A study of the lives and performances of cultural translation of Austrian refugees in Australia must logically start by exploring their old homeland and the context of their origin.1 Austria was the place where they were socialized and had acquired the essential cultural capital (values, norms, lifestyles, and habitual practices) they later brought to Australia as their âcultural luggage.â It helped or hindered them in establishing new and, in many cases, very particular lives in Australia.
There were many similarities between the members of the cohort of refugees that would justify regarding them as a coherent group, even though they took up different ways of life and dispersed geographically throughout Australia after their escape. Many of them pursued very similar hobbies or had similar professional views and attitudes, even after decades in Australia: very many Austrians, for example, shared an enduring love of music and the theatre. Many of them also continued skiing and hiking in Australia, both sports that were âin vogueâ in interwar Austria. Some of them teamed up with others who shared the same interests and immersed themselves in sport clubs as well as social and cultural organizations. Others shared their life-long passion for those practices and cultural elements they had taken up in their old homelands. Austrian refugees, for example, were among the most enthusiastic operators of and visitors to the emerging Australian postwar ski fields. Even in 1967, a postwar migrant who built up a business in the Thredbo ski resort in New South Wales noted: âI have met more people from Austria here than anywhere else in Australia.â2
There were many more cultural similarities. Almost all of the people interviewed for this study expressed their enthusiasm for literature, classical music, or the fine arts. Many refugees were also influenced by political ideas that
Those striking similarities are intriguing. Therefore, I believe exploring the refugeesâ home context and the society and culture in which they had been educated and socialized is important for finding out which forms of cultural capital, values, and habitual practices they had acquired. Accordingly, this chapter will firstly discuss the cultural, political, social, and economic context of Austria during the interwar years. Since 88.5 percent of the refugees analysed in this study recalled having a Jewish background, or being classified as âJewishâ by the Nazis, this section also offers an introduction to Jewish life in interwar Austria, and specifically its capital city, where most of the Austrian Jews lived. This section will also analyse the refugeesâ background and the social and economic context in which the members of the sample group were brought up to indicate and highlight what they regarded as particularly important social and cultural capital they had acquired during their time in Austria. Since the group consists of people from different age categories, this chapter is explicitly not restricted to the interwar years but will also consider social, economic, and cultural aspects of life in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Depictions include analyses of the refugeesâ family background and their education, as well as their social and professional lives. I also exemplify the most important professional skills and knowledge they acquired and analyse their social capital, especially with regard to the networks they built up and maintained, as well as the expectations they had of their networks.
Before beginning this analysis, it is useful to take a closer look at the individual members of the sample group. Who were they and where did they come from? As with the overall cohort of expelled Austrians who sought shelter and refuge in Australia and successfully applied for naturalization, the majority (92 percent) were born in Vienna. Only two members of the sample cohort were born elsewhere (Lower Austria and Germany). As the sample group shows, Austrian refugees in Australia lived predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class lives. More than one-third identified their family background as upper middle class. Almost half of them claimed to come from a middle-class family. One-fifth regarded themselves as either working class or lower middle class. In terms of religion, the group seems to be much more diverse. At the time of the Anschluss, the largest portion of them (more than two-thirds) were members of the Jewish community. Two-fifths claimed that their families were not religious. Less than one-third of the self-identifying Jews described their families as religious, identifying themselves either as liberal or as Orthodox. One-fifth later changed their religious affiliation and were baptized either
Geographically, most of the refugees came from Viennese middle-class districts or the prestigious inner-city region called âInnere Stadt.â Almost one-third were born and raised in the 19th district, a sought-after middle-class district in the north-western region of Vienna. About one-fifth of them grew up in the inner city of Vienna, where the most respectable addresses, especially for professionals and successful businesspeople, were located.3 The rest were more or less scattered throughout the cityâs suburbs, with some people residing in better-off neighbourhoods such as the 9th district and others living in working-class areas such as the 16th district. Surprisingly few people from the sample group (only 8 percent) came from the 2nd district, nicknamed Mazzesinsel (matzo island),4 which was home to almost one-third of the cityâs Jewish population during the interwar years.5
Their education generally reflected their middle-class status. Close to one-third (27 percent) had enjoyed the privilege of a university education. Almost half of them were educated to Gymnasium or high school level. Slightly more than one-tenth had only completed the compulsory minimum school education. This did not reflect the trends among the general population. Although in 1932 Austria was among the countries with the highest proportion of academics in the world, the vast majority of the population had no possibility of acquiring formal university or high school education. In 1932, there was only one student per 260 Austrian residents, compared to one per 506 residents in Germany, 387 in Switzerland, and 515 in Czechoslovakia.6 The share of graduates among the total Austrian population, therefore, was as low as 0.4 percent.
Professionally, the members of the analysed sample group also formed a diverse community. A very interesting aspect is the relatively low proportion of housewives. Only 11.5 percent of the overall group performed house duties prior to their expulsion from Austria. Some 23 percent attended a primary or a high school in 1938/39. One person was enrolled in a university during the Anschluss. Tradespeople formed the largest professional group, amounting to
3.1 A Doomed Era: Fin-de-siècle Vienna
The world the refugees came from differed considerably from their new homeland. Of the people in the sample group, 85 percent were born before the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Nearly half (47 percent) were born before the year 1910 and thus had spent at least their childhood in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Those people were educated in a country historian William Johnston has labelled as a âmelting pot of styles and ideasâ and they consequently grew up during a time he described as a âgolden age of cultural exchange.â7 The Austro-Hungarian state was a unique political construct that had grown out of the centuries-long expansion of the imperial Habsburg family into Eastern and Central Europe. From the year 1867, it consisted of two almost sovereign states. The western part of the monarchy (known to bureaucrats as Cisleithania) hosted 28 million people. It stretched from the Swiss to the Russian borders and was governed from the capital city of Vienna. The other part of the empire, the kingdom of Hungary with its capital city of Budapest, encompassed almost 21 million people.8
In contrast to most of the other major states of Europe at that time, the Habsburg monarchy was by no means an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. The country was home to a wide variety of different races, cultures, and languages, including German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Jewish (Hebrew and Yiddish).9 Both capitals attracted people from every corner of the empire and consequently grew into metropolises of great diversity. There is no doubt, as William Johnston claims, that âboth Vienna and Budapest owed their creativity in part to unheard-of possibilities of cultural transfer,â fostering an
The rapid growth of the city and its opulent architectural and cultural development have often dominated the historical research agendas for fin-de-siècle Vienna, which have been more or less exclusively concerned with the culture of the elites and were dominated by discussions about the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes, projecting an embellished image of Vienna 1900 as an icon of an innovative multiculturalism.
This picture, however, reflected only a certain part of the cityâs life. Vienna was also a place of extreme disparities between the social classes and of spatial and cultural segregation, as well as of nascent antisemitism, race riots, and populist mass politics.13 There was also another âtypicalâ Vienna, located in the highly industrialized outer suburbs far beyond the RingstraÃe. This was a place of poverty, of ethnic and social unrest, but it was also the birthplace of lively working-class cultures. Hundreds of thousands of people were crammed together in the hopelessly congested, infamous Zinshäuser (tenement blocks) in the cityâs working-class districts, hidden behind a facade of impressive beauty that suggests a homogeneous urban fabric inspired by the classical architectural standards of the RingstraÃe.14 As studies of the living and housing conditions in fin-de-siècle Vienna indicate, it was common for six or even more people to share a single-bedroom apartment.15 Many of those
While almost all of the people analysed in this this book did not belong to the working class and thus were obviously not severely affected by the developments in the industrialized working-class suburbs, the horrible living conditions shaped the lives of many others with a less fortunate upbringing. Some of them would later become crucial for the development of the country. Besides the many leading social democrats in Austriaâs First Republic who used their experiences of the abject poverty after the end of the First World War to develop the worldâs largest public housing campaign, the poverty and injustice of the Viennese working-class life had also ultimately shaped the thoughts and the ideology of the young Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna between 1907 and 1913 in miserable conditions.17
Despite the sheer poverty of large parts of the population, the booming metropolis offered ample economic opportunities for migrants. There are countless stories of migrants from rural parts of the empire who succeeded economically in Vienna and eventually climbed up the social ladder. Among them were Jews from Moravia, Bohemia, Hungary, Slavonia, Galicia, and the Bukovina, many of whom assimilated very quickly into the Viennese culture and the German language. Some of them eventually managed to establish successful companies in Vienna, and subsequently rose to middle- and upper-middle-class status.18 As research on Jewish life in Vienna shows, 57 percent of the Viennese Maturanten, the cityâs high school/grammar school graduates, were Jews from the eastern and northern provinces of the empire.19
Many members of this bookâs sample group can be located within this environment. A very large proportion of them were descendants of Jewish migrants from different parts of Eastern Europe, predominantly Galicia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bohemia. More than 46 percent of the members of the group
Culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna flourished, not least because the sons and daughters of assimilated Jewish migrant incomers turned their interest to the arts or literature âas an alternative to more mundane careers.â22 Having benefited from a rigorous secondary education, more than a few secularized Jews aspired to distinguish themselves through intellectual or literary innovation. World-famous intellectuals and artists of Jewish background, such as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus, Arnold Schönberg, Arthur Schnitzler, and Theodor Herzl, pursued embattled careers in a city increasingly known for its antisemitism23 and thus contributed to making the city a âsparkling source of new ideas.â24 Education was one of the core values of the Austrian liberal middle and upper classes. For many it was an important status symbol.25 A great number of the Jewish migrants who had climbed up the social ladder after their arrival in the metropolis agreed with that view and subsequently emphasized the education of their sons and daughters. More than one-third of the students of the prestigious Viennese Gymnasien (grammar schools/high schools) had a Jewish family background, although Jews accounted for only 10 percent of the population.26 The predominantly Jewish members of our sample group, of whom 88.5 percent enjoyed the luxury of a sound secondary education, also highlight this bigger picture.
As the life stories of the members of the sample group who were educated in fin-de-siècle Vienna show, almost all of them were affected by the cultural development of the Wiener Moderne. Modern architecture and design, the fine arts, literature, and Viennaâs musical institutions, such as the Vienna Opera or the Burgtheater dominated their childhood memories. In interviews, letters, or autobiographical depictions, many of them even recalled having seen, having talked to, or even having been educated by some of the great cultural figures of that time. Gertrude Langer, for example, who fled to Brisbane, where she subsequently started a career as an art historian and newspaper art critic, recalled in an interview being educated in school by the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka: âOskar Kokoschka, can you imagine? She [her principal in high school] had a talent to engage geniuses in the school.â31 Langer also recalled in
3.2
After the First World War, Vienna experienced dramatic changes. With the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire, the metropolis of more than two million people lost its position as an economic, cultural, and administrative hub of a major European empire and became instead the oversized capital of a small state of only six million inhabitants. Many Austrians had no trust in the survival capabilities of the young republic and thus favoured the incorporation of their country into Germany, at least until Hitler took power in 1933,37 when many Social Democrats and Catholic Conservatives began to distance themselves from this idea.38 Economically, the country, and particularly its bloated capital city, experienced times of hardship and structural crises. As studies show, the Austrian economy had massive problems with the transition from a major empire to a small country and ultimately performed worse than most of its eastern neighbours.39
Austria was the rump of a former empire. Beggars in the streets were common. The former middle class was impoverished by inflation and shareholding rendered valueless through a variety of reasons. Most people had aunts or other relatives needing help. Tante [aunt] Lisaâs flat in the Maysedergasse looked onto the Albertina [a museum in the Innere Stadt of Vienna], but she lived on cigarettes and coffee.42
The Austrians were very badly off during the war and the aftermath of the war. [â¦] Of course, after the war there was great trouble and unemployment and all sorts of things. [â¦] I never knew poverty but, whether you were rich or poor, there just wasnât anything. [â¦] after the war that was a bad period, very, very bad after the war. That was the time when countries like Sweden and Holland and Switzerland invited Austrian children to come to them as their guests and fed them for several months and clothed them.44
The family was middle class. Her father was a lawyer, who at one time ran a publishing company [â¦]. However, it wasnât an easy time. Austria was struggling economically, politically and socially to come to terms with its post-empire situation. Hanny has told us it was a frenetic, hedonistic time, with trappings of wealth and glamour, but very little substance. The fortunes of the Kolm family [Exinerâs maiden name] reflected this. We know of gambling, numerous affairs, failed businesses and decline of the familyâs finances.48
It seems obvious that during the volatile years between 1918 and 1938, politics, and economic and social crises hindered activities and investment in the fields of art, literature, and culture. Cultural life, which had occupied a dominant position in fin-de-siècle Vienna, lost importance in the public mind. Private philanthropists had less money to invest in culture and the arts and state subsidies for the arts were at an all-time low during the 1920s.49 Museums and archives had to downsize or merge in order to save money, and the gloomy financial conditions of the young republic even forced the government to sell parts of its art collections to back the currency.50
Politically, the young republic was divided. A constructive cooperation of the three major parties, the leftist Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (Social Democratic Workerâs Party), the Catholic-conservative Christlichsoziale Partei (Christian Social Party) and the German-nationalist GroÃdeutsche Volkspartei (Greater German Peopleâs Party) lasted for only one year.58 Despite their very
Ideologically, most of the members of the sample group identified themselves as supporters of the Social Democratic Party. This reflects the general trend that âa majority of middle-class Jews in Vienna voted for the Marxist, working-class Social Democratic Party, which viewed both religion and nationalism with disfavour.â62 As historian Harriet Pass Freidenreich described, âThe upsurge of right-wing antisemitism and the demise of Liberalism decisively shaped Jewish voting patterns in interwar Vienna.â63 Since the political landscape of Austriaâs First Republic was dominated by political parties that were at least influenced by antisemitic ideas, Jewish voters did not have much choice in their voting decisions. The liberal bloc, which had once dominated late 19th century politics in the western part of the monarchy, was in the process of disappearing or collaborating with German nationalists, and because of their radical clerical Catholic mindset, the Christian Socials held little electoral appeal
Younger members of the sample group were mainly influenced by the political stance of their parents. In a retrospective and public interview, Marie Bergel briefly described her own process of shifting toward socialism: âI had become a socialist after the war. My family was very much socialist. During the war they bought anti-war literature.â71 Hans Eisler was in a very similar situation. His
Even though a majority of the members of the Jewish assimilated or liberal urban middle class were sympathizers of the Social Democratic Party, there were, of course, exceptions. As Harriet Pass Freidenreich showed in her study about Jewish politics in interwar Vienna, there was a âsmall group of wealthy bankers and industrialists who gave their financial backing to the conservative Christian Social Party,â probably âout of rational business reasons,â as she puts it.74 In his 1997 memoirs that were intended for publication, Henry Teltscher describes his father as someone who would fit into that pattern very well: âPapa worked long hours [â¦] but came home for lunch every day, driven forward and backward by the ama [his fatherâs company] chauffeur. He seemed to have great troubles with the trade unions, which no doubt must have been responsible for his rather right-wing political stance.â75
The three non-Jewish members of the sample group were all politically committed, however, in different political directions. While the adolescent Paul Herzfeld was a member of the clerical organization Catholic Action and a volunteer soldier for the Austrian Ständestaat,76 Gerhard Felser, who had made a decent living as an accountant, belonged to the conservative camp, serving as a consultant for the Viennese state police during the 1930s.77 Working-class Grete Vanry, on the other hand, became a member of the Communist Party and as such was involved in political actions against the clerical Ständestaat regime, which even resulted in her imprisonment in 1936.78
The ideological and social split between rural, conservative Austria and its capital city, which diverged from the rest of the country in many different spheres of life, increased during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which complicated the development of a distinctive Austrian identity.81 Since the new republic was formed only from a few, predominantly German-speaking, crown countries of the former Habsburg Empire, there was much soul-searching about the nature of the state and the nation and, consequently, âthere was no consensus about what it meant to be a nationalist Austrian or what the Austrian nation state should be like.â82 Together with the countryâs reduced political importance and its crisis-ridden economy, this resulted in notions of inferiority in a world that had radically changed83 and a lack of faith in the future of their country which becomes evident in many of the refugeesâ depictions. âVienna started to become a village after the war. You could see the narrowness [â¦]. Only the Wasserkopf [hydrocephalus] of the empire remained,â Marie Bergel recalled in an interview.84 She developed a passion for English culture, as she described: âWe looked up to everything that was English in âLittle Austriaâ.â85 Many other members of the sample group also recalled being drawn to either France or England. Ernest Bowen, who fled Austria in 1938, was strongly attached to the English culture, as his wife later wrote: âErnest was sent to England annually and has many friends there. England was his chosen land.â86 Henry Teltscher, who left Austria as a schoolboy and went to
3.3 âMany Left, Of Course Many Leftâ: The Austrian Ständestaat Remembered by the Refugees
many of our customers had lost their jobs. [â¦] My family owned a two-story house built by my father. He wanted to build a third floor on his building during the late 1920s. That, however, was not possible because of the bad economic development. The economy went back and back and back [â¦]. Our business was mainly built upon time payment [payment in instalments] and my father financed it by issuing promissory notes and that brought him more and more into troubles. [â¦] In other words, what happened is that through the unemployment a lot of people lost their jobs and therefore could not meet their payments. My father was forced into receivership.95
The lack of consumer spending in the cities soon affected the rural economies and led to various protests and revolts all over the country. The Christian Socials, who had governed the country continuously since 1920, came under increasing pressure and consequently became more radicalized. From October 1932, the Christian Social party leader Engelbert Dollfuss and his successor Kurt Schuschnigg began to rule the country without the approbation of the parliament by using an emergency decree, a relic from the last war year.96 This led to a gradual reduction in democratic rights, social benefits, andâultimatelyâto
1934 was a fateful year for Austria. After a series of political provocations, the socialists and the Schutzbund talked revolt. The army moved in artillery formations and started bombarding the Karl-Marx-Hof. There was sporadic fighting in a couple of country towns. Since the Karl-Marx-Hof was only some 3 km from our house, we could, of course, hear the bombardment very clearly.98
Just before Hitler came in, I was third member of the Viennese staff. In this position, naturally, I was very exposed to political hatred, and in 1934, after two revolutions, one of the Nazis, and the other of the Communists, both times I volunteered for service in the Government Forces; I was only 15 1/2, but I was taken and, on both times, I was at the firing line.102
It is unclear whether his memories correspond to reality, since generally no 15-year-old youths were sent on combat missions, however, we can see how present the 1934 events were in Herzfeldâs memories. âAlthough the uprising lasted only four days, the consequences for Austria and its cultural life were disastrous,â according to historian John Warren, who started his description of cultural development in post-1934 Vienna with these words.103 The years that followed brought ruthless actions against the enemies of the authoritarian Catholic regime, leading to various raids and arrests of members of the Socialist, Communist and National Socialist Parties, as well as to a wave of emigration of political opponents to the Czech Republic, the Soviet Union, andâin the case of Nazi Party membersâto Nazi Germany.104 As an active member of the Communist underground movement, Grete Vanry was personally affected by the governmental actions. In 1936, she was arrested after the police
Culturally, the six-year reign of the Ständestaat regime proved to be âa complicated and unhappy period of Viennese history,â106 which brought recessions in many sectors. The closing down of 72 libraries and the introduction of âblacklistsâ indicating banned works, including those by authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Bertha von Suttner, and Hugo Bettauer,107 set the agenda for the corporate stateâs conservative cultural policy. Another major blow was the shutting down of left-wing newspapers and magazines, many of which had been an essential source of income for writers. Because of this situation and the closing down of the German market for many Austrian writers, after the Nazi takeover in 1933, the formerly thriving Viennese literary scene was severely affected. Paul Hirsch, who had made a name for himself as an Expressionist writer between 1910 and the 1920s as Paul Hatvani, recalled years after his escape: âAfter fascism came to power [in Nazi Germany, and in the Austrian Ständestaat], it was increasingly difficult for me to publish my work. And after a while I finally stopped my efforts to find a publisher.â108 In one of his unpublished letters from the 1930s, he further claimed that the political situation made it âimpossible for many Austrian writers to pursue their usual activities.â109 In addition to the oppression in the literary market, the government also banned socialist cultural associations. Jews had been involved in many of these. Altogether, the atmosphere at the remaining cultural events, such as the Salzburg Festival, became increasingly and openly narrow, xenophobic, and antisemitic.110
As far as I am concerned, I try to carve out a miserable existence, and get older during these horrible monotonous times. [â¦] You are very lucky not to have anything to do any more with Central Europe. There is nothing left; neither magazines, nor painters, not even coffee houses that offer discussions.112
3.4 Jewish Life
Jewish life in interwar Austria was largely focused on Vienna. In 1934, some 91 percent of all Austrian Jews lived in Vienna.113 The other eight states of Austria contained only 15,000 Jews in total. Historian Steven Beller, one of the foremost experts on Jewish life in Vienna, noted in a 2007 speech in the Viennese city hall that âJewish history up until very recently was not mentioned in descriptions of Viennaâs fin-de-siècle and interwar culture.â114 This picture has changed during the past decade. A considerable number of publications recognize the
The approximately 180,000 Viennese who were regarded as Jewish during the interwar period formed a very heterogeneous group, ranging from self-professed Jews to converts, from native Yiddish speakers to secular Viennese Jews, regardless of their degree of Jewish self-identification.117 They also formed an extremely heterogeneous group in terms of their social status, varying significantly with respect to wealth, culture, religion, and politics, as well as region of origin.118 Historian Harriet Pass Freidenreich, who analysed Jewish politics in interwar Vienna, characterized the groupâs social composition thus: âAlthough considerable Jewish poverty existed in Vienna, most Jews belonged to the lower middle-class, while a significant minority can be classified as solidly middle or upper middle-class. Unlike the Viennese population as a whole, few Jews were workers.â119 By economic bracket, they ranged from a tiny aristocratic elite of ennobled bankers and industrialists to middle-class businessmen and professionals to destitute Galician refugees.120 An analysis of data derived from Viennese communal taxes reveals that among those persons who were listed as Jews and could afford to pay taxes, roughly 40 percent were engaged in commerce, 10 percent were industrialists or artisans, 30 percent were salaried employees or wage earners, 10 percent belonged to the professional class, while the rest were retired or had other sources of income.121 Their main connecting element, however, was the fact that the National Socialist
The Jewish community in Vienna grew rapidly during the second half of the 19th century. A considerable proportion of the Jews in interwar Vienna had their roots in the adjacent regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and western Hungary. Like in Vienna, political emancipation and linguistic assimilation had become cornerstones of Jewish self-awareness in these regions.123 Many liberal Jews had assimilated themselves into the German culture and language, as it was the dominant culture in the western part of the Habsburg Empire.124 They identified themselves as Jewish by religion and German by nationality125 and established themselves as a vital part of the Viennese bourgeoisie, as historian Björn Siegel states.126 Furthermore, Jews can be seen as the âinitiators of a European culture,â as historian Michael Gehler noted.127 Subsequently, they not only underwent but also shaped sociocultural socialization and acculturalization processes, which affected their legal status, their drive for education, their political behaviour, their family life, their empirical worldview, their values, and their general behaviour.128 Members of the liberal Jewish middle and upper classes developed a liberal Weltanschauung that placed very high value on education and mobility. As a result, their investment in culture, as a tool to shape the contours of their new self-identification as German-speaking Austrians, was particularly strong.129
I wanted to investigate if anything Jewish touches me. So, I went to the ghetto. And all I saw were these horrible, dilapidated houses where the paint was missing. [â¦] Oversized women in slippers moving around [â¦] what I never can forget, it did not anything [sic] to find that I had anything to do with it. [â¦] It was definitely a ghetto, a little township by its own. It was shabby. [â¦] that put me off more and more of all Orthodox belief.133
The assimilated and liberal faction, as well as their conservative and Orthodox counterparts, were geographically dispersed in the city. While members of the first group tended to live in the more prestigious Viennese districts, or the city centre, and lived scattered across the city, members of the latter moved to Viennaâs 21st district or its 2nd district, which offered the infrastructure to live an Orthodox Jewish life. The 2nd district even acquired the nickname Mazzeinselâreferencing the unleavened bread eaten during Passoverâbecause of its high share of approximately 60,000 Jewish residents.
[It] played no role whatsoever. I had an extremely liberated education and was just allowed to do what I liked and I just searched for myself. At one stage, I was interested in Catholicism, then I was interested in Protestantism, then I was interested in Buddhism. [â¦] My father did not
sort of believe in bringing us up that way. [â¦] I remember I was twice in a templeâto a marriage, thatâs all. Actually, I was always searching for all sorts of beliefs and then in the end I ended up with my own philosophy. But I don't believe in all that business of race, religion, and all that. I believe weâre all people. I donât believe in that rubbish.134
Joan Lynn, who came to Australia as a four-year-old girl, recalled how her father brought her and her sister up: âWe do not believe in âismsâ [Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism]. We learned that from my father.â135 Henry Teltscher draws a similar picture of his familyâs religious attitudes: âBoth my parents had no interest in religion whatsoever and never set foot inside a synagogue while I knew them. Most of their circle of friends were (non-religious) Jews.â136 He further continued: âWe celebrated all the Christian Holidaysâat least their non-religious componentsâEaster, with coloured eggs hidden in the garden. [â¦] On the 4th of December St. Nikolo was celebrated [â¦]. The main interest centred on Christmas, with fairly substantial gifts for everyone.â137 Viola Winkler, who became a teacher, entrepreneur, and artist in Sydney after her escape, similarly recalled in an interview for the Shoa Foundation Institute: âMy parents did not practice religion.â138 Marie Bergel also mentioned: âMy family was not religious. I never went to the Mass.â139 The depictions of Elisabeth Ziegler also indicate the lack of religious identification: âMy father was an atheist; my mother was a believer; to make my mother happy, we went to the synagogue, but had no Jewish education at home because my parents did not know themselves.â140 Sue Copolov remembers a similar situation: âMy family was not religious. My mother was a little bit, but my father not! It was normal for us to have a Christmas tree and Nikolofeiern.â141 Reinhold Eckfeld, who went to Australia as an internee aboard the troopship hmt Dunera, described in an interview with the author how his father distanced himself from the Jewish religion after coming to Vienna: âReligion did not play an important role in
In the sample group, 19.5 percent of the members claimed to be baptized as Catholic or Protestant and mentioned that they had subsequently lost their connections to the Jewish faith. As Ron Exiner, son of Hanny Exiner, stated: âHanny was raised in the Protestant faith. Her family was of Jewish origin but converted during the 19th century.â144 Annemarie Mutton, who was baptized Lutheran as a child, recalled: âMy parents were agnostics. [â¦] Artificial divisions of race, nationality, religion, class had not been a conscious factor [â¦]. To ask why some were one or the other of religion never occurred to me.â145
My parents were religious; they went into a synagogue most Saturdays. It was the Central Synagogue in Vienna. [â¦] It was an Orthodox synagogue, Feuchtwanger was the rabbi. It was close to the Hohenmarkt. [â¦] I started Jewish education when I was eight. I also joined the Jewish Club Blau-Weià [Zionist youth movement] when I was 11. I had a Bar Mitzvah and learned Hebrew.147
Nearly every Jew knew each other. There were 25,000 Jews in Floridsdorf. Everything was controlled by the Kultusgemeinde. You had to pay 10 percent of your income tax to the Gemeinde, everyone had to pay, it was not voluntary. My parental grandmother [â¦] was married to an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. [â¦] My parents were members of the synagogue, but they were no strong believers.148
To my knowledge there were only two other Jewish families in Wieselburgâthe local draper and the owner of a shoe store. I was certainly the only Jewish pupil in my class. We received religious instructions from Rabbi Solomon Fried who came to us once a fortnight on his bicycle.149
Jewish tradition was never a priority in our household as Ilse [the nanny] was Catholic. Apart from the High Holidays and Passover, which were celebrated in my grandmotherâs home, we did not observe anything. We even had a Christmas tree and at Easter looked for coloured eggs in our garden.150
A brief depiction of Jewish life in Austria also has to include the prominent antisemitism in Austria during the pre- and interwar years.151 As historian Peter Pulzer put it: âIf any city in the world may claim to be the cradle of
Orthodox Jewish migrants were the most affected by the antisemitic climate in interwar Austria. Due to the very heterogeneous structure of the Jewish community, there were quite diverse reactions to the antisemitic activities. Many members of the assimilated Jewish majority tried to deny the antisemitic climate of their environment by âtrusting in the protection guaranteed in the constitution and by furthering their assimilation process at all costs,â as historian Thomas Albrich wrote.156 Since most of the members of the sample group belonged to the liberal or assimilated groups of the Jewish community, which largely tried to deny or downplay the existence of antisemitism, descriptions of antisemitism prior to the Anschluss were rather scarce in their memories. Members of the Orthodox Jewish community would presumably have had entirely different memories of that time and, therefore, different stories to tell. One of those members of the sample group who explicitly remembered antisemitic incidents before the Anschluss was Hans Eisler, who came from a Zionist
Antisemitism, in its different forms, was present in all layers of the society. The heterogeneous Jewish population reacted differently to the growing threat of racial German nationalism and antisemitism. As historian Thomas Albrich wrote, the majority of liberal and assimilated Jews trusted in the protection of the Austrian constitution and tried to answer the increasing antisemitism by further assimilating and integrating into the Austrian majority population âwithout acquiring any further minority rights.â160 This was reflected by, amongst other things, very high religious conversion rates during the 1920s and 1930s.
3.5 Family Background
Their parental upbringing played a dominant role in the refugeesâ memoirs. The childhood and youth of the members of the sample group was a defining period, when they learned how to move within their cultural and social contexts, or as historian Simone Lässig puts it, âhow to recognize the respective cultural keyboard and how to easily and safely operate it.â161
As mentioned above, almost all of the members of the sample group enjoyed a privileged upbringing and school education which exceeded the Austrian average. Some 34.6 percent identified their family background as upper middle class. More than 46 percent claimed to originate from a middle-class family and only 19.3 percent regarded themselves as either working class or lower middle class. The families described in many of the individual memories largely matched the picture that research about Jewish life in Austria has drawn of general values of assimilated, liberal Jewish families at that time. Refugees frequently described their parents as liberal and open-minded, with a particular emphasis on culture, arts, and education.
The bourgeoisie, and particularly the members of the Jewish upper-middle class placed high value upon educating their children. This was also true for their daughters.162 This started already with early childhood education. Almost half of the members of the group mentioned that their parents had hired a governess to be engaged in the education of their children. Hiring governesses, and domestic servants in general, was very common among Viennese middle-class families during the interwar years. Since labour was comparatively cheap, even families who were not so well endowed financially were able to hire domestic staff.163 In none of the cases were the governesses of the members of the sample group Jewish. Some refugees mentioned that their governesses were even very religious and brought their charges in contact with Catholic ideas and spiritual beliefs. By and large, the refugees mentioned three types of governesses that were hired by their parents:
- 1.governesses from Bohemia or Moravia;
- 2.Mädchen vom Land (women who came from provincial Austria);
- 3.governesses from France or Switzerland (French-speaking).
We had a very sheltered childhood. My parents were well-off and they gave us a very good education [â¦]. From the very beginning on I had this sort of very democratic outlook, also my father [â¦]. He always said to me [â¦] you do not choose your parents or your country [â¦] you just happen to be born into it and then you have to make something out of that. [â¦] I had, from both parents actually, nothing but encouragement and whatever I wanted to do I was allowed to do.167
My family was upper middle class. I had a very liberal upbringing. I was never forced to do something. For example, when I did not want to go to a French Kindergarten, my father said to my mother âdo not force her.â When I was older, my parents and I spent many hours in the Kunsthistorische Museum [museum of art history].168
He had four sisters. They were wealthy people. They lived a good life for those days and enjoyed upper-middle-class status. The family had a big house in the city and Heinrich [Richard Tandlerâs father] threw legendary high-society parties there. He was known as the âSilberkönigâ [silver king].171
She described her own youth during the 1930s in the same way: âI remember we had a housekeeper. She went to church and took us with herâshe was âvom Landâ [from the countryside]. We had a beautiful garden and a pool. We had a nice childhood. Very few children had a pool.â172 The early life of the civil engineer Gustav Bratspies, who fled to Melbourne, was described in a not dissimilar manner by one of his Australian relatives after his death: âHerbert [Gustavâs son] was born into a very comfortable middle-class family in Vienna. [â¦] Lilly [Gustavâs wife] was at home looking after Herbert.â173 As was the childhood of Kurt Selby: âHe was an only child. He had a good childhood and was very attached to his parents. Particularly to his mother. They lived a good and sheltered life,â his daughter recalled in a later interview.174 Helen Roberts also described her upper-middle-class family as âvery liberal.â She stressed that her father, with whom she had a âspecial relationship,â had a great influence on her.175
My grandmother lived with us and she was always at home when we came from school. My family was unusual. My father was 30 years older than my mother. He was a pensioner and my mother ran a Kindergarten. [â¦] I always missed what I call a normal home, but I had also lots of opportunities such as skiing, dance education, travelling.179
Her family certainly was not well endowed financially. The family was of peasant stock. Coming from the countryside with practically no money before she was born, her father Ullrich Wetzelsberger had been a millerâs assistant. In Vienna, he took a low paid job in the bank and learned stenography. Later, he opened up a coffee shop with his wife Maria. As the coffee shop was not prosperous, Grete had to leave school early to earn a living.184
Her husband Frank Vanry recalled in his memoirs: â[after her fatherâs death] Grete had to help out in her motherâs coffee shop located close to the Franz-Josephs Bahnhof [a train station in Vienna]. Besides that job she worked as a dairymaid, delivering bottles of milk very early in the morning.â185
3.6 Hobbies and Leisure
Interwar and fin-de-siècle Vienna offered manifold opportunities to pursue hobbies and leisure activities. Since these were highly individualized, this section will offer a snapshot of the most frequently mentioned activities and present them as the members of the sample group recalled them. This will ultimately lead us on a grand tour of the most common leisure activities enjoyed by the middle class in interwar Austria. Interestingly, many members of the sample group had similar interests. As we will see, music and the arts, hiking, skiing, travelling, but also more down-to-earth activities such as mushrooming, were very much at the top of their list of preferred leisure activities.
Music and the arts played a dominant role in the lives of the refugees and can be seen as a defining characteristic of their interwar cultural capital. The intellectual and aesthetic atmosphere in interwar Vienna was indeed pervasive and Viennaâs cultural offerings and its musica viva (classical music) occupied âan unforgettable place in the memories of those who lived there.â186 Its cultural programme was rather unique and abundant despite the fact that postwar Vienna may not have been able to compete with its earlier Habsburg past, neither strategically nor in terms of social glamour. It nevertheless remained
But I remember, for instance, when I was five years old I was taken already for the first time to the opera house and my first experience of the opera house was seeing Coppelia. [â¦] It was marvelous. Then of course when we were older we went a lot to the theater, to the opera house and to concerts.192
He loved music. I remember he went to some of the world premieres of Richard Strauss operas and was enthused over them. My parents
frequently went to the theatre and to exhibitions. He hated noise and for that reason vetoed against the acquisition of a radio. [â¦] He did, however, acquire a crystal radio set and listened to broadcasts of concerts and sometimes I was invited to listen with him, which involved one of the two earpieces being turned inside out and I had to sit next to him and press my ear against the earphone. That was how I acquired my first taste for music.193
Music was also essential for the writer Paul Hirsch. In a letter, he gave insights into his hobbies during the interwar years. He wrote: âBut what was really of interest to us were other, almost impersonal things, it was the music, and especially Gustav Mahler.â194 Sylvia Cherny, who grew up in rural Lower Austria, remembered that her father, because of a lack of cultural offerings in his hometown, had organized private musical events: âMy brother and I took fortnightly piano lessons in St. Pölten. [â¦] Our father set great store by music appreciation: He played the violin and held chamber music evenings once a week.â195
One of the more recent contemporary artistic phenomena in Vienna during the 1920s and early 1930s was Free Dance. After World War I, Vienna became a crossroads uniting East and West, with substantial knowledge transfers taking place between Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna.196 Free Dance flourished and was performed in a number of different settings, from intimate variety shows and cabaret theatres to established music venues, such as the Konzerthaus.197 Prominent dancers of world fame, such as Rosalia Chladek, Grete Wiesenthal, and Gertrud Bodenwieser, who later fled to Australia, popularized Free Dance in Vienna and embodied the âinternationalism and interdisciplinary that drove the phenomenon as a whole.â198 In this particular field of the art, mainly well-connected middle-class working women participated in the culture of innovation, as so-called Gestalterinnen.199 They had many
Another aspect of Viennaâs cultural scene during the interwar years was an âexplosion of interest in sports,â as historian William Bowman puts it.203 Skiing and hiking were particularly popular activities, especially among the Viennese urban middle class.204 Both activities feature prominently in the refugeesâ memories and about half of the members of the sample group recalled having skied in Austria.205 The Austrian schooling system was subject to radical reforms during the interwar years. Physical education gained much more importance in the curricula. As part of the growing importance of physical activities, ski courses were introduced in many Austrian schools, which opened the formerly elitist sport up to broader social strata.206 Helen Roberts later recalled having participated in such a school event: âI went skiing. In fact, in school we had ski lessons, but I was a very bad skier.â207 Charles William Anton, who arrived in Australia in 1938 aged 22, was among those who
Skiing and hiking were also common family activities. Children usually practiced skiing very early, as Henry Teltscher recalled: âIn winter, we also went skiing regularly, by taking the tram to the terminus at Grinzing or Sievering and walking up to the slopes in the Vienna woods. [â¦] We even put on our skis in the garden and practiced walking. [â¦] Ski tows, of course, were unheard of in those days.â212 A relative of Gustav Bratspies later described that his family enjoyed their âholidays in the beautiful Austrian Alps skiing and hiking.â213 Gertrude Langer also had glowing memories of the skiing and hiking trips with her family: âI did a lot of sport, skiing and things like that. Father never let a Sunday pass without taking his two little girls somewhere. It was marvelous. [â¦] When I just practically started walking a bit stronger, he took me to high mountains and, when I got tired, brought me home on his back, you know.â214 Marie Bergel even recalled travelling to Switzerland for their ski vacations.215
There were a lot of different organizations for city dwellers that supported hiking and skiing activities in the countryside. From the 1870s, the German
One of my leaders told me that if he [his history teacher] was interested I should invite him as an instructor. So, I did so. He [the teacher] asked me about the movement and I told him it was Austrian. I said âWe are only Anti-Nazi.â He asked whether we would take Jews. I said âNo.â Later it was disclosed to me that he was a member of the Socialist Party and a Jew.223
3.7 Education
Most of this bookâs protagonists who were able to finish their schooling or university education before the Anschluss frequently recalled the high quality of education they had received in Vienna. As we will see, many of them were proud of their education and later in Australia highlighted the high quality of their institutionalized cultural capital. As mentioned above, the members of the sample group generally enjoyed a high level of education. In contrast to large parts of the Austrian population, almost one-third (seven out of 26) of this bookâs protagonists had earned a university degree. In 1932, only 0.4 percent of the overall Austrian population had done so.224 Even more members of the sample group (46.2 percent) had earned a grammar school or high school diploma.
I donât think there was any doubt which secondary school I would like to go to. Non-state schools were almost non-existent in Austria and there was the choice between a Gymnasium (high school), Realschule (technical school), and Realgymnasium (a hybrid of the other two). The bg19, the Döblinger Bundesgymnasium, I think had a very good reputation and it was about 10 minutesâ walk from home and thatâs where I went to. [â¦] the system certainly provided very broad and, I think, on the whole, good education.228
I went to a private school housed in an apartment [â¦]. They [her parents] made a big mistake. [The school provided only] very little education. There was only one teacher and she was a Nazi. The class consisted of 10 to 12 children of different ages, all of us hated the teacher. [â¦] With 9 years, I switched to public school. [â¦] I was very happy there.229
I was a very good pupil. My teachers recommended me to attend a Gymnasium, not a Bürgerschule. After a while I had to leave Gymnasium. [â¦] My father wanted me to learn a trade. He said that there were thousands of professional people (lawyers, doctors, architects) who were unemployed. So I started an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker in another company at the age of 16. I worked five days and went to school one day per week. [â¦] My father told me: âIf I would put you in my own factory you would learn nothing, because you would do nothing.â After the apprenticeship I went to the Handelsakademie [commercial high school] and made up my Matura.230
From about 1900, middle-class and upper-middle-class women increasingly enjoyed the benefits of education. Many biographical sources show that a growing segment of the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie had âquite positive attitudes toward higher education for womenâ and placed âhigh value upon educating their daughters.â231 We can also see this development among the members of our sample group. Viola Winkler described her school education at the Bundeslehranstalt für Textilindustrie, a specialized high school that focused on industrial textile design. The school had prepared her very well for her future career as textile designer, as she recalled: âI went to the Hauptschule and to the Gymnasium afterwards. I went to an Oberstufe [last four years of a high school] for girls with a special focus on textile designâI finished it with a special diploma in arts design.â232 Ernest Bowen, whose parents wanted him to be prepared to take over the family-run textile factory, had attended a commercial high school, as his granddaughter remembered: âMy grandfather attended a Montessori Kindergarten, which reflected my grandfatherâs social worldview. [â¦] Afterwards, he attended a âregularâ school and later on he went
I went to a Gymnasium in Viennaâs 18th district. The girls at school laughed at me. Whenever a teacher entered and I had to introduce myself, I stood up, straight, and with a clear voice said my name, age, and last school. Vienna was free from the military rigour with which I had been trained since entering the St. Anna lyceum in Munich. [â¦] Girls in school in Munich were years behind those I now encountered. Their clothes were fashionable. I met no one who had been as protected as I had been.237
When I was 10 years old, I was enrolled in a lyceum in Vienna and we rented an apartment in Hietzing [a suburb of Vienna]. My father began commuting between Kemmelbach and Vienna [90 km away] which proved to be too strenuous and the following year, in 1936, we returned to Wieselburg where I did the second-year high school by correspondence. [â¦] The school years 1936â1937 were very stressful for me since I attended morning classes in Wieselburg, followed by a lunch, an hour-long walk and homework for both schools in Vienna and Wieselburg, as well as piano practice. [â¦] After each semester, I went to Vienna to sit for exams.238
I went to a private primary school in the Hödlgasse. Then, I came into the Schwarzwaldschule. Schwarzwald was very, very well known. She was the first woman that had short hair. I had very famous teachers, such as Kokoschka, Schönberg, Ernst Wagner. Adolf Loos was my idol.243
As the coffee shop [her fatherâs business] was not prosperous, Grete had to leave school early to earn a living. Though she had no particular inclination for that kind of work, she was apprenticed as a milliner in a small ladiesâ hat factory. [â¦] On advice of a friend, she attended the Volkshochschule at Ottakring, an outer suburb of Vienna. Here, she spent her free time avidly studying music and literature. A political consciousness was also formed by attending special courses on political economy.244
Although antisemitism was not institutionalized in Austria until the Anschluss and Jewish students were granted the same rights by law, at least in theory, many members of the sample group reported having experienced antisemitism in their schools. As many different studies on interwar Vienna show,
I went to a local primary school in the 18th district. When I was asked for my religion, and every other child was Catholic, I and another boy were the only ones who were Jewish. I had to attend Jewish religious instructions. That made me differentâbut I wanted to be like my other classmates.247
Sylvia Cherny, who attended a primary school in a rural town in Lower Austria, remembered having experienced similar forms of religious antisemitism that set her apart from the other children in her class: âI went to a primary school in Wieselburg. As the teachers usually stressed, Jews were responsible for the murder of Jesus Christ. As a reaction, all the other students usually turned around and looked at me. This was a very uncomfortable experience.â248
I also see from the annual reports that in the school, as a whole, more than a quarter were Jewish and in my former class more than a third were Jewish (or agnostic and these were Jewish too). [â¦] The teachers were called âMittelschulprofessorenâ and were addressed as âHerr Professorâ [â¦] I have a feeling that about half of them were of Czech origin, not so much by their names (like Janicek or Hruby) but by accent. My class teacher was Anton Müller, a gnomish man and our German teacher. He was one of the most active and unconcealed Nazis among many like-minded colleagues and, unhappily, instead of teaching us German, he spent most of the time spouting Nazi propaganda, or perhaps more correctly pan-Germanic panegyrics. [â¦] Müllerâs greatest sin was, that instead of introducing us to German literature, he talked about the destiny of Germany and the cultural role of âGermanisms.â251
Seven members of the sample group completed a university degree before they fled to Australia. Some of them had benefited from the opening of the universities for female students in 1900.252 All of them later mentioned the high quality of the education they received, which offered them institutionalized cultural capital that they could take with them after their expulsion from Austria. By and large, the members of the sample group tended to choose rather âpracticalâ studies from which they expected a quicker and smother entrance into the labour market and thereafter a better professional position. Consequently, the group consists of two architects, one textile technician, one economist, one chemist, and one student of medicine. Two members of the group were also enrolled in a second study programme, which rather reflected their personal interests. Gerhard Felser studied theatre studies and history at the University of Vienna in addition to his main degree in economics at the University of Economics in Vienna.253 The enthusiastic dancer Hanny Exiner worked on two degrees at the same time. Besides her study of medicine, she was also enrolled in the Academy of Performing Dance of the world-famous dancer and choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser.254
The parents always consulted a little bit with the teachers and the teachers gave a bit of guidance in what the child is gifted and so forth, and it was quite clear to the teachers that I was a very artistic child and that I had to do something with art, either write or study art history, but definitely something to do with art. By the time I was 18 and left school I had made up my mind that I wanted to go to university and study history of art.256
At the time Langer was enrolled, the University of Vienna had established itself as âa leading site of art historical scholarship.â257 Since the appointment of a first lecturer in art history in 1847, 25 Viennese art historians had developed rigorous and âscientificâ activities through the introduction of systematic methods of analysis,258 and formed what later became known as the Vienna School of Art History. Attracting experts and knowledge from all regions of the Habsburg Empire and Germany, the school had already been recognized as âhaving played a crucial role in the development of the discipline.â259 Langer studied with the professor of art history Josef Strzygowski, who tried to change the horizons governing his colleaguesâ understanding by comparing art throughout the course of history in different areas of the world. He has frequently been described as an âearly champion of world art history.â260 His approach left a deep impression on Langer and led her to develop a profound
Gustav Bratspies and Richard Tandler were among those who enjoyed a top-notch architectural education in Vienna, thus acquiring specialized cultural capital. Considering that Vienna was one of the cultural centres of Europe, architectural education in the interwar period was stirred up by dynamic concentrations of avant-garde movements.263 Both were greatly inspired by their teachers. Bratspies studied architecture at the University of Vienna, graduating as a civil engineer and architect.264 After finishing his studies, he made a name for himself as a âpractising architect, constructing buildings and working on railways around Europe,â as his granddaughter later described.265 Richard Tandler, on the other hand, graduated in 1920 from the Kunstgewerbeschule, a technical college known for its modern approaches offering a well-founded theoretical and practical education over a period of three years.266 Before his studies, he learned the craft of silversmithing in his familyâs silverware factory. In June 1933, after having worked as a designer in the family business for 13 years, he set up his own architectural business, specializing in interior design.267 Influenced by his mentor Oskar Strnad, a member of the so-called Wiener Schule der Architektur (Viennese school of architecture), who pursued a modernist approach to architecture, Tandlerâs architectural style was inspired by elements of Viennese modernism. As the Austrian architectural journal Ãsterreichische Kunst noted in 1936, âArchitect Tandler has designed the rooms of the [Viennese] fashion house âEleganceâ with discreet but generous elegance.â268
3.8 Professional Life
In terms of their work, the members of the sample group covered a wide spectrum of different professional positions. One-third of them were salaried employees. Here, again, the range of jobs was diverse. This subgroup consists of an insurance broker, a druggist, a chemist, a lecturer, a salesman in leather goods, a milliner, a textile designer, and a soldier. Self-employed entrepreneurs formed another grouping of the same size, with businesses including a foot care trade agency, a textile factory, a furniture shop, an artificial flower company, an import agency, and two architectural practices, as well as an accounting agency. Ten members of the sample group (38 percent) did not work at the time of their escape. Three of them were either individuals who did not work or homemakers, another seven were university, high school, or primary school students.
In interwar Austria, the members of the sample group had to prevail in a very competitive market that included not only a lack of financial capital and fierce competition but also unfavourable governmental regulations.270 While the interventionist Austrian government âtortured Austrian businessesâ with âunimaginative regulationsâ aimed at balancing the national deficit, thereby forcing many of the countryâs âbest headsâ to leave the country, as historian Günter Bischof described,271 smaller companies, in particular, had to develop innovative plans to keep their business going despite the overall unfavourable economic conditions. Such risky undertakings could be achieved much more easily by small companies which did not need much capital to implement
The resourceful entrepreneur Marie Bergel offers a good example of the importance of adapting her cultural capital and her business plans in order to cope with the challenges of the economic uncertainty during the interwar years. Thus, she can be seen as a typical âGestalterin,â a middle-class working woman within the economy of production and consumption who offers a good example for womenâs active participation in the culture of innovation.275 Born in 1904, Bergel experienced her familyâs financial impoverishment after the First World War. This experience may have fostered her entrepreneurial spirit. Already as an adolescent she was aware of the advantages of being connected to a large international company. She therefore persuaded her reluctant father, who had never been involved in the foot care industry before, to accept an exclusive contract as agent for Scholl Foot Care, a major American corporation. âI went down on my knees and told him: Please, it is an international firm; it is a gift for us. This is what I want to do,â she recalled.276 After her father agreed, she ran the agency as if it was her own business. âIt was my project,â she later proudly stated. Bergel established a network of business relations with her supplier and private clients in Vienna. She maintained good relations with Frank Scholl, who ran the companyâs overseas ventures from its London branch and provided his advice in building up her agency. âThe agency
As John Hearst described, a similar willingness to adopt ideas and adapt existing business plans had made his familyâs cabinetmaking business successful during the crisis years. âMy father managed to establish himself very well,â Hearst later remembered. He introduced some innovative ideas. The introduction of instalment payment plans, as well as the additional establishment of a small factory that produced exclusively for the shop, making it independent from suppliers, were ideas which set the business apart from its competitors. After his fatherâs death in 1935, John Hearst joined the company. He recalled: âIt became quite successful, despite the bad economic conditions.â280 Later in Australia, Hearst would adopt some of those ideas he had seen during his time in Vienna.
The company was led in a very progressive way: To the Böhms it was natural to restrain their lifestyle in order to extend some of the benefits to the employees. Adolf Böhm bought Schrebergärten [small plots of land for agricultural and leisure use] for his workers.282
We gave him a leading position in our firm. In this position he has earned our praises by his practical work of organization and by the excellent designs which he produced for the manufacture of silverwares. [â¦] In 1926 we lost all of our export trade as many foreign countries closed their markets against silverwares, hence our manufacturing programme had to be reshuffled. With this task, we entrusted Mr. Tandler. Again he succeeded in executing it to the best of our satisfaction, thanks to his circumspection and his technical skills. [â¦] He leaves our firm in order to take up an independent position in conformity with his high qualifications.283
Tandlerâs architectural business focused on modern interior and exterior design, inspired by the so-called Wiener Schule der Architektur (Viennese school of architecture). The company made a name for itself. Three years after he had opened his business, an Austrian architectural journal praised his style of design.284
My father had taught my sister a little bit about the business. My sister was very enterprising, she was 19 when he died and she tried to pick up that little business and she made something beautiful out of it. She managed to import French buttons. And that wasnât easy because you had to have an import licence and you had to buy the goods first in France. It was pretty complicated but she managed and she wanted to send me back to school. [â¦] She managed growing this little business up to something that we could live on.287
As these examples show, many of the self-employed entrepreneurs among the members of the sample group had developed innovative business ideas and âunorthodoxâ plans to prevail in the market. Due to the poor economic situation, the lack of capital, and the Schuschnigg regimeâs failed economic policy it was very difficult to be economically successful and, in many cases, businesses had to be innovative to succeed. Some of this bookâs protagonists had developed a strong affinity for innovation and a willingness to adapt ideas to a changing environment. The experiences the members of the sample group had during those years of economic hardship, as this book argues, provided them with ultimate advantages for a new start in a different cultural context after their expulsion.
The majority of the group were employed white collar workers. Some of them even worked for international companies, thus they were able to acquire valuable innovative and international business knowledge and contacts. Their knowledge of foreign languages was in many cases helpful in obtaining one of the rare international jobs. In some cases, the contacts they made with their business partners abroad helped them escape after the Anschluss. The anglophile Charles William Anton managed to get a job at the Austrian branch of the British Sun Insurance Company in Vienna. His job allowed him to improve his English language skills.288 The British company had branches in different parts of the world but focused its business activities on English-speaking areas. There is ample evidence that Anton maintained intense contact with business partners abroad. During the two years with the company, he had gained an excellent command of the English language. His Austrian passport shows that he had travelled to many different European countries during that time.289 After graduating from school, Kurt Selby began to work for the innovative Czechoslovakian leather goods manufacturer Bata. At that time, Bata
The non-Jewish working-class woman Grete Vanry experienced an economic ascent during one of the worst phases of economic development in Austria. After losing her job as a milliner due to the 1929 economic crisis, the Viennese Arbeitsamt (Labor Office) mediated a new position for her in a small workshop that produced ladiesâ hats. The âsmall hat-making business [â¦] became one of the leading ladyâs hat shops in Viennaâ due to her technical skills and the ownerâs expert management.296 It was particularly âher expertise, that stimulated many new ideas in hats which helped to take the business to prosperity,â297 as a friend of hers later stated. Since her employer, who became a personal friend, managed to relocate her business to Australia and took Vanry with her,
Some members of the group, however, did not mention their work experience as being particularly important for their later lives in Australia. Paul Hirsch, who had worked as a chemist for several years after graduating from the University of Vienna, for example, did not tell much about his professional experiences. The same was true for Bruno Bush who had worked as a pharmacist during the 1930s for more than eight years and barely mentioned this fact in a later interview.
3.9 An Inspiring Environment
The tension that was caused by the many contradictions of a country and its capital city in the midst of cultural, ethnic, and economic change left a deep impression on those who grew up or lived there. Almost all of the members of the sample group described Vienna as an inspiring environment which had, in one way or another, affected their later lives in Australia. In his memoirs, Henry Teltscher recalled the importance of his cultural capital. According to him, his Viennese education and values âwere both more significant in shaping my interests and my life in general.â He noted: âMany of my interests and attitudes were formed at an early age and havenât changed a great deal.â298 Interwar Vienna offered a special environment full of contradictions. Even after the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire, the city remained a multicultural metropolis. The glamour and glory of the imperial days were still apparent. Many members of the sample group were born before the empireâs breakdown and thus had experienced life in the monarchy. After the war, Vienna was about to lose its political and economic position as a hub for Central Europe. The âhydrocephalus of Austria,â as the residents of the newly founded republic of Austria used to call their capital city, still had much to offer in terms of culture and innovation. Its main problem, however, was a lack of financial capital and, related to that, a lack of economic opportunities. Politically, the city was a testing ground for new social experiments: the Social Democratic city government implemented substantial changes that altered the life in the city and brought a renaissance in certain sectors such as housing, education, and the arts.299
For almost all the members of the sample group, education played an important role. Many regarded themselves as belonging to a middle-class intellectual elite which saw education as a status symbol. This was something most of them had acquired from their parents, who in the majority of cases had placed a high value on the education of their children. Vienna, as shown above, was a city that had developed a very high standard of schooling, particularly due to reforms in the early interwar years. The city had hosted some of the worldâs most progressive schools, such as the world famous Schwarzwald high school. The high value placed on education by the members of the sample group was expressed by their good level of education: 88.5 percent had completed secondary education, 27 percent had even achieved a university degree. Their school or university education played an important role in most of their memories of their time in Vienna.
The majority of the members of the sample group recalled their family as belonging to the middle or upper middle class, strata of society that were responsible for much that was happening in the cultural field. As children, many of them had enjoyed education in music, painting, writing, or dance. Subsequently, they developed a great interest in the culture which shaped their childhood and adolescent memories. Not surprisingly, almost all of them located their cultural interest in the fields of classical music, painting, literature, and modern dance.
Leisure activities, especially skiing and hiking, were among the most frequently remembered interests of almost all the people interviewed for this book. Corresponding to the Zeitgeist of interwar Vienna, many of them (including the few members of the working classes) were active skiers, had undertaken regular holidays in the countryside, or were members of one of the different organizations that fostered skiing or hiking in Austria.
Exceptionally, many people who were interviewed for this book remembered being brought up in a multilingual, cosmopolitan environment open to exchange across national borders. This included intense contact with friends and relatives in different regions of Europe (mainly France, England, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary). Almost all of them spoke a foreign language (in most cases French or English) and had frequently travelled or even lived in other European countries.
Politically, the largest part located themselves on the left of the spectrum. However, most of them were not actively involved in any party politics and described themselves as politically moderate. Interestingly, the two interviewees who belonged to the Communist and the Conservative Parties and had participated in their violent struggles during the 1930s were non-Jewish.
A final feature many of the members of the sample group remembered as important was the difficult economic situation in Austria that required many of them to develop innovative and unorthodox ideas and plans to develop businesses which prevailed in the unstable marketâa situation that can be best described by the German proverb âNot macht erfinderischâ (necessity is the mother of invention). Having had these experiences and having developed these types of cultural capital would later support their efforts at building a life in Australia.
These few points summarize the main experiences and values the refugees remembered as having particularly shaped them during their time in Vienna. These experiences would laterâafter their escape to Australiaâaffect their future activities in their new homeland in many different ways.
For the title âA Fabulous Place before the Nazis Came to Power and Ruined Everything,â see Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â in Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 2.
n.a., âThe Snowy Country,â Good Neighbour, October 1, 1967, 4.
Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 14.
Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 13.
âDie Ãberfüllung der akademischen Berufe,â Heft 9 (1948): 337â343, 338.
William Johnston, âThe Political and Cultural Background of Vienna: A Golden Age of Cultural Exchange,â in Vienna, Art and Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos, ed. Christian Witt-Dörring and Paul Asenbaum (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011), 15â25.
Statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Die Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1910 in den im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreichen und Ländern (Vienna: Kaiserlich-königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1912), 33â34.
Statistische Zentralkommission, Die Ergebnisse.
Johnston, âPolitical and Cultural Background,â 18.
Peter Eigner, Herbert Matis, and Andreas Resch, âSozialer Wohnbau in Wien: eine historische Bestandsaufnahme,â Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Wien 55 (1999): 49â100, 53.
Johnston, âPolitical and Cultural Background,â 21.
See Wolfgang Maderthaner, âOutcast Vienna 1900: The Politics of Transgression,â in Spaces of the Poor: Perspectives of Cultural Sciences on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants, ed. Hans-Christian Petersen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 121â134, 123.
Maderthaner, âOutcast Vienna,â 124.
Eigner et al., âSozialer Wohnbau,â 54.
Maderthaner, âOutcast Vienna,â 129.
For the best and most detailed depictions of Hitlerâs life in Vienna, see Brigitte Hamann, Hitlerâs Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man (London: Tauris Parke Paperback, 2010); Roman Sandgruber, Hitlers Vater: Wie der Sohn zum Diktator wurde (Vienna: Molden, 2021).
Björn Siegel, Ãsterreichisches Judentum zwischen Ost und West: Die israelitische Allianz zu Wien 1873â1938 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010), 37.
Steven Beller, âSoziale Schicht, Kultur und die Wiener Juden um die Jahrhundertwende,â in Eine Zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Gerhard Botz et al. (Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2002), 67â84, 78.
Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41.
Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, 41.
Johnston, âPolitical and Cultural Background,â 21.
Johnston, âPolitical and Cultural Background,â 21.
Beller, âSoziale Schicht,â 67.
Beller, âSoziale Schicht,â 69.
Beller, âSoziale Schicht,â 69.
Strobl, âSocial Networks.â
Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867â1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 43.
Michael Pollak, âDie Wiener Moderne: Verlaufsformen einer Identitätskrise,â in Wissenschaftskolleg, Jahrbuch 1983/84, ed. Peter Wapnewski (Munich: Siedler, 1984), 299â310.
For more information on the Wiener Moderne, see Gotthart Wunberg and Johannes J. Braakenburg, eds., Die Wiener Moderne. Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981); Carl E. Schorske, Wien. Geist und Gesellschaft im Fin de siècle (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982).
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 9.
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 12.
âdie Literatur drängte sich bei mir immer mehr in den Vordergrund,â authorâs translation: mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, Paul Hatvani, letter to Ferenc Karinthy, 1.4.1975.
mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, Paul Hatvani, letter to Ferenc Karinthy, 1.4.1975; Paul Hatvani, âÃber den Expressionismus. Vorspruch des Autors,â Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institutes 31 (1965): 177â179, 178.
Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg and Simon Shaw Miller, eds., The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York/Oxford: Berghan Books, 2013).
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Paul Luif, âForum on âCentral Europeâ: Austria and Central Europe,â Perspectives 18, no. 2 (2010): 95â109, 95.
Helmut Konrad, Sozialdemokratie und âAnschlussâ: Historische Wurzeln Anschluss 1918 und 1938 Nachwirkungen (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1978).
Heinz Fassmann, âZur wirtschaftlichen und sozialstrukturellen Entwicklung,â in Handbuch des politischen Systems Ãsterreichs: Erste Republik 1918â1933, ed. Emmerich Talos et al. (Vienna: Manz, 1995), 11â44, 28.
Fassmann, âZur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung,â 28.
Philipp Strobl, Innsbrucker Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2014), 92.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 3â4, 8.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Employment references (in the possession of Sue Copolov).
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Ron Exiner, âCommemoration and Celebration of the Life of Hanny Exiner,â dtaa Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2008): 41â44, 42.
Strobl, âGertrude Langer,â 20.
Peter Melichar, âDer Wiener Kunstmarkt in der Zwischenkriegszeit,â Ãsterreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtsforschung 17, nos. 2â3 (2006): 252.
Holmes and Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â 4.
Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.
Holmes and Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â4.
Edwards Timms, âCultural Parameters between the Wars: A Reassessment of the Vienna Circles,â in Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 21â31, 29.
John Warren, ââWeiÃe Strümpfe oder neue Kuttenâ: Cultural Decline in Vienna in the 1930s,â in Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 32â55, 33.
Warren, âWeiÃe Strümpfe,â 33.
Warren, âWeiÃe Strümpfe,â 33.
Comp. John W. Boyer, Austria 1867â1955 (Oxford: University Press, 2022).
Barbara Thosold and Helmut Wohnout, âPolitische Lager und Zukunftsentwürfe,â in 1918â2018: Die Anfänge der Republik Ãsterreich im internationalen Kontext, ed. Helmut Konrad (Vienna: önb, 2018), 23â26, 23.
Thosold and Wohnout, âPolitische Lager,â 25.
Helmut Konrad, âDas Rote Wien: Ein Konzept für eine moderne GroÃstadt?,â in Das Werden der Ersten Republik ⦠der Rest ist ÃsterreichâBand i, ed. Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (Vienna: Carl Geroldâs Sohn Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2008), 223â240, 229.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 2.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 10.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 10.
Comp. Margit Reiter, âDie österreichische Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus: Politische Kampfansage mit Ambivalenzen,â in Antisemitismus in Ãsterreich 1933â1938, ed. Gertrude Enderle-Burcel and Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018), 361â379, 365.
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Joan Lynn (daughter of Bergel), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
âEs war wohl auch die österreichische Sozialdemokratie da, die Partei, in der wir Freunde hatten und deren kulturelles Programm uns nahestand und von der wir, wie so viele, hofften, dass sie den Weg in eine bessere Zukunft weisen würde.â (authorâs translation), Paul Hirsch, letter to Tony, January 1968.
Strobl, âGertrude Langer,â 20.
Ian Sinnamon, âModernism and the Genius loci: Karl Langer and Gertrude Langer obe,â in Strauss to Matilda: Viennese in Australia, 1938â1988, ed. Karl Bittmann (Sydney: Wenkhard Foundation, 1988), 145â160, 152.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
ushmm, Oral history interview with Hans Eisler, Accession Number: 2009.214.61 | rg Number: rg-50.617.0061.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 9.
Henry Teltscher, The Glückspilz: Autobiography (Melbourne: Stirling Crescent Press, 1997), 10.
Ständestaat characterizes the Austrian clerical and conservative dictatorship between 1934 and 1938. During that time, Austria was a one-party state led by the clerical fascist Fatherland Front.
naa, sp11/5, Felser Gerhard.
ÃSta, nihl, E/1797:25/1; see also Katharina Stengel, Hermann Langbein: Ein Auschwitz-Ãberlebender in den erinnerungspolitischen Konflikten der Nachkriegszeit (Frankfurt: Campus, 2012), 34.
Konrad, âDas Rote Wien,â 232.
Konrad, âDas Rote Wien,â 232.
Helmut Konrad, âDas Rote Wien,â in 1918â2018: Die Anfänge der Republik Ãsterreich im internationalen Kontext, ed. Helmut Konrad (Vienna: önb, 2018), 47â50, 50.
David Lebovitch Dahl, âAntisemitism and Catholicism in the Interwar Period: The Jesuits in Austria, 1918â1938,â Shoah: Intervention, Methods, Documentation, no. 3 (2016): 104â114, 106.
Steven Beller, Was nicht im Baedeker steht: Juden und andere Ãsterreicher im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2008), 45.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 9. The Dunera was a British troopship that transported 2,500 prisoners of war to Australia in 1940 under terrible conditions.
Leon Smith (friend of Anton and his successor as president of the aac), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Sydney, March 2016.
Strobl, âSocial Networks,â 12.
naa, mp529/3/0 Tribunal 2/Herzfeld.
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 3â4.
sjm, au006, title: Liesel Ziegler Oral History Interview [sound recording].
Peter Eigner and Andrea Heilige, eds., Ãsterreichische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert: 175 Jahre Wiener Städtische Versicherung (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1999), 171.
English translation, original text: âEs war eine für uns junge Menschen schwere und fürchterliche Zeit; der Kampf ums tägliche Ãberleben wurde immer schwerer und man hatte viele Sorgen und Zweifel,â mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, letter to Tony, January 1968.
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Philipp Strobl, âThinking Cosmopolitan or How Joseph Became Joe Buttinger,â in Austrian Lives, ed. Günter Bischof, Fritz Plasser, and Eva Maltschnig (New Orleans: uno Press, 2012), 92â122, 92.
Strobl, âThinking Cosmopolitan,â 104.
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 46.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
ushmm, Oral history interview with Hans Eisler, Accession Number: 2009.214.61 | rg Number: rg-50.617.0061.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
naa, mp529/3/0, Tribunal 2/Herzfeld.
Warren, âWeiÃe Strümpfe,â 35.
Philipp Strobl, âThinking Cosmopolitan,â 108.
ÃStA, nihl, e/1797:25/1; see also Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 34.
Warren, âWeiÃe Strümpfe,â 40.
Alfred Pfoser, Literatur und Austromarxismus (Vienna: Löcker, 1980).
Original text: âMit dem Aufkommen des Faschismus [â¦] ging es mir mit dem Publizieren immer schwerer. Ich habe es dann ganz aufgegebenâ; mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, letter to Ferenc Karinthy, 1.4.1975.
Original text: âDies macht es einem Teil der österreichischen Schriftstellerschaft immer schwieriger, die gewohnte Publikationstätigkeit fortzusetzenâ; mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, suggestion to found a monthly periodical, unpublished document, [n.d.].
Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 172; Gertrude Enderle-Burcel and Reiter-Zatloukal, eds., Antisemitismus in Ãsterreich 1933â1938 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018).
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 3â4, 33.
Original text: âWas nun mich anlangt: man lebt so dahin, in dieser monotonen Zeit, in der Alles erstickt, und wird langsam älter. [â¦] Sie sind glücklich, jetzt mit Mitteleuropa nichts zu tun zu haben. Es gibt gar nichts mehr; weder Zeitschriften noch Ideen; keine Maler und nicht einmal Cafés mit Diskussionenâ; dlm, A: Szittya, 80.2060/1, Paul Hatvani to Emil Szittya.
Bruce F. Pauley, âPolitischer Antisemitismus im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit,â in Eine zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Gerhard Botz et al. (Vienna: Czernin, 2002), 241â260, 243.
Beller, Was nicht im Baedecker steht, 23.
Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 4.
Alfred Stalzer, Jüdische Intellektuelle und Künstler und ihr Beitrag zur Wiener Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte: Ein Ãberblick (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018), 2.
Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 4.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 2.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 12.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 2.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 15.
For a detailed depiction of the Nazi discrimination after the Anschluss, see Burger, Heimatrecht.
Siegel, Ãsterreichisches Judentum, 37.
Siegel, Ãsterreichisches Judentum, 37.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 5.
Siegel, Ãsterreichisches Judentum, 35.
Michael Gehler, Europa: Ideen, Institutionen, Vereinigung, Zusammenhalt (Reinbek: Lau Verlag, 2018), 36.
Lässig, Jüdische Wege, 19.
Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 5.
Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 5.
George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880â1890s (Cambridge: Abt Books, 1988), 46â47.
sjm, au022, Helen Roberts, Oral History Interview (sound recording).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
nla, Gertrude Langer interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 14, 32.
Joan Lynn (Bergelâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 8.
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 23.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
sjm, au006, title: Liesel Ziegler Oral History Interview (sound recording).
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Reinhold Eckfeld, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, January 2017.
Eleanor Hart (Selbyâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
Exiner, âCommemoration and Celebration,â 42.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
sjm, C007, title: Bruno Bush Oral history interview (sound recording).
ushmm, Oral history interview with Hans Eisler (sound recording), Accession Number: 2009.214.61 | rg Number: rg-50.617.0061.
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Sylvia Cherny, Who is Sylvia? (Caulfield: Makor Jewish Community Library, 2004), 4.
Cherny, Who is Sylvia?, 4â5.
For a comprehensive overview of the latest research on antisemitism in Austria, see Enderle-Burcel and Reiter-Zatloukal, Antisemitismus in Ãsterreich.
Peter Pulzer, âThe Development of Political Anti-Semitism in Austria,â in The Jews of Austria: Essays on their Life, History, and Destruction, ed. Josef Fraenkel (London: Vallentine, 1967), 429â443.
Thomas Albrich, âVom Vorurteil zum Progrom: Antisemitismus von Schönerer bis Hitler,â in Ãsterreich im 20. Jahrhundert: Von der Monarchie bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Rolf Steininger and Michael Gehler (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 309â366, 321.
Albrich, âVorurteil zum Progrom,â 321.
Albrich, âVorurteil zum Progrom,â 321.
Albrich, âVorurteil zum Progrom,â 321.
ushmm, Oral history interview with Hans Eisler, Accession Number: 2009.214.61 | rg Number: rg-50.617.0061.
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Albrich, âVorurteil zum Pogrom,â 329.
Lässig, Jüdische Wege, 29.
Helga Embacher, âMiddle Class, Liberal, Intellectual, Female, and Jewish: The Expulsion of âFemaleRationalityâ from Austria,â in Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, Erika Thurner, eds., Women in Austria (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 5â14, 6.
Anthony Grenville, Stimmen der Flucht: Ãsterreichische Emigration nach GroÃbritannien ab 1938 (Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2011), 36.
Constance Bantman and Charlotte Faucher. ââFrench Lady Seeksâ¦â: Finding Work as a French Governess in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1870â1914),â Womenâs History Review 32, no. 3 (2023): 271â291, 272.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 3.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 6.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Embacher, âMiddle Class,â 7.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Edie Jarolim, âDetention of Jews in World War ii: Et Tu, Australia,â on Freud´s Butcher, accessed December 2, 2021,
Eleanor Hart (Selbyâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
naa, mp529/3/0 Tribunal 2/Herzfeld.
naa, mp529/3/0 Tribunal 2/Herzfeld.
Exiner, âCommemoration and Celebration,â 42.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
sjm, C007, title: Bruno Bush Oral history interview (sound recording).
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Authorâs translation. Original text: âIch sprach kein Wort Ungarisch. [â¦] Ich musste leben, denken und lernen in einem fremden Sprachraum,â see: mul, letter to Ferenc Karinthy, April 1, 1975; Paul Hatvani, âÃber den Expressionismus. Vorspruch des Autors,â Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institutes 31 (1965): 177â179, 177.
Philipp Strobl, ââIch habe nie die Absicht gehabt, autobiographische Arbeiten zu schreibenââExil und Autobiographie im transnationalen Leben von Paul Hatvani-Hirsch,â Ãsterreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 29 (2018): 58â79, 63.
Bittmann, Strauss to Matilda, 265.
Authorâs translation of the original text: â[â¦] Grete, die im Kaffeehaus ihrer wiederverheirateten Mutter gegenüber dem Franz-Josephs Bahnhof am Alsergrund mitarbeitete und daneben als Milchmädchen frühmorgens mit Flaschen stiegenauf und-ab elite,â see Frank Vanry, Der Zaungast (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1983), 269.
Holmes and Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â 3.
Holmes and Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â 4.
sjm, au022, Helen Roberts Oral History Interview (sound recording).
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
Eleanor Hart (Selbyâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 5, 13.
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 10.
mul, ef 830.912 H669.1 A6/C, letter to Tony, January 1968. âAber was uns bewegte waren andere, beinahe unpersönliche Dinge: Es war wieder Musik und in ihr Gustav Mahler, es war Literatur.â
Cherny, Who is Sylvia?
Andrea Amort, âFree Dance in Vienna,â in Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 117â142, 117.
Amort, âFree Dance,â 117.
Amort, âFree Dance,â 120.
Elana Shapira, âProfessional Women in the Arts and Media in ViennaâKulturschaffende Frauen in Wien,â in Gestalterinnen: Frauen, Design und Gesellschaft im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Elana Shapira and Anne-Katrin Rossberg (Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2023), 9â30, 9.
Exiner, âCommemoration and Celebration,â 42.
nla, 513110, Hanny Exiner interviewed by Michelle Potter (sound recording), 1994.
nla, 513110, Hanny Exiner interviewed by Michelle Potter (sound recording), 1994. ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
William Bowman, âHakoah Vienna and the International Nature of Interwar Austrian Sports,â Central European History 44, no. 4 (2011): 642â668, 646.
Strobl, âMigration, Knowledge Transfer,â 2008.
For more information about the early development of skiing as a mass leisure activity during the 1920s and 1930s, see Andrew Denning, âGoing Downhill? The Industrialisiation of Skiing from the 1930s to the 1970s,â in Leisure Cultures and the Making of Modern Ski Resorts, ed. Philipp Strobl and Aneta Podkalicka (London: Palgrave, 2019), 25â42.
Rudolf Müllner, âThe Importance of Skiing in Austria,â The International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 6 (2013): 659â673, 664.
sjm, au022, Helen Roberts Oral History Interview (sound recording).
Tony Sponar, Snow in Australia? Thatâs News to Me (Palmerston: Tabletop Press, 1995), 24.
Sponar, Snow in Australia, 24.
Grete Vanry, âOf Rocks and Little Stitches,â in Strauss to Matilda: Viennese in Australia, ed. Karl Bittmann (Sydney: Wenkhart Foundation, 1988), 266.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 35.
Jarolim, âDetention of Jews.â
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 13, 26.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Strobl, Charles Anton.
Leon Smith (friend of Anton and his successor as president of the aac), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Sydney, March 2016.
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
For more information on the Boy Scouts, see Philipp Lehar, ââDa hab ich mich schon zuhause gefühltâ: Ãsterrechische PfadfinderInnen im Exil,â Zwischenwelt: Literatur/Widerstand/Exil 12 (2017): 9â15.
Dymia Schulze (Bowenâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Vienna, March 2017, authorâs translation, original: âEr war begeisterter Pfadfinder. [â¦] Er war angeblich der zweithöchste Pfadfinder damals im Jahr 38.â
naa A446, Bowen Ernest born 12 September 1912.
Authorâs translation. Original: âDu weisst gar nicht, welche Freude ich habe, wenn wieder einmal âder Kriesâ hier in Australien einlangt, Alte Lagerfeuer-Erinnerungen und das Gedenken an frohe Tage, die leider so weit zurück liegen, steigen herauf, Freundschaften, die man damals schloss, wiederholen sich nicht mehr im Leben. In unserem Alter wird man nur mehr âgut bekanntâ aber der wirkliche Freundeskreis bleibt ja doch immer nur der gute alte,â see Gerry Felser, âAuszug aus dem Brief von Gerry Felser (Kf ii) aus Sydney,â Der KreisâRundbrief an alte Pfadfinderfreunde 5 (1963).
naa Melbourne, mp529/3/0, Tribunal 2 Herzfeld.
âDie Ãberfüllung der akademischen Berufe,â Heft 9 (1948): 337â343, 338.
Ludwig Wohlgemuth, âDas österreichische Schulwesen,â in 50 Jahre Republik: 1918â1968, ed. Institut für Ãsterreichkunde Ãsterreich (Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Hirt, 1968), 349â360, 350.
Deborah Holmes, Langeweile ist Gift: Das Leben der Eugenie Schwarzwald (St.Pölten: Residenz Verlag, 2012), 271.
Austria-Forum, âBildungssystem in Ãsterreich,â Austria-Forum, accessed on January 26, 2022,
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 28.
sjm, au006, title: Liesel Ziegler Oral History Interview (sound recording).
Interview with John Hearst, n.d., (sound recording) (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Embacher, âMiddle Class,â 6.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
Marianne Schulze (Bowenâs granddaughter) in discussion with the author (sound recording), Vienna, March 2017: original: âMein GroÃvater ist in den Montessori Kindergarten gegangen der sozusagen Teil dieses sozialen Verständnisses meines GroÃvaters war. [â¦] er ging in eine normale Schule, später dann in die Handelsschule im 8. Bezirk.â
naa, A12217, Charles William Anton.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
Sue Copolov, in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, August 2017.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Cherny, Who is Sylvia?, 6â7.
Eugenie Schwarzwald was a progressive Austrian philanthropist, writer, and pedagogue. She developed education for girls in Austria and was one of the most educated women of her time.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript).
Holmes, Langeweile, 135.
Strobl, âGertrude Langer,â 19.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Bittmann, Strauss to Matilda, 265; Pauley, âPolitischer Antisemitismus,â 256.
Gertrude Enderle-Burcel and Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal, âEinleitende Streiflichter,â in Antisemitismus in Ãsterreich 1933â1938, ed. Gertrude Enderle-Burcel and Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal (Vienna: Böhlau: 2018), 17â36, 21.
Comp. Enderle-Burcel and Reiter-Zatloukal, Antisemitismus in Ãsterreich.
ushmm, usc Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Viola Winkler, Oral History, vha Interview Code: 5134 (sound recording).
âIch besuchte die Volksschule in Wieselburg. Die Lehrer stellten für gewöhnlich fest, dass die Juden für den Tod von Christus verantwortlich seien, woraufhin sich alle umdrehten und mich anschauten. Eine sehr unangenehme Erfahrung.â Comp. Katherina Winkler, âIn Einem Augenblick ist unsere ganze Welt zusammengestürzt,â in A Letter To the Stars. HolocaustâDie Ãberlebenden. Schüler schreiben Geschichte, ed. Verein Lernen aus Zeitgeschichte (Vienna: authorâs edition, 2005), 311.
Ernst Nowotny, ed., Festschrift 100 Jahre Gymnasium Stubenbastei. 1872â1972. Elternverein des Bundesgymnasiums Wien i (Vienna: n.v., 1972).
ushmm, Oral history interview with Hans Eisler, Accession Number: 2009.214.61 | rg Number: rg-50.617.0061 (sound recording).
Teltscher, The Glückspilz, 24.
Embacher, âMiddle-Class,â 6.
naa, A1209, Professor Gerhard FelserâHonour.
nla, 513110, Hanny Exiner interviewed by Michelle Potter (sound recording), 1994.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 34.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 18.
Rampley, âArt History and the Politics of Empire,â 446.
Rampley, âArt History,â 446.
Strobl, âGertrude Langer,â 19.
Julia Orell, âEarly East Asian Art History in Vienna and its Trajectories: Josef Strzygowski, Karl With, Alfred Salmony,â Journal of Art Historiography 13, no. 1 (2015): 1â32, 1.
Karen Fisher, âFrom Vienna to Brisbane and a Life of Art: Dr Gertrude Langerâ (unpublished ba Hons thesis, University of Queensland, 2006).
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 19.
Mirjana Lozanovska, and Julia McKnight. âÃmigré Architects and the Australian Architecture Establishment,â in sahanz 2015. Architecture, Institutions and Change, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith OâCallaghan (Sydney: sahanz, 2015), 351â365, 353.
naa, B884, Bratspies Gustav; naa, A997, Bratspies Gustav.
Jarolim, âDetention of Jews.â
Private records (written documents), in the possession of Sue Copolov.
Private records (written documents), in the possession of Sue Copolov.
âMit diskreter groÃzügiger Eleganz hat Arch. Richard Tandler die Räume des Modehauses Elegance ausgestattet.â See n.a., âModehaus: Eine Arbeit von Arch. Richard Tandler,â Ãsterreichische Kunst 7 (1936).
Dymia Schulze (Bowenâs daughter) in discussion with the author (sound recording), Vienna, March 2017.
Günter Bischof, âSchumpeter vs. Keynes: Der Marshallplan und der Wiederaufbau der österreichischen Wirtschaft. Motor der Innovationsförderung und Modernisierung?,â in Die vielen Gesichter des wirtschaftlichen Wandels: Beiträge zur InnovationsgeschichteâFestschrift für Dieter Stiefel, ed. Peter Berger, Peter Eigner, and Andreas Resch (Vienna: lit, 2011), 161â168, 164.
Bischof, âSchumpeter vs. Keynes,â 165.
Andreas Rech and Reinhold Hofer, Ãsterreichische Innovationsgeschichte seit dem 19. Jahrhundert: Indikatoren des Innovationssystems und Muster des Innovationsverfahrens (Vienna: Studienverlag, 2010), 33.
Peter Mayerhofer, Philipp Petzl, and Andreas Resch, eds., âCreative Industriesâ in Wien: Dynamik, Arbeitsplätze, Akteure (Vienna: lit, 2008).
Rech and Hofer, Ãsterreichische Innovationsgeschichte, 33.
Shapira, Professional Women, 9.
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with Marie Bergel, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Joan Lynn).
Interview with John Hearst, n.d. (sound recording), n.d. (in the possession of Gary Hearst).
Dymia Schulze (Bowenâs daughter) in discussion with the author (sound recording), Vienna, March 2017.
slv, Annemarie Mutton, papers, ca. 1930â1987. [manuscript], ms box 2685/9â10.
Private records (written documents), in the possession of Sue Copolov.
âMit diskreter groÃzügiger Eleganz hat Arch. Richard Tandler die Räume des Modehauses Elegance ausgestattet,â see n.a., âModehaus.â
naa, A12217, Weiss Hans.
naa, A12217, Weiss Hans.
sjm, au006, title: Liesel Ziegler Oral History Interview.
Strobl, Charles Anton, 2008.
naa, A435, 1944/4/1110, Anton Charles William.
Jana Gerslova, âDer Schuster der die Welt erobert: Die tschechoslowakische Firma Bata als Paradefall eines innovativen Unternehmens (1894â1948),â in Die vielen Gesichter des wirtschaftlichen Wandels: Beiträge zur InnovationsgeschichteâFestschrift für Dieter Stiefel, ed. Peter Berger et al. (Vienna: lit, 2011), 277â295, 294.
Eleanor Hart (Selbyâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
Gerslova, âDer Schuster,â 289.
Eleanor Hart (Selbyâs daughter), in discussion with the author (sound recording), Melbourne, February 2016.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 34.
nla, Gertrude Langer Interviewed by Barbara Blackman [sound recording], Oral trc 1171 (transcript), 88.
Bittmann, Strauss to Matilda, 264.
Bittmann, Strauss to Matilda, 264.
Henry Teltscher, The Glückspilz, i.
Holmes and Silverman, âIntroduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse,â 1.