Читать книгу Three Tearless Histories - Erich Hackl - Страница 6
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THERE'S NO FAMILY TREE, so it's imperative we stick to the photo in which they're looking out at us from a whole century ago. Ignaz Klagsbrunn, the head of the family, amiable, relaxed or even with an ironic smile beneath his well-groomed mustache. With his right hand he's holding his granddaughter Flora by the arm, his left is placed on the ornate round table on which his wife Johanna is also leaning, with Rosi, their second granddaughter, in her lap. Johanna Klagsbrunn, née Thieberg, has thick, dark hair, just about kept in place by a center parting, while her husband's fair hair seems to be thin and already receding at the temples. Two people of surprisingly contemporary appearance, close to ours, who look contented but neither serene nor split into an authoritarian brow and a forbearing heart. And still astonishingly young. In the prime of life.
All eleven children are sitting or standing around the couple in a suggestion of a semicircle. At the front, on crudely made garden chairs, the two eldest, their daughters Lola and Bertha. At an angle behind them, the spitting image of each other in stature, hairstyle, luxuriant whiskers, their husbands Karl Goldstein and Benno Ostiller. Doctors of medicine both of them, moreover neighbors in the same house, 51 Leopoldsgasse, where they pursue their profession. It is striking how far Bertha Ostiller is leaning back, has put her forearms behind her back, her unusual posture and the suggestion of a bulge under her loose dress, that comes down to the ground, make us think she might be pregnant.
It isn't difficult to distinguish between the Klagsbrunn sons and the sons-in-law (the third, Sida's husband Johann Frey, has a pince-nez and a Vandyke beard), for some of the former, like the daughters, clearly take after their mother: their dark eyes, their melancholy look, their unmanageable mop of hair. Only the two eldest sons, Josef and Hugo, resemble their father, though less in their appearance than in the indulgent interest they take in the photographer or his plate camera. In fact no one shows a lack of attention. Perhaps the youngest daughter, Cilla, is looking a bit sullen. Or impatient because she has to keep still too long for her taste.
Not one of them is smiling, neither Bruno who, forty years later, will die together with his wife Grete in a subcamp of Jasenovac Concentration Camp, nor Samek, of whom we read that he has been missing since 1938, nor Molo (i.e. Maximilian) who will have a dental practice in the center of Vienna, then flee to Shanghai with his wife Frieda and finally die, destitute, in San Francisco, nor Noli, (Dietrich Arnold) who, five decades later and with a persistence matched only by his lack of success, will demand the restitution of or compensation for the equipment and other furnishings which the two dealers, Josef Prossnitz and Theodor Partik, removed from his own dental surgery in the Mariahilf district of Vienna in September 1942. Stole, to be more precise, and since it is accepted that they were acting 'on the instructions of the former Property Transfer Office' the Federal Ministry of Finance sees no reason to grant his request for restitution.
Leo, the second youngest in the family, isn't smiling either. He's standing in the back row, in front of the terrace door with the windows that reflect the light, and wearing a high wing collar going around his neck like a ruff. At the time the photo was taken he's sixteen years old.
