Three Tearless Histories

by Erich Hackl

  Three Tearless Histories

  By ERICH HACKL

  Translated by MIKE MITCHELL

  Copyright © 2017 by DoppelHouse Press

  Drei tränenlose Geschichten

  Copyright © 2014 by Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  DESIGNED BY CURT CARPENTER

  Partial support for this translation thanks to the Bundeskanzleramt Österreich.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  NAMES: Hackl, Erich, author. | Mitchell, Mike, translator.

  TITLE: Three tearless histories /by Erich Hackl; translated by Mike Mitchell.

  DESCR IPTION: Los Angeles, CA: Doppelhouse Press, 2017.

  IDENTIFIERS: ISBN 97809970034-5-1 (ebook)

  LCCN 2016958417

  SUBJECTS: LCSH Austria. | Klagsbrunn, Kurt, 1918-2005. | Brasse, Wilhelm, 1917-2012. | Tschofenig, Gisela. | Tschofenig, Pepe. | Photographers--Austria--History. | Photographers--Poland--History. | Expatriate artists. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Austria. | Auschwitz (Concentration camp). | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Poland. | Austria--Emigration and immigration. | Brazil--Social life and customs. | BISAC PHOTOGRAPHY / Individual Photographers / Essays | PHOTOGRAPHY / History

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC JV8015 .H33 2017 | DDC 940.53/086--dc23

  CONTENTS

  The Klagsbrunn Family | A Story Coming to Light

  The Photographer of Auschwitz

  Tschofenig: The Name Behind the Street

  Notes

  The Klagsbrunn Family

  A STORY COMING TO LIGHT

  1

  THERE'S NO FAMILY TREE, so it's imperative we stick to the photo in which they're looking out at us from a whole century ago. Ignaz Klagsbrunn, the head of the family, amiable, relaxed or even with an ironic smile beneath his well-groomed mustache. With his right hand he's holding his granddaughter Flora by the arm, his left is placed on the ornate round table on which his wife Johanna is also leaning, with Rosi, their second granddaughter, in her lap. Johanna Klagsbrunn, née Thieberg, has thick, dark hair, just about kept in place by a center parting, while her husband's fair hair seems to be thin and already receding at the temples. Two people of surprisingly contemporary appearance, close to ours, who look contented but neither serene nor split into an authoritarian brow and a forbearing heart. And still astonishingly young. In the prime of life.

  All eleven children are sitting or standing around the couple in a suggestion of a semicircle. At the front, on crudely made garden chairs, the two eldest, their daughters Lola and Bertha. At an angle behind them, the spitting image of each other in stature, hairstyle, luxuriant whiskers, their husbands Karl Goldstein and Benno Ostiller. Doctors of medicine both of them, moreover neighbors in the same house, 51 Leopoldsgasse, where they pursue their profession. It is striking how far Bertha Ostiller is leaning back, has put her forearms behind her back, her unusual posture and the suggestion of a bulge under her loose dress, that comes down to the ground, make us think she might be pregnant.

  It isn't difficult to distinguish between the Klagsbrunn sons and the sons-in-law (the third, Sida's husband Johann Frey, has a pince-nez and a Vandyke beard), for some of the former, like the daughters, clearly take after their mother: their dark eyes, their melancholy look, their unmanageable mop of hair. Only the two eldest sons, Josef and Hugo, resemble their father, though less in their appearance than in the indulgent interest they take in the photographer or his plate camera. In fact no one shows a lack of attention. Perhaps the youngest daughter, Cilla, is looking a bit sullen. Or impatient because she has to keep still too long for her taste.

  Not one of them is smiling, neither Bruno who, forty years later, will die together with his wife Grete in a subcamp of Jasenovac Concentration Camp, nor Samek, of whom we read that he has been missing since 1938, nor Molo (i.e. Maximilian) who will have a dental practice in the center of Vienna, then flee to Shanghai with his wife Frieda and finally die, destitute, in San Francisco, nor Noli, (Dietrich Arnold) who, five decades later and with a persistence matched only by his lack of success, will demand the restitution of or compensation for the equipment and other furnishings which the two dealers, Josef Prossnitz and Theodor Partik, removed from his own dental surgery in the Mariahilf district of Vienna in September 1942. Stole, to be more precise, and since it is accepted that they were acting 'on the instructions of the former Property Transfer Office' the Federal Ministry of Finance sees no reason to grant his request for restitution.

  Leo, the second youngest in the family, isn't smiling either. He's standing in the back row, in front of the terrace door with the windows that reflect the light, and wearing a high wing collar going around his neck like a ruff. At the time the photo was taken he's sixteen years old.

  2

  I FIRST MET LEO’S GRANDSON two and a half years ago in Rio de Janeiro. The Universidade Federal Fluminese, the campus of which is in Niterói, on the other side of the bay, had invited me to give a number of lectures and after the first few days in Rio I was somewhat surprised that the inhabitants did not at all conform to the image that is generally ascribed to them: I found them neither particularly cheerful nor loquacious or bubbling over with vivacity. Until I got to know Victor Hugo Klagsbrunn that is. He was warm-hearted in a way that was almost incidental, assured, imaginative and blithely unconcerned about time. But—with one exception: for my final lecture we arrived in Niterói an hour and a half late—things always worked out at the last minute. An authentic carioca, then, surrounded by unauthentic, depressed and harassed seeming citizens of Rio, even though, or because, Victor’s father came from Vienna, his mother from Berlin and he’d spent almost sixteen years in exile. He invited me to his home, a spacious, luxuriously furnished apartment in Copacabana, where I met his wife, Marta, who had been together with him in exile, and a barking white ball of wool that answered to the name of Tuca.

  There, in the Rua Ministro Viveiros de Castro, Victor keeps something which I think gives him the most pleasure of all his family heirlooms: a poster of the Floridsdorfer Athletiksport-Club announcing two matches in the Austrian soccer championship being played at the Hohe Warte stadium on the same day, Sunday 11 September: FAC against Wacker and Vienna against WAC. As Victor discovered, the poster is from 1932 and has, among many others, adverts for his grandfather’s coal business, Karl Jizda’s sports equipment shop and the Sinai Clothing Store. Karl Jizda was a legendary center-forward for the FAC, Leo Klagsbrunn its president and the Sinai Clothing Store was on the first floor of Am Spitz 2 where the club also had its premises. We will come across that store again under the misleading and disrespectful designation of furniture shack. And the match didn’t take place on the Sunday but on the Saturday, as Victor’s grandfather wrote on the poster in blue pencil, and FAC beat Wacker Wien 3-2, with goals from Pepi Stroh (2) and Gustl Jordan.

  There was only a little Victor could tell me about the history of his forebears, for the early death of his father and his own circumstances had prevented him from familiarizing himself with them. On the other hand he did present me with a pile of documents. Most came from the estate of his Uncle Kurt, others he’d had someone dig out of the Austrian State Archives for him. And he told me his own story, and Marta hers, the story of their life together. A story of persecution, worse than that of his parents and grandparents. I will relate both of them, the way I heard and remembered them, the way Victor and I investigated them in Vienna two months later, and the way we have reconstructed them since then in a question-and-answer carousel between here and there: the basic data, rather sparse, not very vivid, without feelings, which our imagination has to supply.

  3

  AS WAS COMMON
in those days, the family photo was used as a postcard. Since there was only enough room on the back for the name and address of the person to whom it was being sent, Ignaz Klagsbrunn had written his news over, beside and under the picture: “My dear children,” and along the top the date and time of the card: “Floridsdorf, 22/9/1904, 10 p.m. weather fine.”

  The photo must have been taken before that, however, in March or even the end of February, for the trees beside and behind them, and reflected in the windows behind Leo’s head, are bare. And the daughters, apart from Bertha, have long fur stoles over their light-colored clothes. The men dark coats. Jackets under their coats. Stiff collars with ties or bows. All of them people with assured taste who can afford well-made, good-quality clothes. The little villa, in front of which they’re posing, wouldn’t stand out in a middle-class district but there, in Pilzgasse, right behind Floridsdorf freight depot where there are only low houses plastered with clay, a soap factory and the Shell oil refinery, it looks if it’s been conjured up out of thin air. Klagsbrunn Villa.

  WE KNOW very little about Ignaz and Johanna Klagsbrunn. That they—to go by their looks and the date of birth of their eldest daughter—were born in the middle of the nineteenth century and come from Wadowice, a Polish county town which lies at the foot of the Beskids, some thirty miles to the south-west of Kraków, and which in those days belonged to the Austrian crown-land of Galicia but is today best known as the birthplace of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II.

  Their children were also born in Wadowice, apart from Bruno who was born in Vienna in July 1892, where the family had settled two or three years previously. His parents are listed in Lehmann’s Vienna Directory for 1891, Ignaz running a business selling laundry materials and specializing in ironing whites with glaze starch, Johanna an innkeeper, both at 5 Mühlfeldgasse. After 1895 Johanna’s name is deleted, suggesting that by then her husband is providing for the family on his own—in the Directory he is listed in turn as publisher of a handbook on laundry and ironing whites with glaze starch, head of a private trade school, inventor of a new method of ironing with glaze starch, producer of chemical products and dealer in flatirons and laundry equipment. Puzzling over and discovering things seems to be in the genes of the male Klagsbrunns; later on Noli will have a wax syringe for dental use patented and his elder brother Josef the ‘Microna’ universal mill. In or around 1899 the family moves to Floridsdorf, where Ignaz has bought the villa in Pilzgasse. A delivery note for ‘Ignaz Klaksbrunn. Chemical Products Factory’ of June 1909 has been preserved; it is for a ¼ case of ‘Heliosin’ glaze for fine linen.

  FLORIDSDORF is on the left bank of the Danube, on the other side from the city of Vienna. Shipping, a lot of industry, ambitious tradesmen, an influx of people from Moravia and other outlying parts of the Monarchy looking for work. Poverty as well, and not only just below the breadline. In the year the photograph was taken the place had around fifty-five thousand inhabitants and was to be incorporated into the Austrian capital as the 21st district, by the law of November 12, 1904. That same year also saw the founding of the FAC, which was to become so important for Leo. We don’t know how he and his brothers got through the First World War; I suspect that, given their training as chemists and doctors, most of them will have seen service in clinics, field hospitals and laboratories.

  The city of Vienna takes steps to combat the lack of affordable—and hygienic—accommodation with an ambitious program of social housing, in the context of which two large complexes are constructed between 1924 and 1932 that are to become the symbol of the Floridsdorf workers’ movement: the Schlinger-Hof in Brunner Strasse and the FAC building in Freytaggasse, right next to the football pitch. During the uprising against the Dollfuss dictatorship in February 1934 both apartment complexes are fiercely fought over. Members of the Social-Democratic Schutzbund1 and para-military exercise groups barricade themselves in there until, after a day and a night of being bombarded with grenades and mortars from the police and the army, they are forced to abandon them. Outside the Schlinger-Hof and in the police station in Hermann-Bahr-Gasse both police and members of the right-wing Heimwehr2 shoot workers that have been arrested and disarmed. On February 14 Georg Weissel, a leader of the Schutzbund and captain in the fire service, is condemned to death by a summary court for ‘refusal to obey orders and rebellion’ and hanged a few hours later. In all seventy-one people die in Floridsdorf during the fighting. Nothing on the photo and hardly anything of what we know about the people in it points to this event. From what we have heard there is no shooting in Pilzgasse, and at that time the inhabitants of the villa are on a skiing holiday in Salzburg or on the Hochwechsel.

  1. Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection Association): a paramilitary organization of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party.

  2. The Austrian Heimwehr (Home Defence Force) consisted of various local armed groups set up in the immediate aftermath of the First World War to defend Austria’s frontiers and maintain order; they were extremely right wing and played an increasing role in politics, especially in suppressing the Socialists in 1934, the year after Dollfuss had suspended parliament and established an authoritarian regime.

  4

  THE PILZGASSE is the title of the memories Grete Gabmeier-Grach wrote down ten or more years ago for her grandchildren. A thin volume with a few photos that Frau Gabmeier gave to me and Victor to read when we visited her in December 2011. On our way there we passed an overgrown plot of land on which Villa Klagsbrunn, badly damaged by a bomb that hit it on March 12, 1945, had stood until the late fifties then had to make way for a modest summer house, until that was also torn down or simply allowed to fall into ruin.

  Grete Gabmeier was born in 1927 and is the last person we could find in Vienna who still remembers the Klagsbrunn family—Leo and his wife and children, not his parents, who were already dead by the time Grete, holding her mother’s or her aunt’s hand, looked around the villa for the first time. Right behind the front door was the larder with an ice-box full of blocks of ice, then a windowless corridor with, on the one side the kitchen, very narrow because a bathroom had been built in, and the dining room, on the other the office and the so-called middle room, from which you could go out onto the veranda, which didn’t exist in 1904. On the second floor were the balcony room and two little attic rooms—the bedrooms for the family of four.

  From the entries in Lehmann’s Directory we know that after the First World War Leo took over the premises of his father’s firm. But before that, after his training as a chemist, he ran a wholesale business for household goods and was a partner in the Buche Charcoal Trading Corporation. Initially his new firm, Leopold Klagsbrunn Chemist, also sold chemical products, but then he restricted himself to dealing in charcoal, coal and coke. He had several employees, eventually six, “all of them Aryan,” as he was to be compelled to declare.

  Leo is a striking figure in Floridsdorf, and not just because of his height, he’s almost 6’ 6” tall, but athletic as well, affable and charming; at the Gänsehäufel lido on the Danube the heads of the young women turn when he takes a run-up on the wooden planks and does a racing dive into the water. To their disappointment, in October 1911 he marries Friederike ‘Fritzi’ Kohn from the Leopoldstadt district who’s one year older and two heads shorter than him. Their first child, Karl Peter, is born on May 24, 1913, their second, Kurt Paul, on May 6, 1918. (It’s a family tradition to give their sons two first names, either because the parents can never agree or because they want to let their children have the opportunity of deciding for themselves whether to take the one or the other; Karl Peter will use his second name.) In December 1926 the police authorities in Vienna grant Leo Klagsbrunn “permission to drive motor vehicles with an internal combustion engine unaccompanied;” in 1930 the Vienna Football Association issues an identity card for him showing that he is the Deputy Chairman of the First League, the top Austrian division. The photos on the card and driver’s license show a slim young man with thick hair
combed back and a carefully trimmed walrus mustache. He still has the melancholy, wistful look of his mother, who died in June 1914, ten years before her husband.

  5

  IN JANUARY 1920 Maria Pfeiffer, also known as Mitzi and sixteen at the time, starts work in Leopold Klagsbrunn’s firm as a clerk, a position she had had from May 1918 to February 1919 with C. Hauptmann’s Widow & Sons (Roofing Felt and Tar Production). According to her niece Grete, the Klagsbrunns treated her like a daughter. In return, her employer certifies that she is hard-working, capable of working independently and absolutely trustworthy.

  Their close relationship with Maria Pfeiffer also includes her family, Grete’s mother Leopoldine and her brothers Rudolf and Josef. Rudolf Pfeiffer occasionally helps out in the firm as a driver. Actually he’s a varnisher by trade, Josef trained as a saddler. They probably kept being made redundant or were out of work for longish periods during the world economic crisis. In a photo from the early thirties the two of them, in baggy trousers and large peaked caps, are standing in front of the fence of the Klagsbrunn’s villa, behind them the house with the wooden gables and the carved balcony rail on which Mitzi and Fritzi are leaning. You can’t tell from their posture which is the employer and which the employee.

  Maria Pfeiffer comes from a working-class family, her brothers are members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and, in addition, Josef is a section leader in the Republikanischer Schutzbund. Both take part in the February uprising and after the defeat try to escape to Czechoslovakia. While Rudolf is arrested on the border and jailed for a few months, Josef manages to get to Brno. From there he carries on to the Soviet Union, where he joins the Communist Party. In 1936 he gets his wife and children to come and join him in Moscow then, in the same year, volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. He fights in the XIII, then in the XI International Brigade, ending up as a lieutenant of the Republican Peoples’ Army. On an undated photo that was taken outdoors, in or near Almería, he is sitting in a basket chair in front of huts, trucks and a bare, steeply rising slope, a beret on his head, his left arm in a sling and resting his bandaged left foot on a chair. After the defeat of the Republic he is interned in the Saint-Cyrpien Camp in France but is already back in the Soviet Union by the middle of April 1939. One month before that Leo Klagsbrunn and his family arrived in Brazil.