Three Tearless Histories. Erich Hackl
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father had had a delicatessen in Berlin-Tiergarten. Salo Steuer is a war veteran and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class for his services to Kaiser and Fatherland. A friend of Inge’s just calls him—contemptuously—the Sergeant. On the sabbath he refuses to take the bus and does the long journey from their apartment in Ipanema to Botafogo and the synagogue of the Associãço Religiosa Israelita, founded by German Jews, on foot.
He is not happy that, of all people, his daughter has set her mind on the frail Peter Klagsbrunn, who is indifferent in matters of faith, and insists he undergoes a medical examination before the wedding. The doctor certifies that he has a weak heart. Inge marries him despite that. In 1944 she gives birth to a daughter, Vera, and two years later Victor is born. His father dies of a heart attack when he’s six, leaving his widow not much more than an apartment in Copacabana encumbered with mortgages and a Ford Anglia that has only just been purchased.
First of all the car is sold. Then lodgers are sought to whom she turns over three of the four rooms. Thirdly she starts to work as a representative for promotional articles. She’s hard-working, she doesn’t spare herself, her nerves are always on edge. She smokes a lot. During the hot season between New Year and Carnival, when hardly anyone in Rio does any work, she makes exhausting business trips to Belo Horizonte and Manaus. Although she has no lack of admirers, she will never have another long-term relationship. She wants the children to have a better life when they grow up. Therefore she sends Vera and Victor to the Colegio de Aplicaçao, a model public school that operates under the aegis of the Universidade do Brasil, but persuades her daughter to follow it by training as a secretary. Thus Vera’s desire to study law remains unfulfilled. Their mother wants Victor, however, to embark on an academic career. An attempt to have him instructed in the Jewish faith by the rabbi Dr. Lemle is torpedoed by Victor’s impudence. When Lemle sets his pupils an exercise to write down what they felt when they attended the synagogue, Victor’s response is one word: heat. He enjoys the laughter from the other children and is unmoved by the rabbi’s annoyance. At Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when he has to accompany his mother’s family to the synagogue or, before it was built, to the premises of the Botafogo Rowing and Football Club, which have been hired for the occasion, it really is unbearably hot and humid in the overfull rooms. Victor always finds some opportunity to slip out unnoticed into the fresh air. At the Colegio he is in danger of having to repeat a year because of an over-strict teacher. Driven by his fear of the worry this will cause his mother, he spends a whole summer boning up on math and, to his own surprise, ends up among the best in the class.
13
FLORIDSDORF has suffered great damage during the Second World War. Pilzgasse is affected because of the air raids on the freight depot and the oil refinery. A bomb has landed in the garden of number 9, demolishing an extension built during the war together with the veranda, tearing the window frames out of the wall and blowing off the roof. The storage area beside the railroad has been completely destroyed.
“We have the laborious task of going back and starting from the beginning again with everything.” That is what Maria Pfeiffer writes to the Klagsbrunns in her first airmail letter of April 15, 1946. She has received no answer to a postcard she had sent a month previously. This means she has to repeat all the news that’s already a year old. Including the good news that Leo’s brother Noli is well and has started to work. Noli, the dentist and inventor of a wax syringe at 34 Wienzeile, who left the Jewish religious community long before 1938 and married a Christian woman—of noble birth, as Victor was told by his uncle—who managed to protect him from deportation during the Nazi years.
The second piece of good news is that Mitzi’s brother Josef is living in Floridsdorf again, together with his family. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union he had volunteered for the Red Army, had parachuted into Yugoslavia in the fall of 1944 and been wounded as a partisan with the Austrian Freedom Battalion during operations in Carinthia or Styria. Now he is head of the local section of the Austrian Communist Party. Her other brother is working for the state police that at that time is still under Communist influence. Her niece Grete is also employed there. “At the moment my husband is working as an electrician.” (As an unskilled worker because he had been a member of the Nazi Party, as Grete Gabmeier tells us. Two years later Arthur Egger will be taken on as an official of the Federal Railways again and soon promoted to a senior post in the planning and inspection department.) The Allied Control Commission, Maria Pfeiffer writes, has forbidden the discussion of business matters in letters abroad. Therefore she asks in a vague formulation for him to send “the confirmation from back then with a recent date, since I urgently need that confirmation.” And she adds a second request: to inform her “how much I still owe you.”
What this is all about becomes clear from Leo Klagsbrunn’s written declaration of October 16, 1946, “that it was of my own free will that I sold my property to my employee Frau Maria Egger, née Pfeiffer, who had worked for me for many years. This sale had been planned long before my departure and had nothing to do with Aryanization. As proof of that one can take the fact that I sent a satisfaction piece for the money owing me on the house from Brazil.” There is nothing in the letters that have been preserved to say whether Leo Klagsbrunn made a similar declaration regarding the coal business or not. Maria Pfeiffer’s repeated complaint, right down until the early sixties, that the purchase of the house and business had “cost her dear,” could be interpreted as an attempt to soothe her own conscience and to prevent her friends in Rio from feeling they are still owed something. She mentions that through the currency reform she and her husband have lost all their savings, 65,000 reichsmarks. That is a considerable sum, almost three times as much as what was paid for Klagsbrunn’s possessions, in current terms more than 200,000 euros. Victor thinks he remembers that Maria Pfeiffer sent his grandfather money now and then. In Vienna she has to combat the suspicion that she exploited Klagsbrunn’s predicament. In January 1961, two years after Leo’s death, she writes to Fritzi, “Since the time when we purchased the house and business in 1938 we’ve had nothing but animosity, first of all from the Nazis and now from Jewish organizations. Sometimes I’m in such depths of despair that I regret having agreed to purchase them in 1938. I admit that you, as seller, have lost out, because you had to emigrate, but I’ve come off even worse than you.”
The fact is that over the years the sales of charcoal have been falling off more and more. Until now the main buyers have been smithies and scythe-works and they are closing down one after the other. There’s no money to be made out of coal for irons anymore either. There’s a minor upturn in the sixties when barbecues become increasingly popular in Austria. As early as 1950 Maria and her husband bought the property at 15-17 Pilzgasse, on favorable terms because Floridsdorf is in the Soviet zone and the owners, Klosterneuburg Monastery, do not believe the Allied troops will ever leave Austria. On the plot there’s a tiny house where two old women live. Maria Pfeiffer lets them continue living there. Only when the last one dies does she have the house pulled down and a three-story dwelling house built that has room for an office on the first floor. Behind the house storerooms with their own railway siding are constructed.
At some time around 1960 the ruined house at 9 Pilzgasse is cleared to make way for a summer house. Maria Pfeiffer makes it available to Leo’s sister-in-law Lisa, his brother Josef’s widow who has to survive on welfare. In return Lisa helps out in the kitchen in the morning and looks after Grete Gabmeier’s daughter, as her mother is now working in her aunt’s office. Two years after her husband’s death at the end of 1973, Maria Pfeiffer sells the firm to Kolkoks and retires. During her last years she, who was always surrounded by people throughout her life, complains about her lonely existence. No one ever comes to see me… When she dies, on January 2, 1980, there is nothing left to recall Leopold Klagsbrunn’s firm. But her niece keeps up the connection with Kurt Klagsbrunn, who after 1945 visited her and Maria Pfeiffer in Floridsdorf at least three times. Grete Gabmeier meets him again during a trip to Brazil. He didn’t talk much, she says.
A letter of May 15, 1941, that one of the sons, probably Peter, sent to Hugo’s widow in the USA, sheds some light on the reason why the family, as Maria Pfeiffer complained, were such poor correspondents.
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