1931

We were now about ready to enlarge our family, and the big event happened on May 1, 1931, when our son Franz was born. I especially was very excited about it, with strange feelings of pride. I was half-crazy. I had stayed all night with Hedy in the hospital while she was in labor and till she had given birth at 2 A.M., and stayed on there till the morning, when I went home to shave. I then grabbed the camera and went back to the hospital to take a picture of Franzerl. That was the name on which my mother-in-law insisted. He seemed to be good-looking, but I thought he was a beauty, though some disagreed. But after a few months he became a really good-looking child. He was now the center of the family. I had a few hard weeks or rather months, because I was the one who got up at night to change the diapers, and he cried each time he got wet, and that happened about 5 or 6 times each night. That was hard. Hedy breastfed him, of course. But the grandmother was wonderful. She arrived early in the morning, tip-toed into our bedroom, took him out of his crib and went out to bathe him, dress him, and take him out into the street for a morning stroll with the carriage, every day for months. Later on, Hedy and I went often out with him in the carriage to show off.

In the summer of 1932, we all went on vacation together, had rented a house in Unterach on the Attersee in the Salzkant mergut. We had a wonderful time there. The grandfather was also very happy, and came often out on weekends. He still had his private practice at that time. Once he wanted to step from the garden door into a boat, with Franzerl on his arm. He held on to the post and put one foot into the boat, but continued to hold on to the pest, while the boat moved away from the shore, with the result that they both fell into the water. Franzerl was for a moment under water, but nothing serious had happened to him. It was an enormously pleasant vacation otherwise and in every respect.

Editor’s note: Photos from the summers at Unterach (1932 and 1933) and other trips from those years can be found by clicking here.

That was in 1932.

At that time there were already dark clouds on the horizon. There was unrest in Germany, caused by Hitler. Hindenburg had become president and had hard times with Hitler.

There was election after election, every few months, and the Nazi party grew, till on January 30, 1933, Hitler won the majority and became chancellor. A few weeks later, they put the Reichstag building on fire, which gave Hitler a good cause to destroy the other parties, decree emergency measures, suspend the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press, as well as other liberties. We in Austria had reasons to worry, although there was still tranquility and a pleasant life as before.

I myself had special worries at that time. My brother Carl had business difficulties. Three people had founded a company and sold mineral water at prices that were lower than the prices they had paid. When Carl lowered the prices [of his mineral water too], to counteract their machinations, they lowered the prices again. This went on for a while, consuming Carl’s reserves and finally losing all of his customers. He lost also his bank credit, and had to go into bankruptcy. All of a sudden he had no business anymore.

My mother still had the house and some tenants who paid a very low rent, but not enough to live on it. Carl’s mother-in-law had a pension and perhaps small reserves, also a house with tenants, and on that they could live a meager life. It was almost a catastrophe.

One day, my sister Else came from Paris to Vienna. She had lost Carl’s support, which he had lent her regularly for years. She left Paris and all her art works, about 32 paintings in a gallery Zivy and 12 paintings in her apartment in Rue Daguerre. She had not paid her rent for a few months and left the paintings with her landlord as insurance. She had thought that she would be able to straighten out Carl’s difficulties in Czernowitz and would soon return to Paris. But she could not straighten out anything, had to remain in Czernowitz and later in Bucharest, and never saw Paris and her paintings again. The poor soul was torn away from her work, which was very prolific at that time. She had had two exhibitions in her studio, and the critiques by prominent men of the art world were very enthusiastic. This was a catastrophe for her, and the end of her work as an artist.

Carl tried very hard to earn a living in many different ways. He concentrated now on the fabrication and propagation of the Darkauer Jod salt. He also started a business of candies with the taste and smell of pine needles in Bielitz in Silesia, where a few of our relatives with the name Mechner lived, and whom he had visited often before. All that was not sufficient and did not develop into a good business, not enough to make a living. He had hard times, and my mother, Else, and Walter also had hard times, and I did all I could to help them. I was a young doctor, had just started with my practice, and it was difficult to help them, although I tried my best.

We had our pleasure with Franzerl, who developed into an adorable child. He was friendly, always ready for play and jokes. It became noticeable very early that he was an unusual child. His knowledge of animals was remarkable and I had to draw animals for him each time I came into the room. He had an abundance of toys, many animals, trains, etc., and we had to have special cabinets built below the windowsills to store all his things there. When he was very little, he liked to make trains of all kinds of things, including dishes and pots. There were great many children books and we had to read them to him. Very early, he took to drawing and painting, and he showed a great talent. We still have quite a collection of his “art” work.

He seemed to enjoy music very early and I remember that he ran around the table in our dining room, which was his room for play and his bedroom for the night, when I played on the record player the scherzo of Mendelsohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. He ran and ran and I had to play it again and again. Hedy remembers that the famous aria “La donna e mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto was also inducing him to run around the table.

He enjoyed also being taken out in winter with a big sleigh by our maid Mitzi. They usually went to the Prater, which he loved to visit, especially in springtime, when he could take rides in a merry-go-round and the Riesenrad, which he called “Titata.” The Riesenrad, of which the Viennese were very proud, was brought many years back from Chicago as a “Ferris Wheel” and installed in the Prater. His pronunciation of difficult words was then spurious or rather childish. So, for instance, when he wanted to say Eisenbahn, which means railroad, he said Ababa.

We come now to the year 1933, the year of the victory of the National Socialists in Germany. Great tension had started in Austria, when Nazi agitators began with provocative actions and manifestations. On account of that, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss suspended parliamentary government and prohibited parades and assemblies. Freedom of the press was also curtailed, and shortly afterwards the Nazi Party in Austria was dissolved. Agitation and terrorism continued, encouraged by a virulent Nazi radio campaign.

Nevertheless, for the summer of 1933 we rented again a house in Unterach on the Attersee in the Salzkammergut. It was not close to the lake, but much bigger and nicer. For that summer, I had invited my mother to join us on our vacation. It was most pleasant, since we had already many friends there from the previous year. We made many trips from there, to the Kondsee and St. Wolfgang See, also boat trips to Gmunden and Traunkirchen.

We also once went up in a group to the top of the Hoellengebirge. We had to cross the Attersee in a boat and to my dismay, Mrs. Eberl, who weighed about 280 pounds, if not more, came also and sat in the boat. We were 7 or 8 people, and the boat was overloaded. Some more people, who had bicycles, went around the southern part of the lake to the other side. Unfortunately, when we were in the middle of the lake, a strong wind started, and white-headed waves started hitting our boat. It was a nightmare, since there were only 4 or 5 inches between the water and the rim of the boat. I was a poor swimmer, and I saw myself already in the water, clinging to the boat. As a precaution, I took off my shoes. The 2 or 3 men, who had the oars, did their best to steady the boat. Fortunately, we made it to the other side of the lake.

The climbing up to the top of the Hoellengebirge was quite an undertaking. We made it, and the view from there was a great reward for our trouble. We saw there the Attersee on one side, the Traunsee with the Traunstein on the other side, and in the South the Dachstein. We stayed over night in an Alpine house, and started then the way down, after taking some pictures. Mrs. Eberl with her 280 pounds had not made it to the top, and so we did not have her in the boat, when we crossed the lake.

There was a physician in Unterach, Dr. Angelis, with whom I once went on a deer hunt, and he took a man along with another rifle, mainly for carrying the deer in case we got one. We stayed in a mountain hut over night, and went out very early. We were not allowed to talk and had to avoid stepping on branches or anything that would make a noise, and finally arrived at a certain spot, where we could sit down on a kind of bench, having before us a wide grassy area and beyond it the edge of the woods. There we were sitting and waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, a deer appeared. Dr. Angelis looked through the binoculars, and really, it was a male, since it had horns. He took his time to aim, and the other man also aimed at the buck, in case Dr. Angelis would miss. But sure enough, he missed, and the buck disappeared in the woods. And this is the end of our deer hunting story. We were, of course, very disappointed.

Once Hedy and I made a trip to Salzburg. We had tickets for the Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre), the famous Felsenbuehne (stage in the rocks), founded by and built for Max Reinhardt, the great theatre director and manager, to see Goethe’s Faust, played by famous actors in a spectacular setting. Faust was played by Paul Kartmann, Margarethe by Paula Wessely, Mephisto by Werner Kraus, and Helene Thimig played an important part in the Walpurgisnacht scene. She was the wife of Max Reinhardt. It was an unforgettable experience. We returned late at night by bus to Unterach.

My father-in-law came very often over the weekend, enjoyed it very much, bathed often in the lake. Lisa and Erich were, of course, also with us, and my mother and my mother-in-law became very attached to each other. There finally came the time when our wonderful vacation came to an end, and we all went home to Vienna and my mother back to Czernowitz. I resumed my work in my office. I was away that summer for three weeks on my regular vacation and also each weekend for two days. 

I was soon enormously busy, and our life in our beautiful apartment was again as pleasant as before.

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