In its first decade the business enjoyed overwhelming success and one shop turned into three, with a second branch opening on Kärntnerstraße, still today one of the city’s major shopping streets, as well as a concession in the Grand Hotel on the Ringstraße.

Wherever luxury was to be found, so too was Altmann & Kühne.

During this expansion Altmann & Kühne enlisted the architects Josef Hoffmann and Oswald Haertl to design their shop fronts and fittings. Josef Hoffmann was an icon of Viennese architecture and one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, an association of designers, artists and craftspeople which began in the early 1900s and was guided by the principle of bringing beauty, artistry and craftsmanship into everyday life.

The Wiener Werkstätte aesthetic is connected to the Art Nouveau movement (Jugendstil in German), but generally strove for simpler, more geometric designs.

The photograph below shows the shop front of Altmann & Kühne on Kärntnerstraße, designed by Josef Hoffmann. This image was published in the magazine Architektur und Bautechnik (Architecture and Construction) in 1932 as an example of the latest shop entrances as designed by German and Austrian architects.

Altmann & Kühne also called upon artists from the Wiener Werkstätte to design papers to cover and wrap their boxes. Three women, Frederike “Fritzi” Löw and Emma “Emmy” Zweybrück from Vienna and the Hungarian illustrator and designer Kató Lukáts, designed an array of playful and often humorous patterns, invoking a timeless, fairytale world.

Yet the fairytale world evoked by these illustrations could not have been further from the reality that some of Austria's population were soon to face. Political developments in the late 1930s changed everything for the business and its owners, who were both Jewish.

In a newspaper article from May 1938, just two months after Austria became part of the Third Reich, it is reported that Emil Altmann and Ernst Kühne are deep in debt, and unable to pay. The two men, pejoratively and dismissively described as “Zuckerljuden” (Zuckerl = sweets, Juden = Jews) are arrested, accused of willingly hiding their company’s insolvency.

This was certainly part of a scheme to confiscate and appropriate property owned by Austria’s Jewish population, a policy which was rapidly pursued as soon as the Nazis entered power in March 1938. As well as persecuting and defrauding Jewish people, such accusations, which were widely reported, served to perpetuate the conspiracy theory among the wider population that Jewish members of society were criminal and untrustworthy.

As their business was being taken from them, Altmann, Kühne, their families and several employees left Vienna for New York.

Ernst Kühne would never return to Vienna and died in New York in 1944 aged only 48. But his widow, Wilma (née Altmann), returned with her brother after the war to reclaim the business which they had been forced to leave behind. Now as Emil Altmann and Wilma Kühne, the original name and ownership of the business was eventually reinstated, although they were only able to regain a license for the shop on Graben. Emil Altmann spent the rest of his life between Vienna and the United States, only selling the business in 1969, a few years before his death in January 1972.