naturally also served Niederdorf/Villabassa, Toblach/Dobbiaco and the other intervening towns and villages. The associated parcels delivery service was also booming. Emma was left at the "Schwarzadler" to focus on "internal matters" (and the couple's growing family), concentrating not just on the guests, but also on organisation of the staffing, catering and the wine cellar, the management of the garden and - perhaps even more important - of the hotel's extensive vegetable garden and dedicated farm.
Widow On 14 May 1858, Joseph Hellensteiner died unexpectedly after seventeen years of marriage: it was determined that he had died from kidney failure. The sudden bereavement, at a time when even the eldest of their children were barely teenagers, was a major shock. Between 1858 and her formal retirement 1887 Emma Hellenstainer took charge of the family businesses on her own, supported increasingly as they grew older by the children. In addition to the various business activities directly associated with the hotel, she now also took charge of the thriving postbus business that her husband had built up.
After the death of her husband Emma Hellenstainer, already a tourism pioneer as a producer of tourism services, also became something of a tourism pioneer as a consumer. She was able to take a succession of day trips away from home for some combination of pleasure, intellectual curiosity and in pursuit of a cure from certain ill-defined but evidently persistent maladies. Around this time a number of fresh water springs that were believed, in their immediate localities, to confer certain health benefits, were beginning to attract visitors from neighbouring. Hellenstainer "took the waters" at a number of springs that, following her visits, almost instantly became known as little "health spas", such as the "deer spring" at nearby Prags/Braies, the "Weiherbad" and "Maistatt" springs on the edge of Niederdorf/Villabassa itself, the "Waldbrunn" spring at Welsberg/ Monguelfo and the "Salmon spring" at Antholz/Anterselva. There was clearly also a commercial motive for these well publicised trips. All the health-giving water springs in question were close enough to Niederdorf/Villabassa to be featured in a leisurely day trip from the "Schwarzadler". Those who were persuaded by the publicity to make their own visits to the little health spas in or close to the Puster Valley included not a few high-profile musicians, writers and painters. Even one or two "crowned heads" were moved to visit the valley, whether for the available health benefits or for the simple delight - enhanced by the fine hospitality of the "Schwarzadler" - to be found from the mountain ambience.