1937 World Championships
Austria won the first world teams championships in both open and women categories, conducted 1937 in Budapest, Hungary. They were organized by the International Bridge League, essentially the predecessor of both the European Bridge League (est. 1947) and the WBF (1958). World War II practically destroyed the IBL and its nascent world championship tournament series. With Austria the leading nation at the card table, the 1938 Anschluss of Germany and Austria was a great disruption. The leading bridge theorist and mentor, Paul Stern was an outspoken opponent of Nazism who fled to England that year.
Another 1938 refugee from Austria to England, Rixi Markus (born Erika Scharfstein) was a member of both the 1937 champions and the 1976 Great Britain team that was defeated by the United States for the second Venice Cup.
Read more about this topic: Venice Cup
Famous quotes containing the word world:
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)