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AT THE END of January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Leon now occupied a larger shop at 72 Taborstrasse, in the heart of the Leopoldstadt district. As the liquor trade flourished, he must have viewed events in neighboring Germany with trepidation. The Reichstag was burned down, the Nazis won the largest share of the vote in German federal elections, Austrian Nazis gained ever more support. Demonstrations in the Leopoldstadt were frequent and violent.
Four months later, on Saturday, May 13, 1933, representatives of the new German government made a first visit to Austria. A tri-motored German government plane landed at the Aspern Airfield, not far from Leon’s shop. It carried seven Nazi ministers, led by Dr. Hans Frank, the newly appointed Bavarian minister of justice, Hitler’s former lawyer, and a confidant.
Frank’s arrival prompted demonstrations, with large crowds of supporters, many of whom wore the white knee-high socks that indicated support for the Nazis. The Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, banned the Austrian Nazi Party, and other measures followed. Dollfuss was dead a little more than a year after Frank’s visit, murdered in July 1934 by a group of Austrian Nazis led by Otto von Wächter, a local lawyer who would, a decade later, as Nazi governor in Lemberg, create the Waffen-SS Galician Division.
Hans Frank (standing in car) arrives in Vienna, May 1933
I found little information on Leon’s life during these turbulent days. He was a single man, and although the odd document offered a snippet about his family, in his papers I found no letters or other accounts, no details of political or other activity. There were several photographs, later inserted into an album in random fashion. Leon wrote several words on the back of some, a date or a place. I rearranged the images chronologically as best I could. The earliest photograph, of his friend Max Kupferman, dated to 1924. Most were taken in the 1930s, but after 1938 the images tailed off.
Several photographs were work related. A black-tie gathering, men with their ladies, taken in December 1930, with names and signatures on the back: Lea Sochi, Max Kupferman, Bertl Fink, Hilda Eichner, Grete Zentner, a Metzl, and a Roth. Another picture showed Leon outside his brother-in-law Max Gruber’s liquor store, on Klosterneuburger Strasse. Others were of family members. His cousins Herta and Edith Gruber outside their father’s shop, on their way to school. His sister Gusta, elegant in a black coat on a Viennese street. A note from his niece Daisy, on holiday in Bodensdorf: “To my dear uncle…” Three photographs of Malke, dressed in black, a widow with a furrowed brow. Malke on a street, Malke in an apartment, Malke walking with her son on Leopoldsberg. I found only one image of Leon with his mother, taken in 1938, silhouetted with small trees.
Leon and Malke in Vienna, 1938
Several pictures showed Leon with friends, many in Klosterneuburg in the 1930s. In bathing suits, men and women laughed, touched, posed. Leon with an unnamed woman, but no clue as to their relationship.
Max. Through the years, from 1924 to 1938, at least one photograph a year of his best friend, a straight run. He was a constant. Leon and Max on the banks of the Danube at Kritzendorf, north of Vienna. Leon, Max, and a young woman with a leather soccer ball at their feet. Leon and Max hiking in the Wachau valley. Leon and Max standing, in front of a shining black automobile. Leon and Max joking around with a soccer ball. Max standing. Max in portrait. Max laughing, smiling.
I noticed how elegant and well dressed Leon always was, neat and dignified. On a Viennese street in a boater. In a suit at a railway station, or maybe it was a marketplace. He looked happy, usually with a smile, more so than the way I remembered him in later years. At my wedding in New York, in his ninetieth year, I recall seeing him sitting alone in a reflective mood, as though looking back across a century.
The last photograph of that period, of Leon’s bachelor days, was of two attractive young women, on the streets. They wore fur, and behind them, approaching in the background, a storm cloud loomed.