Three Tearless Histories

by Erich Hackl

  4. The ‘contribution’, amounting in total to 1.2 billion reichsmarks, imposed on Jews as compensation for the damage caused during the Kristallnacht pogrom.

  11

  WITH HER LETTERS Maria keeps the Klagsbrunns up to date about things that have happened among their acquaintances and in the firm. At one point, because of customers who are behind with their payments, she wishes her former employer were there. “This is a time when you’re urgently needed.” Several times she even regrets having agreed to the purchase. The large number of regular customers aren’t a lot of use to her, she says, because most of them are Jews, and the storage space she had at the freight depot was canceled straight away. She even once accuses Leo of having cheated her since—intentionally or because he forgot—he omitted to delete the obligation to pay the installments, which he’d had entered in the Land Registry, which meant she’d had the authorities on her back for years and was burdened with extra charges. “I can’t understand why you took me for a ride like that when I’ve always been so correct in my dealings with you.”

  Apart from that the relationship between her and the family continues to be as warm as ever. Now and then she complains that the Klagsbrunns don’t write often enough and when they do it’s too little. Right at the beginning she’s worried about whether the crates with their effects have arrived because she had the impression that Hofbauer, the forwarding agent charged with dispatching them, seemed lax and money-grubbing. She asks whether a Bauer family has already written to them. “Max regularly asks after you. I think the man misses you a bit.” To Fritzi she sends fashion magazines and a cookery book. She mentions that her boyfriend, Arthur Egger, whom she marries at the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941, has pains because of his duodenal ulcer. That Egger joined the NSDAP—either to help his chances of promotion with the Deutsche Reichsbahn or because it’s of advantage for her and the firm—we will only learn later from Grete Gabmeier.

  From the above-mentioned list drawn up by Maria Pfeiffer of her payments to and for Leopold Klagsbrunn (various tax and health insurance arrears, missed installment payments, dues, lawyers’ fees, back-payment of wages, dispatch charges, travel expenses for the Klagsbrunn family…) it is clear that the purchase price was also used to pay the expenses Leo’s sister Sida and her daughter Franja incurred in connection with their plans to emigrate. Thanks to Grete Gabmeier we know that Franja was an actress in Vienna (and in the studio theater ‘Literatur am Naschmarkt’ that put on plays and reviews by dissident authors) and later on worked as a dental assistant in a small town near London. A postcard to Fritzi in Lisbon has survived, dated October 27, 1938, in which Franja mentions a school in England where she’s applied for a job. “The disadvantage is that there’s no other kind of work I’ll be able to accept. But at the moment I just need to know where I belong.” Between the lines she hints at how unbearable both her own situation and life in general has become in Vienna. “I try keep my spirits up but it is sometimes difficult. On top of everything it’s very cold & gray & windy outside and & that gets me down.”

  It remains unknown whether Sida was eventually also allowed to emigrate to Great Britain. And what about Johann Frey, Franja’s father? Had he already died, did he not want to leave, did he live apart from his wife and daughter? Unlike Leo’s friend Max, we didn’t find him in the database of Shoah victims compiled by the Documentary Archive of Austrian Resistance. According to that Maz Bauer was deported to Theresienstadt together with his wife Hermine on July 10, 1942, where she died on February 16, 1943. The date of his death is unknown.

  12

  LEO IS FIFTY-ONE, Fritzi fifty-two when they arrive in Brazil. Their sons are twenty-five and twenty. They have brought some effects with them from Vienna, linen, clothes, tableware, perhaps a few pieces of furniture and certainly a typewriter, which Leo bought in Vienna shortly before they left. Money? On Mitzi’s list of payments there is, apart from travel expenses of 5300 reichsmarks, which were entirely taken up by tickets for the ship and plane, passports and visas as well as carriage for their luggage, just one such item, from the day of their departure: Paid in cash to Klagsbrunn for the emigration costs for two relatives and travel money for the Klagsbrunn family: 2850.—Certainly none of that will be left by the time they reach Rio. However they manage to establish themselves professionally relatively quickly. Leo, presumably with the help of his brother-in-law, sets up a small firm—Lustra—making chemical products. Whether Fritzi works there too or brings in extra money from some other employment, is unknown. What we do know is that after the end of the war she is at home making aprons and other working clothes; Grete Gabmeier remembers that her aunt sometimes sends Frau Klagsbrunn material that is unobtainable in Brazil, or at least not of the same quality.

  Their sons have to give up the idea of continuing their studies in Rio. After their long stay in Lisbon they can speak Portuguese reasonably well, so that they would have no problem following the lectures, but the exams they passed in Vienna are not recognized. They probably also find themselves forced to contribute to the family income as quickly as possible. Until he opens his first photographic studio Kurt, as he will later state, did “casual jobs” (the last in a travel agency). As early as April 1939, hardly a month after their arrival, Peter starts working as a sales representative for three local manufacturers of pharmaceutical products and perfumes, one after the other, then he sells essences used in making perfumes for a US firm. In 1942 he marries Ingeborg Röschen Steuer, who comes from a devout Jewish family.

  Inge was the last of her family to escape from Germany. At twenty years old, four or five days before the outbreak of the Second World War. For practical reasons, in order to learn the language during the crossing, she had booked the journey on a Brazilian passenger ship that just managed to sail, while the regular Hamburg Süd liner was stuck in the harbor. Her father had had a delicatessen in Berlin-Tiergarten. Salo Steuer is a war veteran and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for his services to Kaiser and Fatherland. A friend of Inge’s just calls him—contemptuously—the Sergeant. On the sabbath he refuses to take the bus and does the long journey from their apartment in Ipanema to Botafogo and the synagogue of the Associãço Religiosa Israelita, founded by German Jews, on foot.

  He is not happy that, of all people, his daughter has set her mind on the frail Peter Klagsbrunn, who is indifferent in matters of faith, and insists he undergoes a medical examination before the wedding. The doctor certifies that he has a weak heart. Inge marries him despite that. In 1944 she gives birth to a daughter, Vera, and two years later Victor is born. His father dies of a heart attack when he’s six, leaving his widow not much more than an apartment in Copacabana encumbered with mortgages and a Ford Anglia that has only just been purchased.

  First of all the car is sold. Then lodgers are sought to whom she turns over three of the four rooms. Thirdly she starts to work as a representative for promotional articles. She’s hard-working, she doesn’t spare herself, her nerves are always on edge. She smokes a lot. During the hot season between New Year and Carnival, when hardly anyone in Rio does any work, she makes exhausting business trips to Belo Horizonte and Manaus. Although she has no lack of admirers, she will never have another long-term relationship. She wants the children to have a better life when they grow up. Therefore she sends Vera and Victor to the Colegio de Aplicaçao, a model public school that operates under the aegis of the Universidade do Brasil, but persuades her daughter to follow it by training as a secretary. Thus Vera’s desire to study law remains unfulfilled. Their mother wants Victor, however, to embark on an academic career. An attempt to have him instructed in the Jewish faith by the rabbi Dr. Lemle is torpedoed by Victor’s impudence. When Lemle sets his pupils an exercise to write down what they felt when they attended the synagogue, Victor’s response is one word: heat. He enjoys the laughter from the other children and is unmoved by the rabbi’s annoyance. At Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when he has to accompany his mother’s family to the synagogue o
r, before it was built, to the premises of the Botafogo Rowing and Football Club, which have been hired for the occasion, it really is unbearably hot and humid in the overfull rooms. Victor always finds some opportunity to slip out unnoticed into the fresh air. At the Colegio he is in danger of having to repeat a year because of an over-strict teacher. Driven by his fear of the worry this will cause his mother, he spends a whole summer boning up on math and, to his own surprise, ends up among the best in the class.

  13

  FLORIDSDORF has suffered great damage during the Second World War. Pilzgasse is affected because of the air raids on the freight depot and the oil refinery. A bomb has landed in the garden of number 9, demolishing an extension built during the war together with the veranda, tearing the window frames out of the wall and blowing off the roof. The storage area beside the railroad has been completely destroyed.

  “We have the laborious task of going back and starting from the beginning again with everything.” That is what Maria Pfeiffer writes to the Klagsbrunns in her first airmail letter of April 15, 1946. She has received no answer to a postcard she had sent a month previously. This means she has to repeat all the news that’s already a year old. Including the good news that Leo’s brother Noli is well and has started to work. Noli, the dentist and inventor of a wax syringe at 34 Wienzeile, who left the Jewish religious community long before 1938 and married a Christian woman—of noble birth, as Victor was told by his uncle—who managed to protect him from deportation during the Nazi years.

  The second piece of good news is that Mitzi’s brother Josef is living in Floridsdorf again, together with his family. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union he had volunteered for the Red Army, had parachuted into Yugoslavia in the fall of 1944 and been wounded as a partisan with the Austrian Freedom Battalion during operations in Carinthia or Styria. Now he is head of the local section of the Austrian Communist Party. Her other brother is working for the state police that at that time is still under Communist influence. Her niece Grete is also employed there. “At the moment my husband is working as an electrician.” (As an unskilled worker because he had been a member of the Nazi Party, as Grete Gabmeier tells us. Two years later Arthur Egger will be taken on as an official of the Federal Railways again and soon promoted to a senior post in the planning and inspection department.) The Allied Control Commission, Maria Pfeiffer writes, has forbidden the discussion of business matters in letters abroad. Therefore she asks in a vague formulation for him to send “the confirmation from back then with a recent date, since I urgently need that confirmation.” And she adds a second request: to inform her “how much I still owe you.”

  What this is all about becomes clear from Leo Klagsbrunn’s written declaration of October 16, 1946, “that it was of my own free will that I sold my property to my employee Frau Maria Egger, née Pfeiffer, who had worked for me for many years. This sale had been planned long before my departure and had nothing to do with Aryanization. As proof of that one can take the fact that I sent a satisfaction piece for the money owing me on the house from Brazil.” There is nothing in the letters that have been preserved to say whether Leo Klagsbrunn made a similar declaration regarding the coal business or not. Maria Pfeiffer’s repeated complaint, right down until the early sixties, that the purchase of the house and business had “cost her dear,” could be interpreted as an attempt to soothe her own conscience and to prevent her friends in Rio from feeling they are still owed something. She mentions that through the currency reform she and her husband have lost all their savings, 65,000 reichsmarks. That is a considerable sum, almost three times as much as what was paid for Klagsbrunn’s possessions, in current terms more than 200,000 euros. Victor thinks he remembers that Maria Pfeiffer sent his grandfather money now and then. In Vienna she has to combat the suspicion that she exploited Klagsbrunn’s predicament. In January 1961, two years after Leo’s death, she writes to Fritzi, “Since the time when we purchased the house and business in 1938 we’ve had nothing but animosity, first of all from the Nazis and now from Jewish organizations. Sometimes I’m in such depths of despair that I regret having agreed to purchase them in 1938. I admit that you, as seller, have lost out, because you had to emigrate, but I’ve come off even worse than you.”

  The fact is that over the years the sales of charcoal have been falling off more and more. Until now the main buyers have been smithies and scythe-works and they are closing down one after the other. There’s no money to be made out of coal for irons anymore either. There’s a minor upturn in the sixties when barbecues become increasingly popular in Austria. As early as 1950 Maria and her husband bought the property at 15-17 Pilzgasse, on favorable terms because Floridsdorf is in the Soviet zone and the owners, Klosterneuburg Monastery, do not believe the Allied troops will ever leave Austria. On the plot there’s a tiny house where two old women live. Maria Pfeiffer lets them continue living there. Only when the last one dies does she have the house pulled down and a three-story dwelling house built that has room for an office on the first floor. Behind the house storerooms with their own railway siding are constructed.

  At some time around 1960 the ruined house at 9 Pilzgasse is cleared to make way for a summer house. Maria Pfeiffer makes it available to Leo’s sister-in-law Lisa, his brother Josef’s widow who has to survive on welfare. In return Lisa helps out in the kitchen in the morning and looks after Grete Gabmeier’s daughter, as her mother is now working in her aunt’s office. Two years after her husband’s death at the end of 1973, Maria Pfeiffer sells the firm to Kolkoks and retires. During her last years she, who was always surrounded by people throughout her life, complains about her lonely existence. No one ever comes to see me… When she dies, on January 2, 1980, there is nothing left to recall Leopold Klagsbrunn’s firm. But her niece keeps up the connection with Kurt Klagsbrunn, who after 1945 visited her and Maria Pfeiffer in Floridsdorf at least three times. Grete Gabmeier meets him again during a trip to Brazil. He didn’t talk much, she says.

  A letter of May 15, 1941, that one of the sons, probably Peter, sent to Hugo’s widow in the USA, sheds some light on the reason why the family, as Maria Pfeiffer complained, were such poor correspondents.

  14

  DEAR LILLY,

  After a quite frighteningly long time I’ve finally gotten around to writing to you again. Of course our silence isn’t due to the fact that we don’t want to write to you, but simply and solely because we are all putting so much effort and concentration into our work that we have no time left for correspondence. You will quite rightly raise your European and perhaps also North American objections and say that one always has a bit of time left for writing if one really wants to. Not in Brazil. During the hot months here one has to take time to recover from the few unavoidable hours of work and quite simply cannot get around to answering letters promptly. Now that the summer is over and the heat has gone, one has to deal with all the obligations that have piled up. During these cool days we do our thinking for the whole year, for during the hot days our brains seem to have shriveled up and to be having a very annoying summer sleep. During that time you perform your duties quite automatically, do what is most urgent, very slowly and sweating, half asleep while you’re working, but you’re only half asleep while you’re sleeping too, for in that heat you can never sleep properly and you always wake up in the morning much more tired than when you went to bed the previous evening. You slave away and you still don’t get anything done. The things people say during that time should only be taken with the greatest caution and you shouldn’t bear a grudge against anyone for what they say, do, or omit to do during the hot period, for they aren’t responsible for their actions then. However that, as far as I can see, sorts itself out after about five years and then the Europeans are acclimatized to the extent that they don’t notice any difference between summer and winter, then they are the way they are now in summer for the whole year. That means we have about three years to go but it varies with the individual, it happens more quickly with
some. Otherwise the country is a real paradise, magnificent to look at and still relatively one of the cheapest countries in the world, though of course it’s also suffering from the general rise in prices throughout the world because of the war, and that all the more so because the country’s only a paradise as far as not spending very much is concerned, but it’s equally modest as far as earning is concerned and in that respect is anything but paradisal.

  All four of us are, thank God, in employment and we earn what we need. True, it’s only enough for the bare necessities, but even that means a lot to us. We’re also in reasonably good health, even though Mama does suffer from rheumatism most of the year, which is a great hindrance in her work, and Papa is often tormented by stomach pains, yet at the moment none of us is really ill and in this area almost everyone is a little bit off-color.

  15

  THERE’S NOT MUCH Victor can tell us about his father, who died early. That he was of a cheerful disposition, liked chatting, preferred sitting in the coffee house (the Cinelândia in the center of the town) to working, once tanned his hide, but only because his mother wanted him to. That when told his father had died, he, Victor, asked tearfully who was going to repair his toys now.

  As a child, and also during his teenage years, Victor went to see his Austrian grandparents once a week in their house in Jaranjeiras, in the south of Rio, which he liked much better than when he was with his strict maternal grandmother, who was intent on keeping things in order. Grandma Fritzi, on the other hand, thought nothing of crawling around on the floor when playing with her grandchildren and filling the bench with all the goods for a grocer’s shop. She never wore jewelry, nor a watch either, even though Leo often came home with a bracelet or a watch for her. Solid gold, he liked that. He also valued food he was familiar with from Austria. Every day he bought, contrary to Brazilian habits, a quarter of a pound of fresh ham or cheese. He taught his grandson to play chess. After his death in July 1957 Victor was allowed to choose something from his possessions. Without hesitating he chose a large boxed chess set. His grandfather had once told him that every Austrian participant in a chess tournament in Russia had been given such a set. One of the selected players, he’d told him, had been a Klagsbrunn, an uncle or nephew of Leo.