Читать книгу Three Tearless Histories - Erich Hackl - Страница 10

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IN JANUARY 1920 Maria Pfeiffer, also known as Mitzi and sixteen at the time, starts work in Leopold Klagsbrunn’s firm as a clerk, a position she had had from May 1918 to February 1919 with C. Hauptmann’s Widow & Sons (Roofing Felt and Tar Production). According to her niece Grete, the Klagsbrunns treated her like a daughter. In return, her employer certifies that she is hard-working, capable of working independently and absolutely trustworthy.

Their close relationship with Maria Pfeiffer also includes her family, Grete’s mother Leopoldine and her brothers Rudolf and Josef. Rudolf Pfeiffer occasionally helps out in the firm as a driver. Actually he’s a varnisher by trade, Josef trained as a saddler. They probably kept being made redundant or were out of work for longish periods during the world economic crisis. In a photo from the early thirties the two of them, in baggy trousers and large peaked caps, are standing in front of the fence of the Klagsbrunn’s villa, behind them the house with the wooden gables and the carved balcony rail on which Mitzi and Fritzi are leaning. You can’t tell from their posture which is the employer and which the employee.

Maria Pfeiffer comes from a working-class family, her brothers are members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and, in addition, Josef is a section leader in the Republikanischer Schutzbund. Both take part in the February uprising and after the defeat try to escape to Czechoslovakia. While Rudolf is arrested on the border and jailed for a few months, Josef manages to get to Brno. From there he carries on to the Soviet Union, where he joins the Communist Party. In 1936 he gets his wife and children to come and join him in Moscow then, in the same year, volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. He fights in the XIII, then in the XI International Brigade, ending up as a lieutenant of the Republican Peoples’ Army. On an undated photo that was taken outdoors, in or near Almería, he is sitting in a basket chair in front of huts, trucks and a bare, steeply rising slope, a beret on his head, his left arm in a sling and resting his bandaged left foot on a chair. After the defeat of the Republic he is interned in the Saint-Cyrpien Camp in France but is already back in the Soviet Union by the middle of April 1939. One month before that Leo Klagsbrunn and his family arrived in Brazil.