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Oral history interview with Helmut von Schweitzer

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2020.160.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.1081

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    Oral history interview with Helmut von Schweitzer
    Transcript
    There will be a little red button.
    There we are.
    And I'm going to say that this is the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Mr. Helmut Von Schweitzer,
    conducted on June 18, 2020.
    Remote, long distance between London, UK and Falls Church,
    Virginia.
    We are doing this during the time of coronavirus
    and having a remote interview this way via Google Meets.
    And I will start the interview with the most basic questions
    And we'll go from there.
    So my very first question to you, Mr. Helmut, is this.
    Can you tell me the date of your birth?
    Yes.
    I can do that.
    And I thank you very much for the invitation.
    And my actual birthday was the 14th of May, 1926.
    And tell me where were you born?
    I was born in Gneixendorf, Austria.
    How do you spell that?
    G-N-E-I-X-E-N-D-O-R-F. Now Gneixendorf is now incorporated
    in the city of Krems on the Danube.
    K-R-E-M-S, the city university.
    And tell me, what was your name at birth?
    My name at birth was Helmut Alfred Karl Maria Schweitzer.
    How is it that you had so many names?
    Well, was from our founder, came from Italy,
    Maria was part of any name, with a man or a woman,
    Maria was the kind of, faith, thanks to God [INAUDIBLE]..
    The name-- Anyway, names change.
    And nowadays, of course, nobody in our family
    has Maria anymore.
    I think we, my two sisters and I were the last ones
    to have Maria attached to our name.
    But the other names are, of course, the grandparents
    or nephews and aunts who were sponsoring the child.
    Can I ask you were you born into a Roman Catholic family?
    Yes.
    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, which wasn't
    a pure Roman Catholic family.
    That's another story.
    Please tell me.
    What's involved with that?
    Well, my grandfather who died quite young, in 1901
    was Carl Maria Von Schweitzer.
    He was still Von Schweitzer then, [INAUDIBLE] Von
    Schweitzer, even.
    And he married this Swedish [INAUDIBLE],,
    who was, of course, educated as a Lutheran child in Sweden.
    And then her mother was, in fact, an Austrian Catholic.
    But that's, again, a background story.
    My grandfather, my Swedish grandfather,
    Count Carl Gustav Von Wrangel who was in the mid-'50s, last
    century, a young officer.
    In Sweden, there were no wars.
    So he came to Austria to join the Austrian army,
    fighting the French at that time in Italy.
    With -- who was the leader, the boss of Italy.
    And he did well in one of the battles.
    But he also had an affair with his regimental commander's
    daughter, who was widowed.
    And then, the future father-in-law lay down the law.
    In Austria, there is no way that you
    can exist as an officer having had a child with somebody
    not married to.
    And he was ordered to leave Austria,
    was resigned from his Austrian commission,
    and settled with his wife, hopefully then married,
    in Sweden.
    And that's what happened.
    He did it.
    So this is a story from the mid-19th century
    about your family?
    That's right.
    I mean, my family started, in fact, in a fairly grand sort
    of way in Frankfurt a century earlier, in 1750,
    when this young Italian lawyer arrived from Verona in Italy,
    in Frankfurt, and married the only daughter of the Arizina
    family.
    And then became-- well, his name,
    his surname, but Suacaria, which was, of course,
    was for the German people peculiar and difficult
    to pronounce.
    So over the first 20 years before he
    was allowed to become a citizen of Frankfurt,
    he gradually sort of Germanized his name from Suacaria
    to Schweitzer, which means, in German, Swiss.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But explain to me this.
    And it's something I've always been curious about.
    How does one, in Germany, become a Von anybody.
    So a Von Schweitzer, a Von [PERSONAL NAME] a Von
    [PERSONAL NAME] and so on, and so forth.
    And then how did it become for your family?
    Well, as I said, this grand founder of our family,
    young and bright, married the only daughter
    of the Arizina family.
    And the Arizina family were already
    a long settled Italian family.
    It was a whole community of Italian traders in Frankfurt.
    And the Arizinas had a very prosperous kind of business
    in French silks and French fashions
    and that kind of thing.
    And so as my great-great-grandmother
    was the only daughter, the parents
    were anxious to completely have her husband in.
    So he then, when he was paying a lot of money
    to the Frankfurt community, made a citizen,
    he was then Arizina Von Schweitzer.
    And of course, he was a very capable entrepreneur.
    And he made that Arizina business
    a very successful business during his lifetime,
    which the family then benefited for generations
    from the accumulated capital, [INAUDIBLE]
    certainly by the time of the First World War,
    had used it up completely.
    And that's when it became a different kind of story.
    OK.
    Well, this is very interesting.
    It means that your family has roots, really,
    very strong roots to Italy.
    Yes.
    Because the beginning comes from there.
    And also to Sweden, because there is a Swedish line.
    And the connection in Frankfurt, in the mid--
    what would have been the 18th century,
    it all starts in the mid-18th century?
    Yeah, absolutely.
    OK.
    And one becomes a Von, a more aristocratic person,
    in a variety of ways.
    And so this way was that he was allowed to be Von
    when he became a citizen.
    Is this correct?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    It wasn't as simple as that.
    You have to make a much bigger contribution to become a Von
    if you were coming from nowhere, if you weren't already
    a titled kind of person.
    He obviously very much improved the business.
    And he was a good time in the late 18th century,
    his fellow Italians moving around
    from all the different markets all over southern Germany
    to sell all these wonderful garments, material,
    that he was importing from Italy and from France.
    And then there was the king of Bavaria, who was then
    he was a king, who built all these astounding castles
    all over the place in Bavaria.
    He always needed a lot of money.
    And Schweitzer was the one, not perhaps the only one,
    who provided the king with the loans, and with the money
    to fund.
    So eventually, he became [INAUDIBLE] family became
    a Bavarian-titled family.
    Is this the mad King Leopold that they talk about so much?
    Is this that particular king who built all those castles?
    I think that is the one.
    I haven't checked up in my history books.
    But it certainly was at that time [INAUDIBLE]
    a great friend of Richard Wagner at the time,
    or later, and obviously, a bit manic.
    Tell me this.
    In the beginning, it sounds like pure Italian roots.
    And when was there intermarriage with Germans or Austrians?
    And when did the family move from Frankfurt
    to the place where you were born?
    Well, I mean, our family founder,
    he had 16 children and four boys.
    But because there was a lot of money
    and the boys wanted to become titled people in their own way,
    they had to join some sort of army as an officer to qualify.
    And so the eldest son joined the French army.
    And the second son joined the Russian army.
    And those became their--
    got their own titles in the process or in due course.
    The father's money was there to back them up in the meantime.
    And then the two youngest sons were
    left to help with the business.
    Because father was a very activist person right until he
    was 90 years old, when he actually died, and gave up.
    And he was very enterprising.
    He was a leading figure in Frankfurt.
    Curiously at that time, the Goethe family was in Frankfurt.
    The mother's parents were there.
    And the Goethe boys and the Schweitzer boys
    were sort of playing together.
    Goethe boys with Goethe--
    Wolfgang with Goethe-- complaining that the Schweitzer
    boys were also always dragging him
    to various Catholic services.
    And he had to attend.
    He couldn't just run away.
    [LAUGHS]
    And another story about Goethe was that there
    was a golden wedding.
    The parents-in-law of our founder
    had their 50th wedding anniversary,
    which in those days was almost a miracle with people
    weren't as old as that.
    And being a kind of grand manager,
    he completely revamped a country seat
    they had near the Main River.
    And all the world was invited there.
    And young Goethe, who was then a lawyer,
    also was invited because of the family connection.
    And he got a medal.
    Everybody got a golden wedding--
    it was a silver medal.
    And then later on, Goethe had one of his moments
    when he escaped from the northern countries,
    and he went to Italy.
    And in Italy he did what he usually
    did, sketch some sort of interesting buildings.
    Happened to be a fortress.
    So he was arrested by the Italians.
    And then we reduced it through the golden wedding coin.
    And he was released.
    Ha!
    And he wrote about it in his memories, memorial.
    Isn't that interesting?
    Yeah.
    So your family, it sounds like really
    was connected very closely with the epitome of German culture,
    with persons who became very well-known in German culture.
    Whether this was Goethe, whether this was Wagner,
    whether this was other people in that strata.
    And how did you learn of these stories?
    Who told you these family stories from generations past?
    Well, they were all public stories, not only Goethe,
    but other people, particularly Frankfurt historians
    and so on wrote about it.
    But the biggest problem was, of course,
    that these were Italians, you know.
    The Italians?
    I mean, Germans were really looking down at the Italians.
    OK, they were artists and that kind of thing.
    But these Schweitzers weren't artists.
    They're in business.
    And that was part of the problem,
    why the whole Italian colony in Frankfurt was sort of--
    they weren't treated like Jewish people,
    but they were certainly just allowed to be there,
    not to be too much engaged.
    But gradually, of course they assimilated.
    And but the first few generations,
    they intermarried only.
    But then, Frankfurt became the center of a united Germany,
    in the mid-19th century.
    Some Poles -- [AUDIO DROP OUT]
    Something's happened with our sound.
    Can you hear me?
    Yes, I know.
    Sorry.
    that's-- go on now.
    OK.
    Something happened to interrupt your thought.
    Yeah.
    Well, no.
    There was a voice coming out.
    I didn't know whether you didn't hear it.
    Oh, yeah.
    No, I didn't hear it.
    The message.
    OK.
    Well, what happens, you know, I think
    people in the future who will be listening to our interview
    will forgive us that sometimes this is not
    the same as an in-studio interview,
    that there are some technical glitches occasionally,
    and unexpected types of interruptions.
    So--
    Frankfurt became the big center of the German renewal.
    And that was very much anti-Catholic, anti-Italian,
    anti-foreigners kind of movement in the 19th century.
    And so the Schweitzers were, and particularly our founder,
    was looked at with some sort of--
    he didn't quite fit the German picture.
    And in actual fact, after his death,
    some Germans, a researcher, came up
    with the idea, which was then made official
    that our founder's father was actually a German called--
    what was his name?
    I must think of it.
    At the moment I can't think of it.
    It's OK.
    Which was then Italianized in Verona to Suacaria.
    So in actual fact, our founding family
    was, in fact, a German immigrant.
    [LAUGHS]
    What a a convoluted kind of circular explanation.
    But that was the way it was then.
    I mean, it wasn't only the Hitler time that
    started with Germany, on "we Germans
    are so much better, so much more cultured than everybody else."
    And so in fact there was also another.
    Our founder, of course, being also a very sort
    of outgoing kind of person.
    He built a huge Italian-style palais in Frankfurt.
    And the town--
    Does it still stand?
    Is it still in existence?
    Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
    Things went from bad to worse.
    See, the sons, the younger sons who
    survived their father tried to get rid of it
    fairly quickly, because it just didn't
    fit the new mood in Frankfurt, and in their part of Germany.
    And it was too big and too formidable to use.
    But a local butcher bought it and turned it into a famous
    hotel, the Hotel [PLACE NAME] And then,
    when in the mid-'50s, when all--
    the king of England, the Austrian emperor.
    And everybody now stayed at this beautiful hotel, who
    had a decent bathroom, and--
    [LAUGHS]
    But then, these unity [INAUDIBLE] talks
    went on the rocks.
    There was a war between Prussia and Austria in 1863, I think.
    And still, the Austrians were beaten at [PLACE NAME]
    very solidly beaten.
    And Bismarck and [INAUDIBLE] the opportunity to occupy Frankfurt
    and annexed it as their border town, the southern border town.
    And of course, that was the end of the great time of Frankfurt.
    But what did stay in Frankfurt, and I
    think the Schweitzers had a partner here,
    is that it was a German financial center.
    Of course, it will also be Jewish.
    People there.
    And Frankfurt still is the finance center of Germany.
    But--
    Then--
    Sorry.
    Does this mean-- excuse me for interrupting--
    does this mean that your family left Frankfurt
    after German reunification?
    And if my memory doesn't fail me, wasn't that around 1870
    that Germany was unified?
    Yeah.
    Sometime around then?
    Well, you know, obviously by that time,
    the Schweitzer family was a fairly widespread kind
    of family.
    Our particular ancestor left Frankfurt in 1850
    to have a military career in Austria,
    because Austria was busy having these wars, and in Italy.
    So there was some sort of heroism
    to be gained in those parts.
    But one of the cousins who stayed in Frankfurt,
    he was educated by the Franciscans in --
    And as a consequence, he became very anti-religious.
    He became a lawyer.
    And he became one of the great founders
    of the German Democratic Party.
    Which party?
    Would this be if we're talking current parties?
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    --now the 1860s.
    And he was the leader of the Social Democratic Party
    when Bismarck introduced a parliament--
    a Prussian-German-- the new German parliament.
    Well, that's interesting.
    That's very interesting.
    So this is the branch of the family that stays in Frankfurt.
    One of the branches.
    Most of the branches sort of only
    survived not by the name of Schweitzer,
    but by the name of what the daughters married into.
    We are [? occupied. ?] By the First World War,
    our branch was the only surviving male line.
    And we were then, of course, In Austria.
    Remind me again of the name of the founder of your family?
    I know you gave me the Italian name.
    But his first name-- and let's spell it out.
    And then the name of your direct ancestor.
    Was that one of his younger sons?
    And what that ancestor's name was.
    Now I haven't got all my information immediately handy.
    No, it isn't completely important.
    I just thought you might know off the top of your head
    the name of the original founder, and how we spell it.
    The Suacaria?
    The Italian.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Yeah.
    S-A-C-A-- no.
    S-U-A-C-A-R-I-A. Suacaria.
    And what was his first name?
    Yeah, what's his name first?
    Can't even think of that now.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    No.
    I have to think of it, again.
    You know, but mainly his name is so uncertain.
    I don't know.
    It's OK.
    It's OK.
    I think it was Francisco.
    OK.
    OK.
    And then your direct ancestor, was he,
    as I say, one of those younger sons
    who had stayed in Frankfurt, if it was through the male line?
    You remember that you said he had
    four sons, one who joined the French Army,
    one who joined the Russian, and two who stayed
    to help with the business.
    No.
    My-- my ancestor--
    our particular ancestor-- was, in fact, the youngest son.
    There is, in fact, a painting-- a huge painting--
    that has sort of gone from generation to generation
    to the eldest son, which is about 1 meter 60
    high, and at least 1 meter 20 wide,
    which shows the original Schweitzer family for part
    of it, that father Francisco at the back, with beautiful dress;
    his wife, Arizina, with a baby, holding a baby;
    and four other children who are dressed as soldiers, and that;
    and girls dressed in beautiful dresses around.
    A very detailed painting.
    People really sort of look at you.
    You feel they're looking at you.
    The strange thing is that the painter of that is unknown.
    I mean, that painting came right down through the family to me.
    I had it even with us in South Africa.
    But when we were coming back from South Africa,
    the Frankfurt museum were so anxious to have it,
    that they had been loaned to them by my stepmother
    in Germany after the war It's a unique painting
    in many, many different ways.
    And so I made it over to the Frankfurt museum
    about 10 years ago.
    Then clearly it's part of their holdings.
    Has it been displayed?
    Do you know--
    Yes--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    It's on full display.
    I haven't been back to see it there on display.
    But it's obviously a magnificent piece.
    And I mean, how we ever fitted it,
    particularly in the early post-war years,
    how my mother-in-law actually managed
    to fit it into all the different places
    the family then lived in is totally amazing.
    I mean, she came from a well-to-do family.
    Her father was one of the greatest lung
    surgeons in Germany.
    And he was a very, very money-saving guy.
    So she had, in fact, did the whole painting--
    what do you--
    Restored.
    Yeah, restored.
    Yes.
    Restored after the war.
    Paid a lot of money for it.
    I've got all the details of that.
    And so the Frankfurt museum they were only too
    happy then to have it, because it was done by somebody
    they would have also trusted to restore
    it, some artist in Frankfurt, actually.
    What a unique and in many ways telling
    symbol artifact of your own family history,
    a painting such as this.
    And there are few people--
    I mean, there are some.
    But there are few people who are so closely acquainted
    with the history and the personalities
    of their ancestors.
    You seem to know much more about even those who would be
    great-great-great-grandfather or grandmother than many of us do
    way back into the 18th century.
    And not only that they existed, but what kind of people
    they were, that the founder was a large, magnanimous,
    successful, open kind of extroverted personality
    who has a 50th anniversary where he gives Goethe a medal that
    gets him out of prison.
    This is a story!
    This is quite a story!
    It's an amazing story.
    It's an amazing story.
    And I mean, he did a lot of other things.
    I mean he introduced Italian ice cream to Frankfurt.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So then bring us more up to date.
    So your family settles.
    The youngest son joins the Austro-Hungarian Army.
    Do you need to pay attention to something else?
    No, it's not the son.
    It's the grandson.
    The grandson.
    Yeah.
    He was the son of the youngest son of the founder.
    And who is he to you.
    The grandson of the founder was your grandfather,
    or great-grandmother.
    My great-grandfather.
    Or maybe even my great-great grandfather.
    I'm a little bit uncertain how to work it all out.
    Let's see.
    So he's the one who becomes part of the Austro-Hungarian Army.
    And eventually does he settle in the village where
    you were born, or the town where you want?
    Well, no.
    I mean he became an officer.
    I'm not quite sure whether it was
    a captain or a major in the army, part
    of the Austrian Army.
    And with that, he could then make a professional appearance
    in Vienna.
    And in Vienna he was obviously looking
    for a wife who would meet his personal now new established
    standing.
    And so he met my great-grandmother,
    Ida [PERSONAL NAME] Her father was the first treasurer,
    or first imperial treasurer of the Austrian Empire.
    And then married him.
    Her father, later, when he had retired,
    he bought up a Schloss--
    castle-- no, not castle.
    An estate 70 k's outside Vienna--
    Gneixendorf.
    And which was then a Schloss.
    Gneixendorf it was named for.
    And with that, of course, my great-grandfather,
    he inevitably became, actually, co-owner, because his wife
    kept possession of her castle.
    But our family, their children grew up--
    were born and grew up in Gneixendorf.
    Tell me a little bit about Gneixendorf.
    Tell me what does it look like.
    Is it a village?
    Is it a town?
    Is it just a castle and some surrounding forests?
    Describe it for me a little bit.
    Well, the castle and the village are sort of connected.
    I mean, in the 14th, 15th century
    this was a sort of a boundary area
    between Eastern influences, the Hungarian, Turkish--
    I mean, Vienna, I think, was twice
    surrounded by the Turkish empire people.
    And the Catholic orders--
    [INAUDIBLE] brothers-- the Catholic brothers-- were then
    sort of regaining the land.
    And they [INAUDIBLE] building their [INAUDIBLE] in that
    particular area along the Danube there are a lot of these
    [? cloister ?] [PLACE NAME],, [? cloister ?] [PLACE NAME],,
    huge, enormous monasteries on rocks, you know, built.
    And this place in Gneixendorf, it was actually called
    Wasserhof--
    Water-hof-- which was a rather ironical thing,
    because if there's one thing that was scarce up there,
    it was water.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So that was then established, and became.
    And obviously, a village grew around it
    with the people having their holdings,
    and having to make deliveries to the landowners that was first
    in monasteries.
    But when Napoleon reigned in the early 19th century,
    and all that was--
    what do you call it?--
    not naturalized, but definitely the--
    Confiscated!
    [LAUGHS]
    [INAUDIBLE] the nuns and the monks
    went back to their standard places.
    And it became then something to be bought by people.
    And this Schloss Gneixendorf was then
    bought by a guy called Beethoven.
    No!
    Yeah.
    Really?
    It wasn't a composer, but it was his younger brother,
    who had made a lot of money supplying
    all these various armies during the wars with their bandages
    and whatever medical requirements they had.
    So he was basically rich.
    So he bought Schloss Gneixendorf.
    And he invited his brother later in his brother's life actually
    to Gneixendorf.
    And that's another story that--
    Well, I'm going to want to hear it so.
    So in other words, Ludwig van Beethoven was in your castle.
    Lived in your castle.
    Yeah, that's right, for about three months.
    And then, of course, by that time
    he was already almost-- well, we was deaf by then,
    because it was later.
    It was 1826.
    And so every conversation had to be written down to be--
    it was in writing, for him to be able to play
    a part in the conversation.
    And all those books notes have been left.
    And of course after Beethoven's death,
    they became a holy treasure-- not
    of the Schweitzer's, but with his associates in Vienna.
    Unbelievable.
    Truly unbelievable.
    So the von Schweitzers have interactions with Beethoven,
    with Goethe.
    I know.
    Yeah.
    Overwhelming.
    So when did Ludwig's younger brother sell the castle,
    and when did your great-grandfather buy it?
    Do you know approximately when that was?
    I think he brought it in--
    I mean, I'm speaking now off the record.
    I think in 1847 he bought it.
    I can take it up, and we can correct it if necessary.
    But I mean he was retiring from being the treasurer
    of the [INAUDIBLE].
    But before he'd become the treasurer,
    he had been administrator of huge imperial estates
    in Moravia.
    And so he was a very experienced agriculturalist.
    And he certainly made his mark on the land, and of course
    on the village, because automatically he became
    the major of the village.
    And he sorted them out.
    But then he died before his daughter--
    his only daughter-- married the Schweitzer [INAUDIBLE]..
    So he then had that [INAUDIBLE],, which of course ladies
    weren't allowed to do anything serious--
    studying or learning, so on.
    So my great-great-great-grandfather
    wasn't also.
    I mean, he had no agricultural beginning.
    But the father-in-law, having set it up well.
    So then they had some administrators
    to run it for them.
    And of course there was the money from Frankfurt anyway.
    So there wasn't any particular urgency
    to make money out of the estate at that stage.
    But then my grandfather, unfortunately, he
    died very young.
    He also became a lawyer.
    Again, that was a Schweitzer tradition,
    that every other generation became lawyers.
    And some of the people I haven't mentioned,
    some of the brothers, became, after the first generation,
    second generation, became mayors and leading Frankfurt citizens.
    But gradually they were absorbed in the German landscape.
    The gentleman whose daughter marries
    into the Schweitzer family, the one who buys
    this, what was his last name?
    The one who bought the castle?
    The Schloss in Gneixendorf?
    Because it wasn't Schweitzer.
    It was something else.
    That's right he was a Kaleyle.
    He gave me his first name.
    That's OK.
    How do I spell the last name?
    Kaleyle-- K-A-L-E-Y-L-E.
    Kaleyle.
    OK.
    I mean, we know much about the family.
    I mean, they originally pub owners in a village in Baden,
    on the Black Forest, on the [INAUDIBLE] other side
    of the Black Forest.
    That was, in fact, an Austrian possession.
    And so, obviously, it was natural for an upstart
    from a well-to-do village pub to go to Vienna.
    And he was then administrator-- in fact,
    there were two generations who were administrators
    for various archdukes, mainly in Moravia,
    which was a kind of honey or breadbasket
    of the Austrian empire in those days.
    And so that's how the Kaleyles came in.
    But they also became fairly renown.
    If you go to Wikipedia and so on,
    you can look up a lot of people, like grandfather, Count--
    It'll come.
    It'll come to you.
    It's amazing, the Frankfurt people.
    Yeah, Wikipedia, a lot of my records I got from Wikipedia,
    because there are official records or paintings that that
    obviously have been royalty of, --
    including, of course, that painting
    of the original founder with the children.
    I mean, that [INAUDIBLE] itself, painting with children.
    I mean that wasn't done in those days.
    I mean children.
    [LAUGHS]
    Only royal children.
    Only royal children were painted in those days.
    Not anybody else's.
    So this is quite unusual.
    Being again head of the what you might
    call the Catholic minority of Frankfurt,
    which had a big cathedral--
    emperor kind of cathedrals, from going back
    to the 12th century and all that.
    And the Schweitzer family had--
    I remember as a schoolboy I went there--
    had a huge tableau, a black big stone,
    had a tableau on one of the side walls,
    which was totally out of line with the saints,
    and the past bishops and so on, whose figures
    were all over the place too.
    But in the war, the last war, this thing was damaged.
    So I remember when I went there after the war,
    there's a big crack right through.
    And then, when I went the last time to the cathedral,
    I couldn't find it anywhere.
    It was gone.
    But they had now a small little black
    in the main body of the church on the side
    where all the seats were.
    So are you saying it was moved from one part of the church
    to another.
    This block, was it like a stone?
    It was replaced completely by a small kind of--
    not much bigger than a book-sized tablet,
    which more or less summarized what
    was on that big thing, and big golden figures.
    So let's go back.
    We're getting closer to your generation.
    Yes.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    So your grandfather-- yeah it's fine.
    This is interesting.
    This is really interesting.
    So your grandfather is a lawyer.
    And he dies young.
    He dies young.
    Well, of course, he became a civil servant
    in Vienna, or around Vienna.
    And he was looking around for a wife.
    And he met this Lilly Wrangel, who was the daughter of that
    Swedish guy who had to take his kids back,
    because he developed and became--
    you can look him up in Wikipedia--
    he became a leading writer, journalist, and hippologist.
    He was one of the, just before the cars came,
    and the horses were being replaced,
    he published a sort of Europe-wide famous book
    called Das Buch vom Pferde, which
    had many translations, and many things.
    It's an astounding book.
    I've got it.
    It means The Book of Horses?
    Is that what it is?
    Das Buch vom Pferde, yeah.
    Anyway, and so he was after.
    So very successful.
    Why he ever wanted to be a soldier, I wouldn't know.
    He was much better as a public person.
    But it meant that his wife, let's face it,
    the marriage was sort of a forced
    marriage through his father-in-law,
    or the other father.
    It became too much for her.
    He was in and out of the country on heaven knows.
    I mean, he was a very beautiful man too.
    Excuse me that I'm interrupting.
    I'm a little lost here as far as how the family tree is going.
    We are talking now about your grandfather,
    who married someone who was a countess von Wrangel.
    Is that correct?
    Yes, that's right.
    Yes, that's right.
    And then you talked about her father, who was from Sweden.
    Is that correct?
    Countess von Wrangel.
    And then you talked about the man who wrote--
    Sorry, the original Wrangel I mentioned in connection with--
    with what?
    He was the father--
    he is the father of my grandfather--
    from my great-grandfather.
    And then, of course, his daughter--
    and that is what we are-- who we are talking about now--
    was then brought by their mother back.
    They were, in fact, three children--
    two boys and my grandmother, Lilly.
    Came back to Vienna after the divorce.
    And the mother went back with the kids, who were then
    teenagers, back to Vienna.
    And they had to establish them in Vienna.
    So this is when you--
    OK, this is your maternal side of the family, is that correct?
    Father's side.
    Your father's--
    Yeah.
    My father's mother was ex-Swedish Lilly,
    Countess Wrangel.
    OK.
    OK.
    OK.
    I mean, I have known my grandmother very well.
    And I have more to say about her a little later.
    But she was the immigrant.
    And of course his father, Carl's father,
    the guy who came from Frankfurt, and had married a [INAUDIBLE]
    lady, he was totally upset when the son comes and says,
    I want to marry Lilly girl Wrangel--
    a Protestant.
    Divorce.
    Shocking.
    Shocking.
    And no money to bring in.
    I mean, [LAUGHS] Ah, impossible.
    And of course he walked out.
    He bought himself another Schloss next door to,
    or 5 kilometers up the road from Gneixendorf place,
    and sort of settled down there.
    I mean, he's sort of a [audio freeze].
    But his mother--
    I mean his wife--
    she immediately said, you marry her,
    and I'll give you my Schloss Gneixendorf.
    You can live there.
    That's what she did.
    So let's come now to your parents.
    Your grandfather has how many children?
    Your paternal grandfather has how many children?
    And where in that group does your father fit?
    Well, my grandfather had two children-- a boy and a girl.
    The boy was Carl, who married then Lilly--
    Lilly Wrangel.
    And she married into another sort of family, with an estate
    in [INAUDIBLE].
    This is your aunt.
    Yeah, my great aunt, yeah.
    Your great aunt.
    And what was her name?
    Your great aunt's name?
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Don't worry.
    It's OK.
    It's OK.
    Listen, I asked this simply because I
    assume you might have it at the tip of your tongue.
    But if you don't know, that's perfectly fine.
    I've got it.
    All my life I've had a poor memory for names.
    And it shows up in old age even more than before.
    But I've got it written down everywhere Yes,
    and I will remember too.
    Of course.
    Of course-- just five hours from now.
    That's the way it always goes.
    That's right.
    Yeah.
    Can you bring that green book with the family -- ?
    It's right on top.
    You brought it already.
    So your grandfather, when we're talking about your grandfather,
    his name is Carl.
    And he has a sister.
    And then your grandfather marries who,
    who becomes your father's mother?
    In other words--
    He was introducing Lilly, Countess Wrangel,
    to his father.
    And the father then blew his top.
    About the daughter being able to divorce family, no money,
    and Lutheran.
    I mean, it's just impossible that in Vienna
    in the 19th century.
    So she becomes your grandmother.
    Yes.
    She--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    And she had a major influence certainly on my life
    too, because her husband Carl died quite young,
    probably about 33.
    My father was only about 60 years old at the time.
    And so she had to feed the family
    through without a father, because she didn't remarry.
    Ancestors.
    The print --
    So your father is an only child?
    Or did he have--?
    No, no, no.
    They were three children.
    I can show you even a picture of them as young children,
    if I turn the laptop around.
    But I won't do it just now.
    No, no, no.
    Then you have an aunt or an uncle?
    Or do you have two uncles, two aunts?
    Well, I had an uncle and an aunt, yes.
    And my father was the youngest.
    Otto, my father, was the youngest of three children.
    And what were the names of your aunt and your uncle?
    Georg was the oldest.
    I think he was born in 1891.
    Then Matilda-- Tila, as we called her-- was born in 1892.
    And my father Otto, Otto Bernhardt, was born in 1894.
    And when did your grandfather--
    the one who was young--
    died young-- when did he die?
    What year did he die?
    1901.
    So your grandmother is really left with young children
    to bring up, from 6 years old to 12, 13 years old.
    Yeah, that's right.
    That of course before he died, Carl, great-grandfather Carl,
    ordained that a friend of his would
    be the male head of the family until the two sons will
    reach their 21 years old.
    OK.
    And-- oh, I just had-- yeah.
    I just had a question on the tip of my tongue with your dad.
    What did he die of?
    Do you know?
    At age 33?
    I think that my father wrote a complete story
    about the family, including that.
    Something to do with--
    again.
    It's OK.
    It's OK.
    I'm asking too many questions that are distracting,
    and forgive me for that.
    Yeah, yeah.
    No, no.
    It's just that I have that poor memory,
    and I should have had these things at my side.
    No, the green-backed file with all the ancestors.
    [someone in background - INAUDIBLE].
    Oh, it's here.
    Oh!
    Thank goodness I've got the file.
    Yeah, thank you.
    Anyway, I've got-- hello?
    Yes, I'm here.
    I'm here.
    I can look things up now.
    You know what I think we should do with that,
    is if later, if you have some sort of like family tree that
    is sketched out or something like that,
    if you can send me a photocopy, we can put it together
    with your file.
    And then people will know what are
    the names of various people.
    Yeah, definitely.
    I think that's a very good idea.
    OK.
    So shall we go on for the time being?
    Yes, let's go on for the time being.
    As I say, I can give you now some details,
    look them up on these family trees that I've got here.
    But I don't want to hold up the actual talk any more than you--
    OK.
    OK.
    Well, when you're ready, we'll come back,
    and I'll start asking questions.
    OK.
    Right.
    Now where do we go?
    What's the next question?
    All right.
    You know, the three children sort of grew up in Gneixendorf.
    But again, there's enough money in the family left.
    They only stayed in the Schloss Gneixendorf
    during the spring and summer, a bit of the autumn time.
    In the winter, they moved down into Krems,
    in a comfortable kind of house, because the castle was--
    I mean, you had sort of stoves in each room.
    But there were big rooms.
    And I remember from my early use,
    I mean, in the winter in particular you would be--
    if there's only one place you could be--
    close to the stove.
    Yeah.
    So I'm going to just repeat a little bit of what
    I understand from this.
    Your father is Otto.
    He's born in 1894.
    You had an Aunt Matilda, whom you called Tilly.
    And then you had an uncle Georg--
    George.
    And Georg was the oldest, born in 1890 was it that you said?
    Or 1878?
    At any rate, there are--
    1891, yes.
    1891.
    And Tilda was born when?
    What year?
    1892?
    She was born in 1892--
    21st of April 1892.
    OK.
    And Otto is your father.
    And your grandmother is Countess von Wrangel, Lilly.
    And her husband was Carl, who dies young, at age 33.
    Now let's turn to your mother's side of the family.
    What was your mother's name?
    My mother's name was Margarete von Mossig.
    How do I spell her last name?
    Mossig?
    M-O double-S I-G. It was a true Viennese family, that
    had worked its way up from being property owner in the city.
    And her grandfather, I don't know.
    Her great-grandfather--
    Anyway, her grandfather became a very senior Austrian officer
    in charge of the fortresses of the Austrian empire.
    He retired as a field marshal lieutenant--
    whatever that means.
    But he was a field marshal.
    And he was a very personable kind of person.
    I've got a very nice photograph painting from him.
    He loved Italy.
    And he married an Italian--
    French-Italian lady.
    Her father had been a consultant and doctor of the sultan
    of Constantinople.
    Oh, my goodness.
    And all this took place in Florence.
    Did your mother have brothers and sister?
    Yes, they had two sisters.
    But she was the eldest of three.
    What are the names of her-- so she's Margarete.
    Margarete, yeah.
    And the others were Evelyn, who was the second child,
    and then Helga was the youngest.
    Helga is still alive, lives in Vienna.
    How old is Helga?
    Helga's a bit younger than I am.
    But her husband was 96.
    So you have an aunt?
    She is technically your aunt?
    No, she's my --
    Well, maybe I've got myself mixed up.
    No, she's my niece.
    OK, she's your niece.
    So in other words, your mother has two sisters, one of whom
    is--
    I forgot their names.
    Your mother's Margarete.
    Then who is the second one?
    The second was Evelina.
    Evelina.
    And the third one was living --
    Spain with her-- no, I can't think of the name right now.
    It's crazy.
    Did you know these aunts very well?
    Yes, very, very well, because they used to come--
    I mean, when they were living in Vienna,
    in the summer they would always come to Gneixendorf
    for their summer holiday.
    So --
    And is Helga the child of one of these aunts?
    Yes, that's right.
    She's the child.
    She is, in fact, the youngest of all the children.
    Must have been born in 1929 or something like that.
    OK.
    So your mother comes from a family called von Mossig.
    And when did she and your father get married?
    And how did they meet?
    Do you know much about that?
    A lot.
    [LAUGHS] My grandfather, Margarete's father, apparently
    that's a kind of family saga.
    He ran away from home.
    He didn't like the Italian set-up,
    and he came back to Vienna, and wanted to join the cavalry.
    Of course, without the financial backing of his parents,
    he had a problem.
    So he married into a rich bohemian
    family, my grandmother.
    And to see if that sails through.
    He was one of the best riders of the Austrian cavalry, which
    really, in the First World War, wasn't all that much
    of a necessity anymore.
    And the other thing is he was definitely renowned
    to be the best bridge player.
    Always important.
    Always important.
    Yeah.
    He just survived long enough to be at my christening.
    But then, very soon, died.
    So I haven't, personally don't remember him at all.
    Only from photographs.
    So how is it that your parents meet?
    Well, my dad-- because that's, of course, the other story.
    When the war came, my dad had just
    finished his university entrance exam at the Krems gymnasium.
    So that means the First World War, 1914.
    The First World War.
    So he joined the Austrian Army as an officer cadet.
    And Georg had already, being two years older,
    he was already a established lieutenant
    in the Austrian Army.
    So he was a staff officer.
    He was that kind of person.
    Staff.
    But Otto sort of went out with the cavalry
    into Russian Poland, along the [PLACE NAME] River.
    And to cut a long story short, he was very soon
    a Russian prisoner of war.
    And he spent six years in Siberia before coming back.
    This is your father.
    My father, yeah.
    Oh, my goodness.
    So that means he was in Siberia in prisoner of war camps--
    Tsarist prisoner of war camps.
    Which also means that he was there
    during the Russian Revolution.
    Absolutely.
    And I mean, that's why they were held up.
    I mean Russia surrendered to Germany in early 1918,
    before Germany surrendered to the Allies.
    And these prisoners just couldn't make their way back
    along the Siberian railway.
    And that took years.
    And the thing is, when he came back,
    there's a photograph of him as he looked
    when he came back, in rags.
    His mother-- Lilly--
    said, now you must sit down, and we write down
    the whole story of your prisoner-of-war [INAUDIBLE]..
    Did he do it?
    Did he do that?
    He did it, and she did it too.
    We've got two versions of it.
    Did we ever find out?
    Not until my dad had died, that all these things turned up.
    Oh, my goodness.
    Oh, my goodness.
    I mean, it's an amazingly detailed day to day and week
    to week story of what happened, how they got on.
    And I want to [INAUDIBLE] here.
    I want it translate it you know It's a wonderful story.
    Have you had it published?
    Do you still have the manuscript?
    I've got both manuscripts.
    But it's a huge job.
    I was going to write--
    But it's unique.
    It's very unique to be able to--
    yeah.
    It's totally unique, yeah.
    So he comes back after World War I having spent six years
    as a prisoner of war.
    And he comes back in rags, you say.
    Yeah.
    And I mean they had to make sure in particular
    the final stages, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, where they were
    finally released, he wouldn't be reported as an officer,
    because communists would take out all the officers
    and put them into their concentration camp.
    Did your father ever tell you stories of Siberia
    when you were growing up, or this time there?
    Not seriously.
    My father had some very great friends,
    and one was Kurt [? Weindorf, ?] from Germany.
    Also a German.
    His same age.
    The family were the owners of Pelican writing gear,
    which was, in the pre-war time, the place for pens--
    fountain pens, everything you wanted to buy.
    And he came from that family.
    And the two boys, I mean, Uncle Kurt and my dad,
    they were just wonderful friends.
    And for me--
    Where they prisoners together?
    Had they been prisoners of war together?
    They were together for most of the time.
    But at a later stage, the Germans
    were given some sort of priority.
    They were supposed to--
    well, Kurt did get back to Germany, probably six months
    before my dad.
    Depended whether you were allowed
    on one of the few trains that were running.
    And the Germans were then unloaded first,
    and the Austrians stay behind.
    So I ask again, did he, as you were growing up,
    would he ever tell you stories, or is it
    that you would hear him speak with his friend Kurt,
    and you would pick up things that way,
    through what they were talking to with the one another.
    No, when my dad felt that we had to have some Catholic church
    attendance.
    And the local village in Gneixendorf
    had a church, but not a priest.
    And that was a neighboring village.
    And of course, neighbors don't like each other.
    No, those Catholics priests in those villages weren't exactly
    the most--
    Christian!
    [LAUGHTER]
    But dad certainly, you know for formal occasions,
    we would [INAUDIBLE],, - audio/video freeze which was
    a 2 kilometer walk.
    But I mean for Sunday service, when the weather was OK,
    we would walk down 4 kilometers to Krems,
    to one of those beautiful Catholic churches, yeah.
    But then Dad would sort of--
    my dad wasn't a big talker anyway.
    But then he would sort of talk about being a prisoner of war
    in Siberia, making windows, covers for farmers,
    and that kind of thing.
    But having now read the greater part of his story,
    the real story is quite different.
    But he and Kurt [? Wandorf ?] definitely
    became a kind of technical workshop in the officer camp,
    making their own home, and making
    theater arrangements, which apparently was a great thing.
    And the Russians were totally fake.
    They would fill the auditorium time and time again
    when these Austrians had their theater performance.
    And Dad and [? Wandorf-- ?] Kurt [? Wandorf, ?] were doing all
    the mechanical side of it.
    Making their own tools.
    Well, they came--
    I mean there's many aspects to this, and we won't go into--
    I mean, I'm fascinated, but we won't
    go into the Siberian story here, only to note
    that there's an awful lot there.
    But quite honestly we children didn't seriously know about it
    until after his death.
    He's died in 1891.
    No, your father didn't die in--
    1991, sorry.
    My goodness.
    That is--
    A very recent kind of knowledge.
    I mean, we knew that he had been in Siberia,
    but that wasn't a subject that was talked about.
    Do you think it influenced him?
    Because it comes at a crucial point in his life
    when he's a young man.
    He has just come of age, and then enters the army.
    And as he enters, he gets arrested and sent there.
    I mean, when he leaves he's still a young man.
    He's still 25, 26 or whatever.
    Whenever he gets back, he hasn't yet hit 30 years old.
    He was only 20 years old when he joined the Austrian Army.
    So he was, obviously, still 20 years old when he was caught,
    a prisoner of war.
    What kind of personality do you remember your father
    having when you were a young boy?
    Was he someone who was more distant?
    Was he someone who was reserved?
    Was he someone who seemed traumatized now in hindsight?
    He wasn't traumatized.
    I mean, he had two most fantastic wives,
    and two wonderful friends.
    I mean, sometimes friendships [that you know I stood
    in awe of.
    And one, of course, was Kurt [? Wandorf. ?]
    And the other one was a Viennese friend who
    introduced him to my mother.
    So it was a Viennese friend who introduces him
    to Margarete von Mossig.
    Yes.
    And he, I think he was also in love with Margarete von Mossig.
    When did your parents marry?
    1922-- November 1923--
    just when there was the inflation, which virtually
    erased all money [INAUDIBLE] in Germany and Austria
    particularly.
    And did they settle then in Gneixendorf?
    They did settle in Gneixendorf.
    And Grita turned Gneixendorf around.
    She was a real Viennese girl.
    She was the first girl in her family-- don't forget,
    girls didn't go to school in those days.
    It was first generation.
    She was the first generation who graduated
    for university entrance in Prague of all places.
    This is your mother?
    My mother, yeah-- Grita.
    Wow.
    Yeah, she is a very bright--
    bright woman.
    And of course, when the war finished, and was lost,
    and her dad went back to Vienna, didn't
    want to go to work anymore.
    So there wasn't much money in the family.
    She went out and created a club for society youngsters
    for reading books--
    famous books, and generally sort of a social club.
    She was a clairvoyant kind of person.
    But nobody talked about it.
    We only found out, again, behind the times.
    But she was quite an amazing kind of person.
    And of course, Schloss Gneixendorf
    was the ideal place.
    She would have paying guests and family guests.
    The house was always full of guests, and so on.
    And that's what I remember when I was just a little boy.
    Amazing, amazing people there, who were there for a time;
    of course, the regulars.
    And in particular, of course, that friend,
    the great inventor--
    Don't worry.
    It will come.
    It will come.
    It will come.
    He was a count of something.
    Riemesberg.
    Count Riemesberg.
    He was a magic person, with photography.
    And of course, my mother loved being photographed,
    being a beautiful person.
    She also had a lot of painter friends who would paint.
    So they had all these paintings and photographs
    which to some extent still around the family.
    But she was a sort of heart and soul of the party.
    And suddenly my dad, who was basically,
    as far as the rest of the family is concerned,
    he was the youngest.
    He had trouble getting through the gymnasium.
    So Georg passed, [? took ?] colors, and so on.
    He was a prisoner of war in Russia.
    I mean come on.
    I mean, what can you expect from that youngster?
    So he had a hard time reasserting himself.
    But Grita, his wife did a fantastic [INAUDIBLE]..
    But she was only there for a short time.
    Tell me what happened.
    What happened with Grita.
    Well, he was-- hello?
    Where are you?
    Can you see me?
    Yeah, now I can see you.
    He had, very quickly, four children.
    And then she died of blood poisoning
    when I was about three years old.
    So you don't have many memories of her.
    I have only got just a few.
    But I'm the only one of us kids who has any physical memories.
    But we-- particularly with my sister, Rosemarie,
    who is next to me--
    a year and a half younger than I am--
    we've been really in a way possessed by her.
    Not at first, because we didn't even
    know she died, because Dad was absolutely--
    he ruled that nobody would talk about her.
    She just, next morning, she wasn't there.
    Maybe my first clear memory was one evening,
    when at night my parents at [? least ?]
    nightly picked me up from the bed in the children's room,
    and walked me to their bedroom.
    And there was my mother was lying there in the bed.
    And she kissed me.
    She only kissed us on the [INAUDIBLE]..
    Kissed me.
    No words spoken.
    Dad took me back to the bedroom.
    I am certain I can't say it--
    I can't be sure--
    that that was the night she died, because we didn't see her
    anymore.
    And servants were carrying on as normal.
    We were being fed and so on.
    The only thing is Fila and my grandmother
    would be much more around with us children,
    and Fila, of course, then took charge of Imgard
    who was only a few weeks old.
    And she, in a way, became her mother.
    The two children and her [? maid ?]
    were mother and daughter.
    For a child, I can't imagine what
    it is like, because you experience,
    at that age, the world through your emotions,
    and completely through your emotions.
    So here is a presence, and then it's gone,
    and no explanation as to what happened.
    And this happens to you when you're three years old.
    And you had two younger sisters?
    Yeah, two younger.
    OK.
    One of them is Rosemarie, did you say?
    Yeah, Rosemarie.
    Rosemarie and I were very close.
    And we were both, in a sense, realizing,
    as we grew up, that we, in some way, possessed our mother.
    It's very strange.
    How do you explain that?
    How does it manifest itself?
    In what ways would you be--?
    Well, OK.
    One of the obvious things, my sister Rosemarie,
    who was [INAUDIBLE] at the moment.
    She's made it a definitely ruling long, long ago
    that she'll be buried in the same grave
    as my mother in Gneixendorf.
    We never really seriously discussed.
    I mean, she obviously collected anything
    that could be found from our mother, she would collect.
    And she was in Germany the whole time.
    So she obviously had a much better chance of me,
    who was staying after the war in England,
    and then in South Africa later.
    But even without--
    I could [INAUDIBLE] she would do something
    that I would have wanted her to do without having actually
    asked her.
    And it was that kind of thing.
    And before we went to South Africa,
    I was working for ITT, huge American
    combine for the German-speaking countries.
    And we were living in kind of a medieval little town
    called Markgroningen, outside of Stuttgart.
    And Pam had insisted that our children
    would be born in England.
    And so our daughter was born before we left England.
    But Carl was-- she especially went back to that hospital,
    where she'd made friends with nurses, to have him.
    And then she brought the baby back to Markgroningen.
    And then she persuaded the sister
    who was helping with the birth to live with us,
    looking after the baby, because she was going out to work.
    Pam was never one for staying behind.
    And then she said she was a medium.
    So we said all right.
    One evening we'll have a session.
    We had this medium, this board, Ouija board or something.
    What's it called?
    And so we have this session.
    And of course, in no time at all who comes up?
    My mom.
    And she doesn't stop talking about us being in Johannesburg.
    But Johannesburg, South Africa, were not on our program at all.
    We didn't like what was going on there.
    And so in the end, I said to Mary,
    for heaven's sake let's stop.
    So we stopped.
    And two years later we were in Johannesburg.
    Well, there are some of us who believe in things
    that we can't explain.
    It is part of Catholicism too, a kind of mystical--
    I mean though most priests would not approve
    of any kind of Ouija board.
    But there's a mystical aspect to the faith
    of people who believe in things they can't explain,
    and other people who dismiss it as, well, this
    is all some sort of snake oil.
    But for you, when you mentioned that your mother had
    clairvoyant tendencies, did your medium, when
    you spoke with her, this lady who took care of your children,
    did she know that?
    Did you share any details about your mother at all with her?
    No, not at all.
    We didn't really know then that she was a medium.
    That only then sort of gradually emerged from there.
    And Rosie asked Dad--
    our father-- some questions.
    And he said, yeah, she was a bit clairvoyant,
    but then changed the subject.
    It wasn't something the family talked about.
    Then of course, when his sister, who kept diaries, died,
    we found all her diaries.
    She was horrified about Grita's ability
    to influence other people--
    the fellows and so on.
    She never said it to my Dad, but she said --
    Otto should never marry her, [INAUDIBLE]..
    This is your aunt Matilda.
    Yeah, she wrote that in her diary
    that she certainly wasn't the person to stand up to Dad
    and tell him what he must do.
    But the boys told her what to do.
    And she didn't marry the guy who wanted to marry her.
    I don't know to what extent they were in love or not.
    But the boys didn't think he was the right [? guy. ?]
    Tell me, who is your youngest sister?
    You had yet another sister.
    Is that correct?
    Yes, Imgard.
    She was the one who was about six weeks when her mother died.
    And she and my dad have always been at, sort of,
    loggerheads, because she always felt that that Dad was
    blaming her for what happened.
    Did he?
    She talked [INAUDIBLE] psychologists about him
    and so on.
    But I think the real cause was probably the wound that I had.
    What is that?
    What do you mean by the wound that you had?
    The real cause--
    We had all these Victorian toys, which my parents had.
    They were sort of passed on to us,
    because they couldn't afford to buy us new toys.
    And a toy elephant that was on wheels, and heavy iron things.
    And I crushed my toe on my left foot.
    And I got this osteomyelitis which in those days
    was incurable.
    I had two operations in the hospital in Krems,
    and footbaths forever more.
    But eventually did it did heel.
    The doctors-- the [INAUDIBLE] doctors-- said,
    I can't believe it.
    In post-war it would have been no real problem.
    So was this, let's say, lead paint on that truck?
    Was there some sort of chemical that infected
    your toe that caused blood poisoning, like you
    said it was with your mother?
    I mean, nobody was, at that time, trying to find out that.
    I mean my mother had blood poisoned,
    and the doctor couldn't rescue her, and that was that.
    And then my dad, the way he is, once a person is dead,
    don't talk about it.
    That must have been very hard for children.
    For some adults maybe they can adjust,
    but for children, as I said earlier, there was a presence,
    and then there is no person.
    What happened to them?
    And particularly it's your mother.
    So it's a key person, if not the key person in your life.
    Well, I mean, in a sense, our mother got--
    I mean, or we got our own back--
    because we were influenced by her all our life.
    There are plenty of other instances of Rosie and I,
    and also the way we sort of, without talking about it,
    she would do something that I would have liked to do,
    or vice versa.
    I mean, I translated her latest book into English,
    just before she died.
    We together, over the--
    Excuse me.
    Does this mean your mother wrote a book, or Rosie wrote--
    Rosie.
    I mean Rosie became a famous professor in Germany.
    What was her full name then?
    Did she marry?
    No, she didn't marry.
    So it was von Schweitzer.
    Rosemarie von--
    Doctor Rosemarie von Schweitzer.
    OK.
    OK.
    And the image that I'm getting of your father
    is that he was a little harsh, or a little bit
    cut off from emotions, cut off from whatever feeling.
    It must have been very hard for him to lose his wife.
    If he was the one who has been in the shadow,
    and she was the shining star, and all of a sudden she's gone,
    it's like the shining star is gone, and it's very painful.
    Yeah.
    Well, he fell in love with my wonderful stepmother
    not much more than six months after my mother died.
    OK.
    And it was not something that he deliberately brought about.
    But he went to an agricultural exhibition in Germany.
    And he met there his cousin Rango,
    from one of her grandmother's siblings,
    who had married into the German family.
    And who was there?
    Ula Ripke.
    And the two fell in love with each other.
    And of course, there again, there was that kind of scene
    that her father said, if you marry this guy,
    we won't talk anymore.
    So what was wrong with your father in his eyes,
    in Ula Ripke's father's eyes?
    What was wrong with your father there?
    Because he had three kids?
    First of all, he was a Catholic.
    Secondly, he had already three children
    from a different marriage.
    And third, his estate sounded OK,
    but it wasn't particularly economically viable,
    which is all correct.
    But she married him anyway.
    Married him anyway.
    And afterwards he was--
    I didn't have any real grandfathers.
    But he was a true grandfather to me.
    How nice.
    How nice.
    So tell me about all--
    He was completely, I mean, outraged.
    Because he was the sort of guy--
    he came from Poland.
    And he came.
    He had, the parents again, village pub.
    Father dies.
    Mother has the pub now, suddenly.
    She's got this.
    Only two children.
    One, the girl, gets married.
    She's got a son and three sisters.
    Look, that boy is so gifted.
    He must go to high school.
    So she sells the farm to the pub.
    And so he can go to the symposium, to the gymnasium.
    He goes to the gymnasium, in Posnan.
    He goes off to Freiberg in Germany,
    becomes a young doctor.
    I mean he just went from strength.
    He was the kind of guy who was totally
    devoted to what he was doing.
    When I knew him, he was on the point of retiring.
    He was heading a huge [INAUDIBLE] sanatorium
    on the top of a hillside in central Germany.
    And he'd written books.
    He was contributing to medical periodicals.
    I think he's been translated.
    At the time he was probably one of the leading lung
    surgeons in the world.
    Of course, the war sort of cut everything off.
    You're talking about World War II, now, or--?
    Yes, World War II, yeah.
    But I went through, for one year,
    in 1940 to '41, when he was retired in Wiesbaden,
    in Germany.
    And that was the first time when I went to a city high school.
    And I had good marks on my local high school thing.
    But the headmaster said, I don't know
    what these countryside [? city ?] towns do.
    I think you got to take tests in all the main subjects.
    I said tests in all these subjects.
    I failed all of them.
    So I went back to Grosspapa, and I said, look.
    I mean, this is terrible.
    I don't want to start with one year back in high school.
    And he said, no, we'll show them.
    Professor Doctor Ripke with me, headmaster bowed.
    [LAUGHS]
    And the headmaster said, now look, we can reconsider,
    if you, a professor will see to it that your nephew will get
    the necessary study help, we'll accept him provisionally,
    and we'll see at the end of the year
    whether he'll make the grades, which is what happened
    [? with him. ?]
    So this your stepmother's father--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    --who is like your Grandpapa.
    Who violently argued against his daughter marrying my dad.
    But once the marriage was done, the typical Prussian way,
    then I was part of the family, no matter what.
    Did they have children?
    Did Ula and your father have children?
    Not Ula.
    Funny enough, her mother was Margarete,
    and his name was Otto, exactly like my parents--
    name, first names.
    So you didn't have any stepbrothers and sisters?
    Oh, no.
    They were our stepmother's--
    they were siblings.
    They were four boys and two girls.
    So you're saying that she had brothers and sisters.
    Yes, we were the eldest child.
    And then there were three boys and one girl,
    and then [INAUDIBLE].
    OK.
    OK.
    Most of the boys died in the war.
    World War II.
    World War II.
    How many years did you live in Gneixendorf?
    How long was your childhood there?
    '26 to '35-- nine years.
    Well, eight years something.
    And why did you leave?
    Why did the family leave?
    Because as grandfather Ripke already foresaw,
    it just wasn't possible.
    And then it was 1932.
    It was still during the big world Depression.
    And that definitely sort of finally
    killed over my dad's effort to--
    I mean, he sort of turned the farm around
    into something American-style.
    Just be a huge chicken farm, and--
    what's it called?
    [NON-ENGLISH].
    What--
    What was the word that you--
    Combine harvester.
    Oh, OK.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So it was really mechanized farming there.
    And then, of course, there was Ula Mutti is saying look,
    you know.
    I've got connections.
    She was a household teacher, trained household teacher.
    She was the other person, woman, in the family who
    had a full up to university education,
    for the first time in the family.
    And she was a very, very capable person.
    So tell me about her personality a little bit.
    I mean, I hesitate to say it, but also did
    she replace the mother?
    Was she really like the mother?
    No, she was totally different.
    But she was an outstanding mother, that's for sure.
    She made everybody work.
    Everybody had to do something.
    There was no let-up.
    You had to learn things, do things, so on.
    I mean, but she was also a good entertainer.
    I mean, particularly also [INAUDIBLE]
    way she picked up from my first mother,
    all her relations and so on, she kept up all the relations.
    But she had that managerial ability,
    which I don't think my real mother had.
    Was she kind?
    Yeah, very kind.
    She was tough, but very kind.
    She involved you in it.
    You had to do things with her, and run with her,
    and do this, and go, and so on, which sometimes, I mean,
    I often tried to escape it, to get into the library.
    Nobody was looking [INAUDIBLE] me.
    That was the thing.
    But there was no let up with her.
    She was a--
    [LAUGHS]
    And so you described the castle to me.
    You described the town a little bit, the village.
    And Krems is nearby.
    Did you have a lot of interaction
    with your neighbors, with the neighborhood kids,
    with people in both of these places?
    Or this world that you have describe
    for me sounds so full, and so many
    different adult characters with their very
    interesting biographies.
    Was that enough?
    Well, in Austria, the thing was, of course, the Schloss people
    wouldn't mix with the villagers.
    But I took the liberty.
    I think I was the first boy.
    I just wandered out, and played with a [INAUDIBLE],,
    and met boys and girls, basically children
    of our workers, and then the other children.
    And then, of course, I had to join, for the first time
    again with the family, the local primary school.
    So again, met with a firmer, further kind
    of range of village people-- the lower village,
    not just the upper village.
    I think that my sisters--
    well, Rosie also had to go to the village school.
    So that was a break from the previous generation,
    that where we [INAUDIBLE],, especially the girls, not --
    only had home education anyway.
    Nothing proper schooling.
    Was this an entirely Catholic place?
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    Did you ever meet any Jewish people
    in these years when you were living there?
    [LAUGHS] Yes.
    I mean, when my real mother was, and she had all these guests
    in-- paying guests and otherwise--
    there were Jewish people among them.
    I remember a Jewish artist who was making
    these small figures of people--
    men, women, and children--
    in traditional dresses, for Tyvol
    and different parts of the country.
    My dad put one of his chicken stable things,
    and it had to sort of special [INAUDIBLE],,
    which we pull along onto the tractor.
    He put that up behind our garden.
    And he had that as a studio.
    Oh, so this person, he had an enlarged chicken coop
    as a studio?
    Yeah, that's right.
    But this is a time when you were three years old.
    Yeah, that's right.
    And you remember.
    You have this-- yeah.
    Back then there was another lady, a Hungarian lady,
    who was married to a local manufacturer [INAUDIBLE],,
    to a manufacturer.
    What was her name?
    --
    Anyway, she was a beautiful, black haired youth
    married to him.
    Anyway, and she was one of a family
    that my mother had introduced to Gneixendorf.
    And she was the sort of life and soul of the party, very lively,
    very, very much my mother's type person.
    And she gave Rosie a black doll as a present.
    And for some reason, that black doll
    meant an awful lot to Rosie.
    And when we were on the train to resettle in Germany,
    she was clutching her black doll.
    And the parents were getting more and more
    anxious before the German border.
    This means your father and your stepmother?
    Stepmother.
    And my stepmother had bought a beautiful white doll for her,
    and tried to sort of hand it to her.
    And she was refusing to hold her.
    In the end, my dad, just before we got to the frontier,
    just grabbed the doll-- the black doll-- from her
    and took it away.
    And Rosie was so upset, screamed and cried.
    Can't believe it.
    And even as a university professor,
    she would come up with how terrible
    it was when that baby doll was dragged off.
    It was amazing.
    A university professor saw this and came up--
    oh, are you saying your--
    Rosie becomes a university professor.
    She had become a university professor.
    And she still was suffering from that blow.
    And Dad just grabbed that black doll from her.
    Why do you think he did that?
    Because of the German frontier.
    Could you imagine the Nazi kind of inspectors, what would they
    have done?
    I mean, they would have made a big scene about it.
    And we were trying to immigrate to Germany
    with a clean kind of ticket.
    So I want to go back a little bit here.
    The one part that you told me that sounded so jarring
    is when you said that you had gotten some kind of infection
    and poisoning in your toe because of toys that had been
    handed down from Victorian era.
    And the reason why they're handed down
    is that your parents don't have enough money
    to buy new toys for you.
    Is that correct?
    Yeah, that is correct.
    Because I mean with a big castle like that,
    and the economic situation, and my dad
    having to take over from people who were supposed
    to look after the farming side during the war, who
    weren't qualified, and who grabbed stuff for their own.
    I mean my dad said something.
    there were weeds all over the place.
    And it's in a terrible state, the estate,
    because there were no--
    there was no man around to deal with it.
    There were servants who were supposedly
    looking after the estate.
    So is this what you mean when you
    say that the founder from the 18th century
    had created a fortune that by the time
    you are born most of it has been dissipated.
    Most of it has disappeared.
    Yeah, definitely completely disappeared.
    And then of course the inflation wiped out any sort
    of bank money altogether.
    So everything had to be done from square one again.
    And of course they weren't used to it.
    That's the problem.
    And they'd been living, growing old,
    in a totally different place.
    Yeah.
    You're right.
    I mean the whole transformation of one kind of society
    in the early part of the 20th century
    to a different kind of society, and how people were then
    going to make their living and make ends meet,
    it just completely went upside down.
    But if you were, for example, from a noble family,
    you didn't have to think about things like that
    in such a business way before.
    The trouble is a noble family with money is OK.
    Without money it's even worse off than other people,
    because you haven't learned to work hard.
    But my dad of course, he had to carry
    this change, because Georg, his elder brother, was no good.
    Why was Georg no good at this?
    He was a know-all.
    He was a total failure.
    I mean, he was a kind of Nazi, but then we, the family,
    didn't know what he was.
    He was just a [? figure ?] man.
    But I mean he didn't have any children.
    Did he not marry?
    Yeah, he married.
    But he saw a beautiful girl on the tram in Vienna
    while he was studying law, which he never finished.
    And he fell in love with her just like that.
    She married him.
    And You know Tilla wrote in her diary, not our kind.
    But aunt Emmie, as she turned out to be,
    was a wonderful aunt.
    I mean she represented everything
    that Georg didn't represent.
    And he [? stole ?] off my dad, and he just
    couldn't get on at all.
    Was there any friction as to inheritance?
    Because there are the three children, and your father
    is the youngest.
    And usually the youngest does not inherit things.
    Well, I mean, Georg had at least Langenfeld.
    That was his grandfather had decided, because he so
    disapproved of his son's wedding that he
    had made it a legal deal that his son, his children,
    would not be able to inherit Langenfeld--
    Schloss Langenfeld.
    They could only utilize it.
    The first person to inherit it would be the eldest grandson
    when he reached the age of 21.
    And that happened to be me, that 21.
    OK.
    Langenfeld is something that we haven't spoken about.
    So I'm a little bit confused.
    But the point of it, that you're saying here,
    is that there was another family property, and your uncle--
    your father's older brother--
    gets this property.
    So it means that he is not in line
    for the Schloss Gneixendorf.
    Did I say it right?
    Gneixendorf?
    No, I think because he had the use of Schloss Langenfeld,
    he stepped aside for Otto to sort all the problem, which
    was one of the few good things he did in his life,
    because Otto was the person to do it.
    Georg certainly wasn't that kind of person.
    He wanted to be a diplomat.
    He wanted to charge about Vienna.
    He became a Nazi.
    He was imprisoned when Dollfuss was killed.
    He became imprisoned again, of course, at the end of the war.
    And the new Austria immediately imprisoned him.
    And of course the Schloss Langenfeld was confiscated.
    There was no Schweitzers about to protest about it.
    And that was that.
    So this is something that we're going
    to want to talk about later, in a bit more detail.
    But for our purposes right now, you've
    described a little bit about your uncle Georg.
    One of the things that is of interest to me
    is when 1933 comes around, and Hitler comes to power,
    you are seven years old.
    Is that correct?
    Six, seven years old?
    Do you remember that?
    Do you remember any talk about that at home
    or in the neighborhood amongst people,
    amongst your father and your stepmother, your grandmother,
    and so on?
    Any kind of knowledge of what is happening there?
    Well, indirectly yes.
    I mean, obviously, the Austrian president didn't
    want to join at that stage--
    think it was.
    I'm asking now about 1933.
    This is in Germany, not in Austria.
    1933, obviously, Hitler took over Germany.
    But by that time, Hitler wasn't--
    I mean I think the rest of the world thought, well, here's
    another one.
    You know, they had a whole series of changes.
    And then this Hitler boy, I mean, from nowhere, I mean,
    he hasn't got a chance.
    That was that kind of atmosphere.
    Is this what you remember from the conversations at home?
    Or were there conversations at home?
    Well, politics with not a subject the family
    talked about in public--
    certainly not with children.
    Did you know that there was such a thing
    as a Herr Hitler in Germany?
    Well, later on, yes.
    But at that time, no.
    I mean, the whole family wasn't politically minded.
    So you know, it was a --
    I mean, Georg was the political guy.
    But I mean, he was mostly in Vienna.
    And he would talk down, certainly not to children,
    for heaven's sake.
    OK.
    Did you ever hear him speak to your father,
    and you witnessed his those types of--
    They avoided speaking to each other as much as they could.
    They didn't like each other, then.
    No.
    OK.
    OK.
    And was this personal?
    In other words, was it because they just never
    had gotten along?
    They were brothers?
    They were just totally different people.
    And Georg had that habit of putting people down.
    He was the great guy.
    And you really, with Otto having a trouble
    to get his Matura at the high school,
    and being interested in farming, for heaven's sake.
    And then, being a prisoner of war [INAUDIBLE]..
    And then losing his eldest son.
    I mean for heaven's sake, I mean Otto was just no good at all as
    far as he was concerned.
    Who was the oldest son that Otto loses?
    Gottfried.
    Gottfried was the first, my older brother.
    Again, he was never talked about.
    The family was having a big garden party,
    and suddenly Gottfried was missing.
    They found him drowned in a rain water collecting.
    Thing.
    Sadly-- I've learned that later from different sources--
    little boys are apt, when their face goes underwater,
    to stay under water and remain still, not to struggle.
    And that's happened just virtually around the corner,
    with the whole family having tea and chatting away.
    So there were lots of things that uncle Georg looked down
    upon your father on.
    It was from nature, you know, right from early youth.
    I mean, there was a huge letter from you
    know from Tilla which is written by Lilly's father.
    Lilly, one thing she did, when her mother either already
    had died or something like that, she
    got in touch with her father again, and said,
    we will come and visit you this summer.
    So they went to [PLACE NAME] Sweden, Lilly
    with her three children, and stayed the whole summer there.
    And then, at the end of the year,
    grandfather brought her this amazing letter--
    [INAUDIBLE]---- an amazing letter, saying what a wonderful
    experience it was to meet her again.
    Obviously, she was his favorite daughter.
    And all the weeks together.
    But then he sort of says, well, you're lovely children,
    but he says, well, Georg, he's a very nosy and know-all kind
    of guy.
    He wants to be a diplomat, but really, he's
    got to learn to be friends with people.
    He found him very, very different.
    Tilla, well, she's such a nice girl, but she's so lazy.
    [LAUGHS] She hasn't got any will to do anything.
    But Otto, when he comes in the room,
    everything is [INAUDIBLE],, and it's wonderful.
    He is the most amazing, lovely child.
    How interesting.
    How interesting.
    So this is from his Swedish grandfather,
    who had not met him before.
    And about how old do you think Georg was at that time?
    Around 7-- 16.
    Oh, my goodness that can be such a difficult age.
    When someone is 16 years old and they know everything.
    But it's telling.
    It's telling that this is something
    that you, that various members of your family
    see, the older generations, and then
    your own perception, and then your father's and your uncle's,
    you know, that they don't get along;
    they're too different of personalities.
    And that your uncle has some sort of arrogance
    to him, some abrasiveness, some arrogance do his personality.
    I mean, to me he wasn't abrasive.
    But indifferent.
    I mean, we went with my stepbrother,
    we spent a summer holiday at Langenfeld, 1941.
    No.
    1940.
    1940.
    Who is your stepbrother?
    I didn't think you had a stepbrother.
    Yeah, Peter.
    My stepmother had also three children.
    So we were a total of six children.
    OK.
    OK.
    So Peter and you spent a summer there
    with Uncle Georg at Langenfeld.
    I mean, it was aunt Emmie, really, we spent the time with.
    Uncle Greg, well, he took me, when he went hunting,
    he took me with him.
    But there was very little talk.
    You had to be quiet anyway, not to disturb the--
    And he took me on a weekend I think to Vienna.
    He had a flat in Vienna.
    He never had a uniform.
    He was supposed to be a Nazi, but he certainly
    didn't talk about it.
    But, you know I was in the Hitler Youth
    then, in the Jungvolk, a junior kind of leader.
    But would he talk to me about it?
    Not for any thing.
    If the whole family--
    I mean, obviously, Otto and he wouldn't talk much.
    But the rest of the family, and aunt Emmie,
    who was a nice, talkative person,
    knew nothing too much about Georg.
    But I mean as soon as the Nazis were gone,
    he was put into prison.
    You had mentioned that he was arrested
    when Dollfuss was assassinated.
    Is that right?
    Yeah.
    He must've been in some way associated
    with the group who had, including
    that guy who actually shot him.
    I don't remember or know exactly what kind of guy it was we're
    talking.
    But it was obviously a underground, undercover Nazi
    group.
    So this would have been in the mid '30s.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    I think it's 1936.
    I'll check it up.
    One of the curious things, though--
    so when your parents leave--
    that is, your stepmother and your father
    and the six of you--
    leave Austria, and you're on your way to Germany,
    do you sell the castle?
    Do you just leave the castle?
    Well, the castle is yet another big story.
    The castle was actually sold, yes, to a Viennese paint
    manufacturer.
    And that when the Nazis took over,
    the paint manufacturer may have been a Nazi himself.
    I'm not connected or sure about it.
    But when the Nazis took over Austria,
    the German Army took over Schloss Gneixendorf,
    and made a deal with this paint manufacturer, who really wanted
    the Schloss, because he had a lot of spare money,
    rather than actually live there.
    And so it was taken over by the German Army.
    And they put a big water pump kind of thing from the Danube
    there.
    They put an airport or a airfield
    there, because it's fairly flat ground.
    And in the war, it was one of the biggest German prisoner
    of war camps--
    that is Russian prisoners and French prisoners, [INAUDIBLE],,
    and English.
    Americans in the end.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    The Americans in the end made a big movie about this camp.
    Was it also called Gneixendorf?
    No.
    It was called-- what was it called?
    I'll have to look it up.
    I'm sorry!
    [LAUGHS] But it was one of those big postwar monumental American
    movie, with, of course, American prisoners, or a couple of them,
    escaping and being [INAUDIBLE].
    Wow.
    Wow.
    So another question that I have--
    so in other words, the castle is sold.
    It leaves your family after having been in your family
    almost a century, not quite a century.
    83 years.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And is it sold when you moved to Germany,
    or is it sold for or--?
    OK.
    OK.
    When we moved.
    SO that was all sort of simultaneous.
    But then we moved in '36.
    And in 1938, Germany occupied Austria.
    You know, it was welcomed in a big way, of course.
    And then built, made it in a big army station and prisoner
    of war camp during the war.
    And then, of course, at the end of the war,
    it was part of the Russian zone of occupation of Austria.
    And of course, the Russian Army occupied the place.
    When the [PERSONAL NAME] family, what was left of it,
    got the thing back, it was hardly inhabitable.
    There was one of these obviously not the [INAUDIBLE]
    that they bought the place.
    But one of the children, one of the sons, who was a bit queer,
    he had moved in there.
    He was a lonely kind of fella.
    The way he made things pay for him, he was looking after--
    how you call it?--
    mentally sick people who were strong enough
    to sort of, under control, live their own lives,
    rather than stay in a sanatorium.
    And were sort of disabled, as they called it.
    And they were moving around there.
    And that sort of gave him enough cash to stay there.
    But everything was obviously falling sadly to pieces.
    And then we as youngsters went visiting there.
    He's kind of nice guy, if you could find him.
    But to see that place gradually sort of going to seed.
    And then eventually it was officially ordered to be--
    I mean [INAUDIBLE].
    What was his last name?
    You had mentioned it.
    The people who bought the castle from your family?
    What was their last name?
    This paint company?
    Yeah, I know.
    It's so stupid.
    It's OK.
    Listen, I don't want to make you feel bad about that.
    These are just details that come to my mind.
    And if you don't remember, it's OK.
    I can easily look it up again.
    And I have to look it up to find out.
    But it all takes time, that looking up.
    And you know something.
    What it will be is that we're going to have
    many parts of this interview.
    And so some of these maybe we can, after we finish here,
    before we have the next one, you can jot down,
    and we just mention them when we start up again.
    Yes.
    OK.
    So here's another question, before we go to Germany.
    And it's my final Austrian-related question, is--
    was there any trepidation on the part
    of your father and your stepmother, Ula, and any of you
    to move to Germany, actually because
    of the political situation?
    Not at that stage, because I think Hitler at that stage
    was successful.
    He sort of moved it back to the Saarland.
    He played a big, big role.
    He fully caused the employment to increase again.
    He built up the economy.
    Everything was sort of running in a amazingly, positive way.
    Certainly our parents weren't--
    compared with good old Austria, that was really the rock bottom
    at that stage, with Dollfuss having being killed,
    and neither was Schuschnigg, who was a make-do kind of leader.
    And of course the whole country completely divided
    between the socialists and the church,
    traditional conservative people.
    A kind of hopeless dilemma.
    So in other words--
    If you haven't got any better choice,
    Germany was definitely the place to move to.
    So that means that it was in some ways
    the land of economic opportunity in the mid '30s.
    In the mid 1930s, it is, compared
    to where you're coming from, impoverished nobility,
    unable to run a farm economically,
    castle going down.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    So what kind of opportunity then presented itself
    in Germany for your father that he would go there?
    What was the specific--?
    Well, to find a farm that they could [INAUDIBLE] in Germany,
    that could be a family farm in place of Gneixendorf.
    And with Ula Mutti and all her friends,
    and aunt Ellen Wrangel, who was very much involved--
    she introduced my dad to Ula Mutti anyway--
    that all these wise people would help
    to find a kind of ideal farm in Germany
    where the family, the Schweitzer family, could settle down.
    Did they find that farm?
    They found a farm.
    But it was another disaster.
    Everybody blamed everybody else of course.
    And so that's why it was sold in 1940, beginning of the war.
    So in other words, you moved to this farm in 1935 in Germany.
    And you lived there for five years.
    And then it sold.
    Yeah.
    So I would say that perhaps we stop our interview here
    for today.
    We've been speaking for 2 and 1/2 hours.
    And it's one phase of your life where
    we covered wonderful aspects of your family history,
    of what you know of your ancestors, and who they were,
    and how things developed, who some of the great-grandparents
    were.
    And I found that really so unique and so
    wonderful to listen to, and to learn about.
    And then your own early childhood in Gneixendorf.
    And now we'll come to a different phase
    when we start again.
    Absolutely.
    It will be 1935.
    And we'll talk then, the next time,
    about things that developed from there.
    Yeah.
    So I will say for right now I'm going to pause
    and turn the recording off.
    Yeah.
    And we'll come back to this.
    Yeah.
    And I've turned the recording off.
    OK, so today is June 19th, 2020.
    We are continuing the USHMM interview, the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview,
    with Mr. Helmut von Schweitzer, who is in London.
    And I, the interviewer, is in Falls Church, Virginia,
    right outside Washington, D.C. And this will follow up
    on our interview from June 18th, which was part one, where
    we talked about your early childhood in Austria
    and some of the people who were part of your world.
    Now, at the end of our interview yesterday, we
    had already come to the point where your family is
    moving to Germany.
    But there were a few loose ends to tie up
    from your life in Austria.
    So let's start with those right now.
    Tell us about your stepmother whom you called Ulla Mutti
    and how she came into your life after the death of your mother.
    OK.
    Well, of course, we hadn't really
    properly realized, because of my father's care,
    that we had lost our mother.
    Because she just wasn't there anymore
    and life went on otherwise completely as normal so
    we kids just couldn't ask the question, so to speak.
    But then about six, seven months later, my father
    called the whole family together,
    including Grandmother and Tila, all in our children's room.
    And he said that he had an important announcement
    to make that Ulla would be our mother in the future.
    He would marry her and that would take a few months.
    So that was a big family shock.
    But again, we children really didn't fully take it.
    But I was so moved by it that I jumped up from my little seat
    with my favorite Grimm fairy tale book.
    And I gave it to my dad and said, please take it to her
    when you see her.
    Aye, that was quite a moving scene.
    And of course, when my dad came back from another trip
    to Germany, he brought me an even better Grimm's fairy tale
    book with a lot of colored pictures in it,
    which I didn't have in mind.
    So that was a kind of good start.
    Can I ask a question here?
    Yeah.
    So when you say, everyone was in the room,
    including Grandmother, that means
    Lily, your father's mother.
    Yes.
    Is that correct?
    That is correct, yeah.
    And it also means your Aunt Matilda, who you call Tily.
    Is this correct?
    Tila, yeah.
    Tila, who is your father's sister?
    Yes.
    And she was, by that time-- already
    had been taking full charge of little Yumgard,
    baby Yumgard, who was still only a few months old at that stage.
    But she became a kind of mother to Yumgard.
    This is Tila?
    Tila, yeah.
    I think we talked about that briefly yesterday.
    Yeah.
    And the year is 1930 when all of this happens?
    Yes, early January, 1930.
    Yeah, that's right.
    And of course, when my dad talked to us
    about marrying Ulla, that would have
    been probably September, 1940.
    1930.
    1930, sorry.
    Yeah.
    So your mother passes away in January, 1930.
    And your father would have talked to you
    by about September 1930.
    But Ulla was not in the room with you.
    He didn't introduce you to her at that time?
    No, he did not.
    He had met her at a agricultural exhibition in Hanover,
    where he was joining Ellen [PERSONAL NAME],,
    who was a cousin of his.
    But her father, a brother of Lily, had moved to Germany,
    and married, and was a married man in Germany.
    And then the daughter, Ellen, joined the German civil service
    and was a household teacher.
    And Ulla was a pupil of hers, and they were
    both at the same exhibition.
    And so my dad, Otto, was introduced to Ulla.
    And then they seemed to fall in love almost at once.
    Had you met Ulla by that time or not at all?
    No, not at all.
    We had no idea who she was and what she might be.
    But it was that announcement by my father to the assembled
    family, if you like, that suddenly brought that name
    into our lives.
    And as I say, very deeply, I was touched by it.
    That is why I jumped up with my favorite Grimm's fairy tale
    book to hand to my dad for her.
    That's a lovely gesture for a little boy.
    It's a lovely gesture.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So I have a few questions about our Austrian discussion.
    And I want to touch on one of the illustrious former owners
    and guests.
    And that is Ludwig van Beethoven who had stayed at the house.
    Now yesterday, after our interview,
    I looked up on Wikipedia about Gneixendorf.
    And I saw that even today, there is
    something called the Beethovenhaus in Gneixendorf.
    And I wondered if that is the same place
    or whether this is something else.
    It's a place where people can go and see where Beethoven was.
    Can you tell me about that?
    Was the schloss in the middle of the city or are we
    talking about a different place?
    Well, that is again something we didn't talk about--
    the dispute where Beethoven and his younger brother
    actually stayed.
    There are two properties there.
    I can show you a picture.
    Where is it now?
    Can you see it?
    If you push it up a little bit.
    Pull it up.
    No, up in front of your face.
    Yes, I can see the top half of it.
    That seems to have a church.
    The bottom half, I cannot see.
    OK.
    The bottom half is-- are these controversial?
    The one here on your left side, I believe--
    You're going to have to pull it up like this.
    Perfect.
    So in the bottom part, yes?
    That one with a tower, that is the one that is claimed
    and now, definitely again, the one that is the Beethovenhaus.
    But the other one on the left-hand side was,
    for a considerable time, also a rival claim--
    certainly when I was a young boy.
    And there's a personal story involved with it.
    Our neighbor had established his claim
    and people would come to either that house or the other house.
    And my parents were not on talking terms
    with the Kneifel people who were having it.
    But then one day, the old man, Kneifel,
    invited me as a little boy on a Sunday afternoon
    when all the people normally when and had their afternoon
    sleep, and invited me in and showed me this--
    you can see it here, actually, in the middle.
    His grandfather, who was a craftsman,
    had established a proper Beethoven museum piece,
    if you like.
    There was a small piano, and the proper tapestries, and so on.
    And that is how the claim appeared, their claim,
    and came to be.
    Whereas, in actual fact, it is almost certain--
    with now documentary certainties--
    that it was true because where we
    was born-- in fact, the children's room in which all
    the three generations of Schweitzers that
    were born there had been born, that
    was also the Beethoven room.
    And as far as the Schweitzers were concerned,
    to have a Beethoven bust on the children's wardrobe,
    that was all they would do.
    No further pretense.
    Because your original furniture wasn't there anymore.
    And Beethoven's brother was not at all a musician, and so on.
    In fact, the two brothers--
    particularly with the brother's wife involved--
    were in constant arguments.
    And all these arguments have been carefully recorded,
    to a large extent by, again, some other relations of mine
    on the Kleine side.
    And a book has been written about it.
    And of course, the whole thing has become very publicized.
    And that in the end, of course, led to the incident going back
    to Vienna of Ludwig and his--
    no, what do you call it?
    Not his son but his brother's son.
    His nephew.
    With his nephew.
    But that's--
    Nephew.
    --another brother's son-- nephew.
    Which was in fact an open carriage-- well,
    not a carriage-- cart, really.
    Because there was nothing else available on the spur
    of the moment.
    And so three months later, he died in early 1827.
    OK.
    So if I understand this properly, that there are two,
    separate places--
    one, which would be a castle, and one
    which was another house.
    Yeah.
    And the other place was established
    by your neighbors, but not neighbors in the sense of right
    next door to you?
    But actually, opposite.
    Yeah.
    As you can see, these two buildings--
    if you can see them.
    Yes.
    I can see them.
    They're just opposite each other.
    OK.
    So the building with the tower, is that your home?
    Yeah.
    That's your home, the building with the tower?
    Yeah.
    And that window here, where my thumb
    is, that was what generally has been thought
    was the definite Beethoven--
    Beethoven room.
    --where he stayed as a guest of his brother.
    OK.
    And the house on the other side is your neighbor's house
    opposite?
    Yeah, that's right.
    OK.
    So what claim, besides fitting out a room
    that had a piano in it?
    Did Beethoven ever stay there?
    Well, they claim the same.
    And of course, in a sense, for the visitors,
    this other establishment was so much more of something to view.
    Because there, you had an apartment reconstructed,
    if you like, in the same way as it
    was the fashion at Beethoven's lifetime.
    Whereas, on our side, it was a usually disorderly children's
    room with just a Beethoven bust on the wardrobe, which
    doesn't look terribly authentic, does it?
    No.
    But this explains something that was a discrepancy in my mind.
    Because you had mentioned yesterday that by the time
    World War II ended and the various military presences--
    first from the German army and then the Russians took over--
    and you said nothing was left of the castle,
    that it was in ruins.
    And so there couldn't be--
    No, it wasn't in ruins but it was dangerous to live in.
    It was officially condemned as not safe to live in.
    So when we see today, and today being
    2020, that in the town of Gneixendorf,
    there is a Beethoven museum that claims
    that he might have stayed there, it was confusing to me.
    Because how could that be if the castle had been condemned?
    So this explains it.
    But this place that has the Beethoven museum currently,
    is that neighbor across the way the opposite way?
    No, it's the other way around, actually.
    I see.
    But during the wartime--
    ever since the German army occupied
    what was the genuine Beethoven room, if you like.
    There was a German army, and afterwards, the Russian army,
    and afterwards, the family who had bought it from us
    got it back.
    But they only could temporarily live in it
    before it was also condemned.
    But when this new guy with a lot of money,
    an architect from Vienna, bought the property, I think in--
    I don't know the exact date, but fairly recently--
    after it had been totally condemned,
    he got it, obviously, quite cheap.
    In the meantime, the rival one had been big on the internet
    and had a lot of visitors.
    But around about that time, the building itself on their side
    was condemned as not fit for anybody to live in.
    And the architect from Vienna was very much
    an internationally-connected person.
    He then produced a huge, glass--
    Plaque.
    --plaque on the outer wall of what
    was our original home with a display of part of a quartet
    that Beethoven completed while he was in Gneixendorf.
    And he had it introduced in a very solemn way.
    OK.
    He had it introduced by a professional quartet playing
    that quartet to an invited audience from Vienna
    and from elsewhere.
    The villagers were completely ignored.
    OK.
    So thank you for that.
    At least we have covered Beethoven's presence
    in Gneixendorf, in the schloss that your family owned,
    the estate they owned.
    And now we go back to where we left off yesterday.
    And that is, your family moves to Hessen.
    And Hessen is a region in Germany, yes?
    I know it's been a little bit up, and down,
    and back, and forward.
    We started off with father announcing to us
    that he would marry Ulla Roepke and that she
    would be our mother.
    The background to that was, in fact, his father
    immediately said, on no account can
    I agree for Ulla to marry this guy, Otto, from Austria.
    A, he is a Catholic.
    B--
    He's got children?
    --he's got three children from a first wife.
    And thirdly, although he has got a title
    and he owns this estate, as far as he's concerned,
    that estate doesn't look very profitable.
    And so there doesn't seem to be any real future
    for a gifted person like you, my favorite daughter, Ulla.
    Well, we talked about this yesterday.
    I think we did.
    I don't know if you remember but we talked about this yesterday
    and how he became, who had this reservation,
    like a stand-in grandfather who was very much your champion
    and whom you were very close to.
    And so once she disagreed and did what she wanted to do,
    he came around.
    Yeah, absolutely.
    OK.
    So now, we are on the train.
    We're going to Germany.
    Your sister's doll is taken away.
    There is still-- because my stepmother married
    in a Lutheran way back in Melsungen
    and the history isn't sure whether her father actually
    attended that wedding or not but the rest of the family
    certainly did.
    And then they had a Catholic wedding in Linz on the way
    back.
    Because she had to accept that the children would have
    to be Catholics and that my dad certainly
    didn't want to have that broadcast in any big way
    around the village.
    So as far as weddings were concerned,
    nothing happened in the village of Gneixendorf
    and nothing was apparent to the little children either.
    But then she came, and she certainly turned the place
    around, and modernized it, and so on.
    And of course, her family--
    I think I mentioned yesterday, she
    was the eldest of six people.
    They all came to Gneixendorf and she certainly turned it around.
    And we lived, from 1932, still three years in Gneixendorf.
    And they certainly were dramatic years
    as far as the turnaround was concerned and as far as--
    for us children, a complete change from--
    all these servants that had been the establishment
    before, except for the cook, were sent packing
    or pensioned off.
    Because, as far as Ulla was concerned, you do it yourself.
    The family does it yourself, as I did at home, and so on.
    And we children, we were directly involved.
    We all had to play our part.
    We had to clean up our shoes and things.
    She would do it first with you and then
    you were expected to do it yourself.
    So it was, as far as our family lifestyle was concerned,
    it was a complete change from being
    the aristocratic kind of setup to a proper family setup.
    I would like to ask you, if you could--
    I'm sorry-- just sit back a little bit.
    Because I cannot see your full image.
    Yes, that's much better.
    Thank you so much.
    Yeah.
    Then we catch more of you in the screen.
    Ulla, was she successful in turning the farm around
    with these kinds of--
    Not the farm.
    The household was completely turned around.
    My father was still struggling on the farm side of it.
    And I think we fairly well covered it all, didn't we--
    Yeah.
    --with the eggs and with the Jewish--
    did we talk about that?
    No, we didn't.
    Tell me about that.
    About eggs, you say?
    Yes.
    Quite apart from having the combine harvesters
    and the tractors, I mean, he reduced the regular staff
    of the farm from what it was originally-- about 20 workers--
    to about four men.
    And it was all mechanized.
    Then, additionally, he had these, again, American White
    chickens--
    2,000 chicks that he imported.
    And again, they were also bred on a electric breeding
    station in our cellar.
    So the chickens didn't breed their own eggs.
    They were then bred and--
    That sounds kind of bizarre that a chicken--
    It was the completely modern establishment.
    But with the economic disaster of 1932,
    the complete international breakdown,