Three Tearless Histories

by Erich Hackl

  He’s my uncle, Victor said.

  A long time ago, she said, she and Kurt had been friends. More than friends.

  And why did nothing come of it in the long term?

  Oh well, the woman said. You know Kurt. He’s a man who only thinks of himself, who doesn’t want commitment.

  24

  KURT KLAGSBRUNN’S career coincides with the rise of photojournalism in Brazil. Journals such as O Cruzeiro, Sombra and Rio Magazine, based on British and North American models, start to appear and they are dependent on contributors such as him: they are aimed at a new middle class with a cosmopolitan outlook and a North American attitude about life. Journalism in which the picture replaces the message and is no longer merely illustration. Cool, detached, effective in an unspectacular way, deriving its expressive power from the gulf between appearance and reality. It entails irony, which at its best is the ability to capture the provisional nature of people and objects. Kurt Klagsbrunn is a master of that ironic photography. Given that, it’s no surprise that he soon succeeds in getting commissions for the New York magazine Life.

  On a journey across seven or eight Brazilian states he opened up new territory for his camera. Later on he will accept a number of commissions that repeatedly take him away from Rio, to Brasília, for example, full of curiosity about the emergence of the new capital that was designed on the drawing-board. But first and foremost he is the great chronicler of Rio de Janeiro, which until 1960 is the seat of government, thus the center of political power, the economic capital as well, a seaport, a place of hope for hundreds of thousands of people leaving the countryside, a goal of national and international high-society pleasure-seekers. With its bays and hills it is one of the most charming cities in the world; in contrast to São Paolo it has not banished the natural world from its confines and has a wealth of color that, paradoxically, is captured in the photographer’s black-and-white pictures. It is also a city that, during the four decades of his professional life, goes through an immense transformation, architecturally, demographically, socially. When Kurt arrives in Rio it has 1.7 million inhabitants; in 1980, when he stops photographing, over five million, not counting the suburbs. He makes this change visible, documents the great building projects—the Avenida Presidente Vargas, to which whole rows of houses are sacrificed, the Maracaña Stadium, that is opened in time for the 1950 World Cup—has a look around the fashionable Jockey Club, liberates models and beauty queens from their sterile environment, records the tumult of the carnival in almost lapidary pictures. He retains the eye of the foreigner who notices things that seem ordinary to the locals.

  It is not mere chance that, like him, other important photographers in Brazil also came to the country as young adults, as refugees from Europe: Thomas Farkas, Hildegard Rosenthal, Judith Munk. He and Thomas Farkas are friends and because Thomas’ parents in São Paolo own a photography store, he never has any problem obtaining photographic material, despite the import restrictions during the war. For a while Munk was Kurt’s business partner; his nephew, who met her in his grandparents’ apartment and later often enjoyed visiting her, remembers her as an uncommonly lively, stimulating, gregarious woman. Right up to the end Kurt also works as a photographer for advertising and industry, which on the one hand brings in money and on the other reflects his penchant for getting to the bottom of things, understanding how they work, observing them at rest and in motion.

  Even though he frequently works for news agencies, he is anything but a reporter working under pressure. Rather he’s a perfectionist, who spends a long time thinking before he presses the shutter release, and however casual and spontaneous some of his photographs look, they aren’t snapshots. Or they are, only the observer doesn’t see them as such. His portraits of artists and politicians have an almost relaxed immediacy, are unpretentious and vivid. You could imagine they are the work of someone who loves people, at least understands them.

  He will leave his nephew an archive of 150,000 photos, slides, negatives and contact prints, and a big question about the gap between life and work: why do his indifference, his egoism, his mistrust vanish as soon as he looks through the viewfinder; why do we feel deceived when, after everything we’ve heard about him, we feel that we find in his pictures, which are never hurtful, the things he lacked in dealing with people: openness, involvement, tenderness. And a second question: what is more important, a proper life or an exceptional oeuvre. Does the one have to be achieved at the expense of the other.

  25

  WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD Luana was a real bookworm, Victor says. At the German school she went to in Rio, she spent many hours in the library. One day the woman in charge there told her that she knew someone else called Klagsbrunn. She used to work in the German bookshop, she said, and one of her colleagues had been Rose Walter, Rosina actually, the wife of the photographer Kurt Klagsbrunn. Luana told them about this when she got home, excited to have learnt about a relative she’d never heard of. And that was what made Victor go and visit his uncle.

  That must have been in or around 1990. Whenever it was, Kurt had already had a stroke, could hardly use his right hand at all and was trying to write with his left. He spent most of the time lying in bed, in his apartment in Rua Ribeiro de Almeida, the same street where the Klagsbrunn family had first found lodgings in Rio. Victor went to see him and his wife regularly, out of a sense of duty toward his last surviving relative and out of compassion, above all with Rose, who bravely bore his uncle’s moods. He sucked her dry, Victor says. Once she confessed to him that she was finding it more and more difficult to cope with the housekeeping. Since Kurt’s illness she was having to deal with financial matters, which was getting to be too much for her. It wasn’t a great matter, Victor says, she just needed someone to give her a hand now and then. But Kurt had been unhappy that she had asked his nephew for help.

  He volunteered nothing about himself, Victor says, I had to keep on asking. Nothing about his weekend cottage in Araras, in the mountains an hour’s drive away from Rio. It would never have occurred to Kurt to suggest his nephew and family use it for excursions. He had designed it himself from plans in magazines such as Do It Yourself. I made the garden, Rose told him, Victor says, while he was always sitting around in the cottage tinkering about with things. Using equipment he’d had sent from the USA, good tools from the forties and fifties. He’d even made the spare parts for his old car himself. He wasn’t allowed to drive any longer because of his illness. So he made do with starting the engine once a week. For him selling the car was out of the question. He insisted on keeping all material things, Victor says. In one cupboard he stored half a dozen rotting tennis rackets, on his work-bench were three punctured tennis balls, in one corner old newspapers were piled up to the ceiling. He did have a television but seldom switched it on. He preferred to listen to classical music on the old crackling portable radio on his bedside table. Rose suffered from the heat but because he hated drafts he wouldn’t even have a fan on the house.

  When she died, like it or not he had to accept that his nephew took care of him. Victor employed two women who looked after him alternately. He persuaded Kurt, who had grown lazy in old age, to go for walks with him. To have a drink of water more often, for according to the doctor he was in danger of having kidney failure, but he could only get Kurt to sip at a cup of sweetened lemon tea now and then, pursing his lips, as Victor says. He had very bad teeth.

  I’ll take you to the dentist.

  No, why, no one’s going to see me.

  It must have been a strange experience for him, Victor says: at the end of your life, to be together with a nephew you have nothing to do with…

  Once Victor asked: you enquired about our address in Berlin. Why didn’t you come to see us? Rose was afraid, Kurt replied. On a trip to Europe in 1999, after Rose’s death, his nephew made a detour to Vienna to collect Kurt’s victim’s compensation pension for him (wire transfers always involved high bank charges) and on that occasion Kurt gave him Grete Gab
meier’s telephone number. Victor and Marta went to see her, in Floridsdorf, in Pilzgasse, in the house Grete’s aunt had had built after the end of the Allied occupation. It was a stimulating meeting but Victor still knew too little, about Austria and about his family, for him to be able to ask the right questions. The information his uncle in Rio let slip was only bits and pieces; it wasn’t enough for him to work out the wider circumstances.

  Their relationship improved during his last years, Victor says. And that was due to Luana. Kurt would confide secrets he’d never told his nephew to his grandniece and assembled a little dossier about as many relatives as possible: a photo, a couple of letters, official documents, whatever he could find. He gradually started to show some interest in Victor’s professional activities. But as far as his own memories were concerned, Victor still had to drag them out of him. He only learnt that his uncle had been called to meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from a historian. Soon after their return, Victor and Marta had requested to see their files held by the Political Police, and when Victor went to collect the copies from the Federal Archives (one page on him, fifty on Marta) the historian had asked him whether he was related to Klagsbrunn the photographer.

  Yes. Why do you ask?

  I’m working though the CP archive and have found lots of photos there. All of them have the name of the photographer stamped on the back: Kurt Paul Klagsbrunn.

  When asked about this Kurt said, yes, in the forties he’d been a sympathizer of the Communist Party of Brazil. Because at the time he’d had his studio in the Edificio São Borja, the multi-story building next to the Senate where the Party also had an office, the comrades had brought him in to take photographs. Even later on as well, after 1947 when the Party had been banned. Then, for security, they’d put a black hood over him and driven him to the secret meetings.

  And was it you who put the stamp on the photos?

  Of course, what d’you think. I’ve always been professional about my work.

  Some things only came to light after Kurt’s death. Such as the fact that immediately after his arrival in Rio, he started taking photos for the magazine of the National Students’ Union that was antifascist and, with its mass mobilization of opinion, contributed to Brazil entering the war against Nazi Germany. In a 1942 newspaper article that Marta found in his apartment, it said that Kurt took part in all the activities of the Students’ Union. He was regarded as a kind of honorary member, it went on; he spoke little—usually only as much as was absolutely necessary. “As you all know, I’m Austrian. Nazism drove me out of Austria and I ended up in Brazil. I have been helped here and made many acquaintances. The students as a whole have become my best friends. I think what you’re doing is very important.”

  Kurt Klagsbrunn died on August 7, 2005, eight months after Victor’s sister Vera.

  He was the last of his generation, Victor says, and I had had no opportunity to care for my mother or my father. In the end I liked him. I didn’t try to understand him. I felt very sorry that I couldn’t do more for him. I never heard him say that there was anything in his life he regretted. I once asked him: Did you never want to have a child? And he said: No, actually not.

  Actually not. As far as it has been possible to establish, of the eleven children of Ignaz and Johanna Klagsbrunn, who were photographed in front of a villa in Floridsdorf in spring 1904, only Leo had grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A current photograph ought to be placed over that one, in color and with, beside or between Victor and Marta, their daughter, their Italian son-in-law their two lively grandchildren. For a moment we can imagine we can see part of Klagsbrunn Villa in the background. But it’s the façade of houses in a medium-sized German town where Luana lives with her family. Invisible on this picture are the threads linking times and continents.

  The Photographer of Auschwitz

  BEFORE HE SETS OFF FOR HOME, to the house, weathered to a sulfurous yellow and sandy gray, on the outskirts of Żywiec, where his wife is waiting for him, watching television. Before he eases his stiff legs into the official car of the Austrian consulate general, behind the driver who the previous day told Jacek Buras the history of his divided Polish-German family, in general outline. As a farewell, then, Wilhelm Brasse shouts: And give my best wishes to Austria. He has been there, twice, with a gap of fifty or fifty-five years. Once to die and once to reacquaint himself with it.

  Now he slips onto the rear seat, closes the door, raises his arm in a friendly gesture, Jacek and I wave, then we withdraw from the mild, autumn sunshine into the excited whispering of the lobby of a four-star hotel in Kraków. How, I ask myself, can one pass on greetings to a whole country. It also occurs to me that I forgot to ask Brasse about Oskar Stuhr. Whether he knew Oskar Stuhr, even photographed him. Whether he had at least heard from him. After all, they both ended up in Auschwitz, against their will and yet of their own volition, it would have been in their power to avert the danger. Perhaps they only ran into each other afterward, on the occasion of a commemoration in the former camp or at a meeting of survivors from the Kraków area. Brasse has quite often been to such events and has no regrets about it, at least in that way he saw Hermann Langbein again, which pleased him immensely, even though he wasn’t such a close friend as Rudi Friemel and Vickerl Vesely, of whom we will speak later.

  Why not Oskar Stuhr then who, like Brasse, had no time for German blood and other Nazi stuff? Stuhr came from Vienna, lived in Kraków, and long before the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was the legal adviser to the Jagiellonian University. As such he had seen it as his duty to accompany the venerable professors to Lecture Room 55, where they had to assemble on the orders of the Security Police. He was arrested along with them and deported to Sachsenhausen then Auschwitz. When, during registration in Auschwitz, it turned out that according to the Nuremberg Laws he was to be regarded as a German from the Reich about whom, moreover, there were no political reservations, the camp commander himself apologized for the mistake and informed him that he was free to go. Stuhr replied: Sir, that was not a mistake at all. I am Polish and I am staying here, with the other Poles.

  The reporter Hanna Krall presented this episode twice: in the obituary of her friend, the film-maker Krzysztof Kieślowski, and in her doubly autobiographical novel The Subtenant. In the book she made the Austrian Stuhr into a German by the name of Staemmler who, after the liberation, has his name transcribed into Polish, Sztemler, which sounds Jewish to many ears and twenty-three years later leads to his children and grandchildren suffering anti-Semitic harassment; presumably Krall hoped this invention would improve both the book’s aesthetic structure and its message. However in reality the man was called Stuhr, was born in Vienna and the author heard the story of his loyalty and pride from his grandson, the famous actor and director, Jerzy Stuhr, during a nocturnal chat about grandparents at Kraków Central Station, in the non-alcoholic restaurant there that shut down years ago.

  But the memory remains of this Austrian who preferred to be a Pole rather than a German, just as it does of Karl Albrecht von Habsburg-Lothringen, an archduke of a branch of the Imperial house whose father had taken up residence in Saybusch in the eighteen-eighties. At that time the little town in the Beskids had 4296 inhabitants, occupied a picturesque situation at the confluence of the Soła and Koszawara Rivers, lay on the Galician Transverse Railway with a branch line to Bielitz, was the seat of a county administration and a county court, and had a few factories producing liqueurs, glue, cloth and paper. It was well-known for its brewery; beer from Żywiec, as the place is called in Polish, was also popular three hundred miles away in the Emperor’s capital of Vienna. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Saybusch fell to Poland. Karl Albrecht changed nationality and henceforward served in the Polish army, ending with the rank of brigadier general. The German occupiers arrested and expropriated him, for they took it as proven that he had denied his racial ties and he felt no need to dispute that accusation. Detained by the
Gestapo, then under house arrest, finally in a labor camp in Thuringia, he and his family (his wife a Swedish aristocrat; two daughters) survived the period of Nazi rule. They returned to Poland in 1945; however, after the Communists took over power they were compelled to seek refuge in Sweden.

  Wilhelm Brasse was also Austrian, on his father’s side. After the Franco-Prussian War his grandfather, a landscape gardener from Alsace, had settled in Saybusch/Żywiec, where he tended the extensive castle park to the complete satisfaction of the Archduke. His son, Wilhelm’s father that is, worked as a precision engineer in the Brevellier-Urban engineering works and married a devout and great-hearted Polish woman who bore him six boys, Wilhelm, the eldest, on December 3, 1917. The others were called, in an almost perfectly balanced mixed-cultural sequence: Kazimierz, Rudolf, Marjan, Johann and Heinrich. Since the sudden death of the youngest from a heart attack in the middle of October this year, only Wilhelm is still alive. He attended the high school in Żywiec, trained as a photographer after he left, and opened a photographic studio in Katowice once he had obtained his diploma. He couldn’t complain about a lack of commissions, on the contrary, he was highly regarded for the care he took and for his ability to capture both the reality of the person whose portrait he was taking and the way they saw themselves.

  As long as he was at school Brasse was not aware of any tensions between Poles and Germans. He had friends in both camps, neither side valuing their own kin more highly than those who were supposed to be foreign. It was only in 1936 that he noticed that, instead of a medallion with the Virgin Mary, more and more girls were wearing the bent cross on their necklaces. Until then he hadn’t noticed any hatred of Jews, his five Jewish classmates at least had not been exposed to any animosity. After the war he was to run across one in the market square in Żywiec and that was for the last time, because his friend had decided to emigrate to Palestine, his ticket for the boat was already on its way.