3
AS WAS COMMON in those days, the family photo was used as a postcard. Since there was only enough room on the back for the name and address of the person to whom it was being sent, Ignaz Klagsbrunn had written his news over, beside and under the picture: “My dear children,” and along the top the date and time of the card: “Floridsdorf, 22/9/1904, 10 p.m. weather fine.”
The photo must have been taken before that, however, in March or even the end of February, for the trees beside and behind them, and reflected in the windows behind Leo’s head, are bare. And the daughters, apart from Bertha, have long fur stoles over their light-colored clothes. The men dark coats. Jackets under their coats. Stiff collars with ties or bows. All of them people with assured taste who can afford well-made, good-quality clothes. The little villa, in front of which they’re posing, wouldn’t stand out in a middle-class district but there, in Pilzgasse, right behind Floridsdorf freight depot where there are only low houses plastered with clay, a soap factory and the Shell oil refinery, it looks if it’s been conjured up out of thin air. Klagsbrunn Villa.
WE KNOW very little about Ignaz and Johanna Klagsbrunn. That they—to go by their looks and the date of birth of their eldest daughter—were born in the middle of the nineteenth century and come from Wadowice, a Polish county town which lies at the foot of the Beskids, some thirty miles to the south-west of Kraków, and which in those days belonged to the Austrian crown-land of Galicia but is today best known as the birthplace of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II.
Their children were also born in Wadowice, apart from Bruno who was born in Vienna in July 1892, where the family had settled two or three years previously. His parents are listed in Lehmann’s Vienna Directory for 1891, Ignaz running a business selling laundry materials and specializing in ironing whites with glaze starch, Johanna an innkeeper, both at 5 Mühlfeldgasse. After 1895 Johanna’s name is deleted, suggesting that by then her husband is providing for the family on his own—in the Directory he is listed in turn as publisher of a handbook on laundry and ironing whites with glaze starch, head of a private trade school, inventor of a new method of ironing with glaze starch, producer of chemical products and dealer in flatirons and laundry equipment. Puzzling over and discovering things seems to be in the genes of the male Klagsbrunns; later on Noli will have a wax syringe for dental use patented and his elder brother Josef the ‘Microna’ universal mill. In or around 1899 the family moves to Floridsdorf, where Ignaz has bought the villa in Pilzgasse. A delivery note for ‘Ignaz Klaksbrunn. Chemical Products Factory’ of June 1909 has been preserved; it is for a ¼ case of ‘Heliosin’ glaze for fine linen.
FLORIDSDORF is on the left bank of the Danube, on the other side from the city of Vienna. Shipping, a lot of industry, ambitious tradesmen, an influx of people from Moravia and other outlying parts of the Monarchy looking for work. Poverty as well, and not only just below the breadline. In the year the photograph was taken the place had around fifty-five thousand inhabitants and was to be incorporated into the Austrian capital as the 21st district, by the law of November 12, 1904. That same year also saw the founding of the FAC, which was to become so important for Leo. We don’t know how he and his brothers got through the First World War; I suspect that, given their training as chemists and doctors, most of them will have seen service in clinics, field hospitals and laboratories.
The city of Vienna takes steps to combat the lack of affordable—and hygienic—accommodation with an ambitious program of social housing, in the context of which two large complexes are constructed between 1924 and 1932 that are to become the symbol of the Floridsdorf workers’ movement: the Schlinger-Hof in Brunner Strasse and the FAC building in Freytaggasse, right next to the football pitch. During the uprising against the Dollfuss dictatorship in February 1934 both apartment complexes are fiercely fought over. Members of the Social-Democratic Schutzbund1 and para-military exercise groups barricade themselves in there until, after a day and a night of being bombarded with grenades and mortars from the police and the army, they are forced to abandon them. Outside the Schlinger-Hof and in the police station in Hermann-Bahr-Gasse both police and members of the right-wing Heimwehr2 shoot workers that have been arrested and disarmed. On February 14 Georg Weissel, a leader of the Schutzbund and captain in the fire service, is condemned to death by a summary court for ‘refusal to obey orders and rebellion’ and hanged a few hours later. In all seventy-one people die in Floridsdorf during the fighting. Nothing on the photo and hardly anything of what we know about the people in it points to this event. From what we have heard there is no shooting in Pilzgasse, and at that time the inhabitants of the villa are on a skiing holiday in Salzburg or on the Hochwechsel.
1. Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection Association): a paramilitary organization of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party.
2. The Austrian Heimwehr (Home Defence Force) consisted of various local armed groups set up in the immediate aftermath of the First World War to defend Austria’s frontiers and maintain order; they were extremely right wing and played an increasing role in politics, especially in suppressing the Socialists in 1934, the year after Dollfuss had suspended parliament and established an authoritarian regime.
4
THE PILZGASSE is the title of the memories Grete Gabmeier-Grach wrote down ten or more years ago for her grandchildren. A thin volume with a few photos that Frau Gabmeier gave to me and Victor to read when we visited her in December 2011. On our way there we passed an overgrown plot of land on which Villa Klagsbrunn, badly damaged by a bomb that hit it on March 12, 1945, had stood until the late fifties then had to make way for a modest summer house, until that was also torn down or simply allowed to fall into ruin.
Grete Gabmeier was born in 1927 and is the last person we could find in Vienna who still remembers the Klagsbrunn family—Leo and his wife and children, not his parents, who were already dead by the time Grete, holding her mother’s or her aunt’s hand, looked around the villa for the first time. Right behind the front door was the larder with an ice-box full of blocks of ice, then a windowless corridor with, on the one side the kitchen, very narrow because a bathroom had been built in, and the dining room, on the other the office and the so-called middle room, from which you could go out onto the veranda, which didn’t exist in 1904. On the second floor were the balcony room and two little attic rooms—the bedrooms for the family of four.
From the entries in Lehmann’s Directory we know that after the First World War Leo took over the premises of his father’s firm. But before that, after his training as a chemist, he ran a wholesale business for household goods and was a partner in the Buche Charcoal Trading Corporation. Initially his new firm, Leopold Klagsbrunn Chemist, also sold chemical products, but then he restricted himself to dealing in charcoal, coal and coke. He had several employees, eventually six, “all of them Aryan,” as he was to be compelled to declare.
Leo is a striking figure in Floridsdorf, and not just because of his height, he’s almost 6’ 6” tall, but athletic as well, affable and charming; at the Gänsehäufel lido on the Danube the heads of the young women turn when he takes a run-up on the wooden planks and does a racing dive into the water. To their disappointment, in October 1911 he marries Friederike ‘Fritzi’ Kohn from the Leopoldstadt district who’s one year older and two heads shorter than him. Their first child, Karl Peter, is born on May 24, 1913, their second, Kurt Paul, on May 6, 1918. (It’s a family tradition to give their sons two first names, either because the parents can never agree or because they want to let their children have the opportunity of deciding for themselves whether to take the one or the other; Karl Peter will use his second name.) In December 1926 the police authorities in Vienna grant Leo Klagsbrunn “permission to drive motor vehicles with an internal combustion engine unaccompanied;” in 1930 the Vienna Football Association issues an identity card for him showing that he is the Deputy Chairman of the First League, the top Austrian division. The photos on the card and driver’s license show a slim young man with thick hair combed back and a carefully trimmed walrus mustache. He still