by Erich Hackl
Were her parents still alive. Did she have brothers and sisters. Did she like going dancing or to the cinema. Was she sociable. Hermann can’t remember. She had relations in Norway, he says. And once she talked about 1938. She’d been to a convent school, she said. (Probably with the Ursulines, though no class registers from the time before forty-five have been preserved and there’s no Magda on the lists of boarders.) When the German army invaded the country, she went on, the classes had been let out early so that they could cheer the soldiers. All the passers-by were full of enthusiasm. Only one old man had turned aside, muttering as he left, Hitler brings misfortune. Soon we’ll be at war.
Hermann went to the first two elementary school classes in Villach, where he lived with Pepe’s mother, once more in a railroad worker’s apartment that was cramped but didn’t feel like that. His Aunt Hilde, who was still at high school then or had just started an apprenticeship as a salesperson, helped him with his homework. Hermann felt safe and secure with Granny Tschofenig, whose husband had died before the war. Even later he often went to stay with her. But, “I would love to have grown up in Linz.”
In 1948, six months after his half-sister was born, Pepe and Magda took him to live with them in Klagenfurt. They’d named their daughter after his mother and it was as if with that Pepe had fulfilled his duty of remembrance. As if it were no longer necessary to keep the memory of the other Gisela alive.
“The past was never something he talked about. I don’t know why. I didn’t ask and my father never told me anything.” Not anything about Belgium, France and Dachau either. That is the way myths arise. It was only through me that Hermann learnt that Pepe was never in Spain.
It could be that he rejected his stepmother instinctively. It wasn’t that she treated him badly. “Looked at objectively, she made no difference between me and my sister. Gisi’s seven years younger than me, so she needed much more attention, at the beginning they had to spend a lot more time looking after her. Despite that, my stepmother did make an effort for me. But the way things are, when another person behaves as if she’s your mother…” At first there were problems at school, then he started having troubles with his health. At a Kinderland vacation camp in Klosterneuburg he caught a cold, developed pneumonia that turned into pleurisy, and missed half the school year because of the time he had to spend in hospital and the convalescent home. He was close to dying, he said. Until Albert and Leni came roaring along on his motorbike, “I think that gave me back the will to live.” And then the holidays in Linz, where he was closer to his mother (when Kleinmünchen Cemetery was closed down, his grandparents had her name engraved on the family gravestone in the urn grove in Urfahr). With Andi and Albert who let him ride with them in the cab of the works locomotive on the VÖEST site. With Peter, with whom he went bathing. With Leni’s husband, who was a model for Hermann because of Franz’s air of calm, and because, unlike Pepe, he didn’t smoke like a chimney.
Pepe and Magda were unhappy with the way he kept feeling drawn to Linz, clearly there was some ill feeling between the Taurer family and his father that goes back to what happened to Gisela. Gretl Zahradka says that Tschof claimed they held him responsible for her death; her memory of what he said about the disagreement even suggests the family of his first wife were convinced National Socialists, who had set Hermann against his father. That is nonsense, they were and remained communists, even after Gisela’s death. It is however conceivable that in contrast to Pepe they refused to accept the orthodox pro-Soviet Party line. That at least is what is suggested by a tortuous sentence in the biographical sketch according to which people who knew Gisela expressed the opinion after her death that she “sacrificed her life and left her 5-year-old son without a mother as a LITTLE IDEALIST, while the GREAT STALIN sent not only enemies and traitors but also his own Party comrades into exile in Siberia or to the firing squad because of differences opinion.” The growing estrangement between Pepe and Gisela’s family is also suggested by Hermann’s memory of an unannounced visit he made to Füchselstrasse: he rang the bell, he says, his grandmother opened the door and recoiled when she saw him—because at first she thought he was his father.
That must have been later, after the Tschofenig family had moved to Vienna. Hermann went to high school there, after which he started an apprenticeship as a fitter with Siemens-Schuckert. His aim was to become independent as quickly as possible, to stand on his own two feet, no longer to have to answer to his parents. Perhaps also to get away from the silence surrounding his mother, which was kept alive by the post-war bureaucracy, as can be seen from Pepe’s letter to the Taurers: “At the offices of the Carinthian state government nothing is ‘OFFICIALLY’ known about Gisela’s death. A communication to that effect was sent from the register office in Linz to Klagenfurt. After that I applied to the Carinthian state court to try and initiate the process of having her declared dead. That’s not possible either! The fact is, then, that officialdom has not registered the events of 1945.” In order for Gisela to be declared dead, it needed the testimonies of Resi and Karl Kastner: “I hereby declare…”
Pepe (or Tschof as they called him in the Party) is uniformly described by his comrades Hans Kalt, Irma Schwager, Josefine Seif and Michael Grabner, in almost the same words, as reserved, unapproachable, taciturn, distrustful, awkward, very hard on himself and on others. Tall, peculiar Carinthian dialect. It was even a special occasion, Fini Seif says, when he once had a coffee with her and her colleague. Walter Wachs, she says, and Rudi Schober, Irma Schwager adds, felt it almost as a special favor when they were allowed to visit Tschof (many years later, when he’d retired from his Party work) in his weekend cottage up on the Semmering Pass. He’d been embittered, Gretl Zahradka adds, it was said his wife had been accused, completely without justification, of a misdemeanor in the firm where she worked as a bookkeeper.
Embittered or disheartened. Hermann remembers how despondent his father was one election Sunday (it could have been the Sunday of every election at which the Communist Party had put up candidates) when the results were announced on the radio.
Pepe’s inability to show him affection did not spoil Hermann’s enjoyment of the leisure activities of the Communist youth organizations. He was leader of one of the groups in the Young Guard, then transferred to the Free Austrian Youth. It never occurred to him to deny his political background. Whenever he was asked for his father’s profession he would reply, “Official of the Austrian Communist Party. Member of the Central Committee.” He found friends in the area around 2 Starhemberggasse, where the family lived. Like him, most, though not all, were the children of Communists, born in exile or underground, in a country that had been conquered by Germany. Hans West, Franz Kostmann, Bruno Geir. Hermann had already been a ‘sergeant’ back then, Hans says, explaining his choice of word with the fact that ‘Tschofi’ lavished the affection he lacked at home on others. He looked after his friends like a mother hen, especially a certain Peter, Peter Honsal, who didn’t come from a communist family. The one thing that struck him about Hermann’s father was that he never asked how his parents were but only his grandfather who, as a Jew, had escaped to Hungary when the Nazis arrived.
They roamed the streets, slipped past their adversary, the janitor armed with a wooden club, into the Theresian Academy, at that time a Red Army barracks that was in the process of being closed down, where they watched the women soldiers, standing legs apart in their relatively short skirts, shooting at a rag with machine pistols. On another occasion they went to see the sculptor Franz Pixner, who gave them a hammer and chisel each and a lump of stone: “Make something out of that.” Hans produced a head, Hermann the emblem of the Free Austrian Youth.
Or they would go swimming, to the FAY baths on the bank of the old arm of the Danube. Or they would go and visit each other, at the Kostmanns it was always open house, you could turn up at eleven in the evening, be offered a cup of tea and hear the music from the next room where Jenö, the journalist, was busy writing, thinking or
doing nothing. Bruno lived a bit farther out, on Mollwaldplatz, where his mother was caretaker, and on the corner was an inn where his father regularly went after work; oddly enough the caretaker’s apartment wasn’t on the first floor but the top floor, one large single room under the flat roof, on which they once planted a house-leek. Whenever they met in West’s home, Hermann never forgot, like Tschof, to ask after his grandfather, knock on his door and say hello. It was only the Tschofenig apartment where they were never allowed in. “Tschofi’s mother obviously didn’t want it messed up.” In Hans’ memory they often spent hours standing there, drinking milk and chatting to each other about anything and everything, the Korean war, the girls they fancied, the mopeds they would eventually have, he out in the corridor, Hermann leaning against the door-frame; as far as could be seen from outside the apartment was pretty neat and tidy. Sometimes Hermann’s sister would appear. Hans remembers her as “pretty fresh”, she was much too young for him to have paid her much attention.
In 1962 Hermann disappeared from Austria. By that time he had long since left home, lived in a room on the Margarethen Gürtel and was still working for Siemens-Schuckert. During a disagreement with the management his own representative on the works council refused to support him, so he resigned and went to Switzerland with a few workmates. At first he worked as a mechanic with Brown-Boveri, then as a fitter with a firm making construction machinery, constantly moving around. He became acquainted with a young woman, they got married, had a little girl, then a boy, he applied for Swiss citizenship, transferred to his father-in-law’s firm, a repair shop for all kinds of vehicles and engines. Family quarrel, divorce; earlier on he’d noticed an advertisement looking for border guards, he applied, was accepted, performed his duties at Kloten airport to the satisfaction of his subordinates, who appreciated his social sense, but also to that of many asylum seekers, to whom he showed a caring face, not that of a defender of the affluent society. At sixty-four, burnt out, as he says, Hermann retired. Now he spends the summer on the Dalmatian cost, in Croatia, the home of his second wife, who for me combines two contrasting qualities: being lively and radiating calm. She thinks it’s right that someone is looking into his mother’s history.
This haste to run through Hermann’s Swiss years in time-lapse photography. Because they are years of repressed memory, of desperate attempts to free himself from family entanglements, of adapting to very different conditions. “I had to shut myself off. Politically things were completely different in Switzerland. A left-wing outlook hardly existed at all. Conditions were somehow sterile—that’s not the right word, but it’s something like that.” On the other hand, Hermann says, whenever he went back to Austria everything there bothered him. “Everything!” The phony friendliness, the stubborn dissatisfaction, the chronic impatience, I suspect. “Even the sticky rings from the glasses on the inn tables.” He has, however, seldom been to Austria. Once the family met for a skiing holiday in the Tyrol, once his father came to see him in Chur and they managed to have an almost normal conversation, though they had to make an effort. Anything that might have been hurtful was avoided. After he got back, Pepe said to Gretl Zahradka, “I’ve already got two grandchildren, my son, well yes, now I have a good relationship with him.” When he died Hermann wasn’t informed. He doesn’t know when his stepmother died either. He has been in contact with his sister for a year now. She’s single and has no children. He had, he says, been able to give his children a socially responsible attitude. Since they were working seven days a week, their interest in the family history was minimal.
THAT ISN’T THE WHOLE of the story, simply an attempt to narrate it from the beginning to its provisional end, full of gaps because I arrived too late as far as Gisela’s relatives in Linz are concerned. I didn’t manage to find the children of the Tatschl family either (the boy Hermann used to play with in Möltschach might still be alive) or to discover their relationship with Franz Tatschl who had been imprisoned along with Pepe in Wöllersdorf, set off for Spain from Villach in December 1936 and in the spring of the following year died in the hospital in Murcia from the wounds he had suffered during the Battle of Jarama; I was unable to persuade either Hermann’s aunt in Villach or his sister in Vienna to assist my research with information. Gisela Tschofenig left my letter with a request for a conversation unanswered, because of lack of time and because she didn’t want to talk about her parents, as I learnt from Hermann; for the same reason the boxes remain closed to me, the ones that contain her parents’ documents, as she once told him, material that might shed light on their biography, perhaps even on that of Hermann’s mother, but she said that she still hadn’t managed to bring herself to open them and sort through the contents, the very idea brought tears to her eyes, and I ask myself what—how and when—can have got into the Tschofenig family, an unforgivable insult, a fault opening up, a rift beyond repair, the consequence of which is that Gisela never really comes alive, never has a clearly defined profile, is condemned to fall again, anew, once more into the Schörgenhub pit.
Question: what actually happened to her boots and to the guard who appropriated them on the night of the murders, who has ever called that woman to account.
If it wasn’t for Hermann with his helpful and trusting attitude. If it wasn’t for Margit Kain, who wrote a letter to the Mayor of Linz, and then another because nothing precise came out of city hall, with the urgent request to name a street, school or other public facility after her adopted aunt, until her proposal was accepted in February 2006, so that now we can all set off for Ebelsberg, in the outer suburbs of Linz.
TAKE WIENER STRASSE out of town. At the first lights after the bridge turn right onto Kremsmünster Strasse. Follow this for about 550 yards. After building number 38 turn right. (Be careful crossing the cycleway.) Then to the right again, drive onto the gravel car park. Switch off engine, get out, look around. Gasthof Sportcasino, Lugmair Family, No Parking. Only for customers. Illegally parked cars will be towed away. Take the asphalt footpath that goes in a northerly then westerly direction between three-storied houses and garages in pink, sky blue, lemon yellow and russet. Rental parking places for residents alone. Beyond the houses the riverside woods, invisible behind the woods a tributary of the Traun. Retrace your steps along the blind alley until just before you reach Kremsmünster Strasse. Raise your eyes and read, tearless, what is on the sign under the street name. Gisela Tschofenig (1917–1945), opponent of the Nazi regime.
NOTES
The Klagsbrunn Family
Was written in 2013.
With thanks to Ilse Pollack, who translated Marta Klagsbrunn’s poem (pp. 73–75) from the Portuguese. The book of photographs: Kurt Klagsbrunn: Photographer in the Land of the Future, ed. Ursula Seeber and Barbara Weidle, was published by Weidle Verlag, Bonn, 2013.
The Photographer of Auschwitz
First appeared in the Spectrum section of Die Presse, Vienna, 5. 1. 2007.
Wilhelm Brasse died on October 23, 2012 in Żywiec.
Tschofenig: The Name Behind the Street
First appeared in the anthology Linz Randgeschichten, ed.
Alfred Pittertschatscher, Pictus Verlag, Vienna, 2009.
TRANSLATOR’S BIOGRAPHY
MIKE MITCHELL has been active as a translator for over thirty years. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain, has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition twice for works from German along with a commendation for a translation from French, and has been shortlisted for numerous other awards. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.
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