On Parade in Old Wien

 

A parade was once a common thing to see in cities and town. Every religious holiday, political rally, protest demonstration, or other special event included a procession of people marching in the cause of some greater purpose. And that almost always required music from at least one band, though more was always better, to propel the participants along a city's streets in order to attract the public's attention. One of the places that has had a long history of parades was the Austrian city of Wien or Vienna. This first illustration shows  a military band marching along a boulevard with people watching and even joining the parade. It is captioned:

Wien. Burgring ~ Vienna. City ring road
Mit Lyra und  Säbel ~ With lyre and  saber

The artist of this lively watercolor sketch was the Viennese artist Fritz Schönpflug (1873–1951) whose work I began collecting a few years ago partly for their colorful novelty and light humor, but also because his caricatures record perceptive details of Wien's culture and its people that has largely disappeared following the two Great Wars of the 20th century. My last story on his artwork was in November 2023, The Frat Boys of Old Wien, which featured a set of his postcards on fraternity alumni from German/Austrian universities.

Today I present a small medley of what I think Fritz would have called Wiener Verein ~ Viennese Associations or civic clubs. His postcard drawings depict social groups that I can't always identify or understand, but it seems clear that in the 1900s these were groups of people who were easily recognizable and probably often seen in parades along Wien's grand avenues.

The first postcard shows six elderly ladies wearing long dresses and coats walking behind a man holding a banner on a staff. The women are arranged in block formation and have determined, if slightly sour, expressions as if they mean business. The man is bare headed and has a blue and white sash over his formal suit which, to my eye, resembles a servant's livery. They look like a women's club but not for a political movement like women's suffrage. Maybe they represent a religious or civic organization. Whatever their cause they are going someplace with a purpose.

Many of Schönpflug's drawings of people were printed on a plain white cardstock without any framework of sky, ground, or surroundings. The effect cleverly makes the viewer look closely at the characters to see their humor or irony. I think this was also done to allow space for a message since in the early years of the postcard only the address was permitted on a postcard's reverse side. Here the writer filled up most of the usable white space with a long message which unfortunately I'm unable to decipher. It's surprising how often people wrote cursive script in small compact letters.  However just below one lady's skirt is a date 27.2.05 which confirms the faded postmarks from Wien of 27 February 1905. 

* * *

The next postcard has a similar lineup of elderly men dressed in identical military hats and jackets with mismatched trousers. The sender of this postcard has helpfully added their own captions. At the top is written: Serie des Wiener-Vereine — Series of the Viennese clubs. And along the bottom:

                        I. Veteranen Verein — I. Veterans Association

                            Gott grüss Such, Alter! -- Schmeckt das Pfeifchen?

                            "Ich finde die fünf alten Mannli sehr schmuckig!"

                            God bless you, old man! -- Does the pipe taste good?

                            "I find the five old men very dapper!"

The men are veterans of the Austrian army and in 1900 likely served in the very brief Austro-Prussian War of 1866 which lasted all of seven weeks. The word schmuckig is a difficult one to translate. Since it is written, I think, with a lower case s it is not the German noun Schmuck which means fool or moron, but is instead an adjective based on schmuck which means neat, smart, or dapper. I think it was an invented word used by the writer much like how in English we add the suffix "ish" to imply a not-quite authentic or genuine quality, like fortyish, squarish, youngish, etc.

The way the writer notes that this card is in a series is one reason for Schönpflug's popularity in Wien. The publisher's mark on the back is B.W.K.I. which stands for Brüder Kohn Wien whose business was located in the no. 1, or I, district of Wien. This publishing firm was established in 1898 by Salomon Kohn (1873–1944†) with his brothers Adolf and Alfred Kohn. Salomon was also a photographer and their company produced thousands of colorful postcards and greeting cards illustrating Wien, and its citizens and celebrities. 

Schönpflug's humorous cards were arranged around a theme, usually  in a set of six or eight different pictures, and printed as a series with an identification number, in this case B. K. W. I. 597 - 2 ,  which means this was the second of the series. The ladies club was number 4.  (I'll come back to the word Deposé later).  This card was sent from Switzerland on 02.IV.04 – 2 April 1904. The word AMBULANT on the postmark refers to a Swiss railway postal wagon, in this case delivering mail to a civil and military hospital in Montpellier, France on the Mediterranean coast. 

* * *

The next group is a quartet of civic dignitaries, four old men in tailcoats and top hats. Like the men on the pervious card, these gentlemen all sport numerous campaign medals pinned to their  chests. One man carries a national flag. The printed title reads:  Kriegervereine – Veterans’ associations. They look like former officers standing for a review of the troops. This postcard was never mailed so there is no date

The word Deposé is printed in small letters under the picture but not on the back next to the series mark, which in this case is also B. K. W. I. 597 - 2. It is a French word that means deposited or filed and I think it may have something to do with copyright protection. It's also possible that the  two pictures sharing the same series number may indicate a second printing. My hope is to eventually acquire a full set of this particular series.

* * *

The picture on this postcard is definitely a parade that people of the 1900s would be familiar with. The printed caption reads: Heilsarmee – Salvation Army, which is also displayed on two banners carried in the procession. A trombonist and accordion player lead with a bass drummer bringing up the rear. One stalwart young women dressed in black holds out flyers as she sings along to the music. A pair of policemen escort the crowd. This card was never posted but is marked as B. K. W. I. 597 - 4. 

* * *

This next Wiener Verein look like they are also part of a parade. Six men are dressed alike in short jackets with broad brimmed hats stand around their leader who wears a black, red, orange sash and holds a large flag. This postcard was sent from Switzerland to the hospital in Montpellier by the same writer that sent the card with the five veterans. On the side is written:

                            VI Malerbund — VI. Painters Association

                                    Wenn ich nur wüsste, ob auch Damen beitreten dürfen!

                                    Wäre nämlich entschieden mein Fall!

                                    Schluss    J.SP

                                    If only I knew whether women could join too!

                                    That would definitely be my case!
        

                                    End J.SP

I'm uncertain if the writer is referring to this picture as an association of art painters or house painters. I think the former is more likely since most of the men each have an artistic style beard. The caricatures may even be Viennese artists familiar to people of this era. I don't understand the long horn carried by one man. Is it powder horn for a musket or a flask of some spirit?             

This card shares the same number B. K. W. I. 597 - 4 as the one with Salvation Army parade but has Deposé added so I think it is from another edition of the series. One of the special qualities of early postcards from this era was how people often sent a complete series like this to someone as a gift. Unfortunately I could only find two in this writer's sequence, but even so, their humorous captions add a helpful context that is often missing in old postcards. I hope the recipient, Monsieur Hans Keitz got a laugh from the full set. Was he a patient or a member of staff at the hospital?

* * *

This last picture postcard shows a spectator's view of a band on parade in Wien. It has a printed caption of Wien, Aufzug der Burgwache – Procession of the castle guard. In the foreground a gentleman seems to be marching with the band. The card has no postmark but is addressed to the Offiziertischgesellschaft – Officers' table society of a German army regiment in Metz, France which was then in the Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine.  By coincidence Schönpflug did another series that lampoons that kind of club, too, but that will have to wait for a future story. 

Though I can't find Fritz Schönpflug's signature in the picture as it fills the card's space, I feel confident that it is his work as it was printed by the Brüder Kohn Wien and is marked as B. K. W. I. 510 - 4.  The back of the card also has "Printed in Austria" which is a post-war phrase never used in the time of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

Fritz Schönpflug's postcards were distributed throughout Europe as I have found many with postmarks from Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, France, and the Netherlands. It's not surprising that his illustrations appealed to Wien's visitors and natives alike as his subtle humor captured a silliness that was universal and familiar to people of any language or culture. 

To finish my story I wanted to add some historic film footage of old Wien that showed a parade or people on the streets. I found a few vintage clips in black and white but the quality was poor. Then I found two short clips taken from Austrian movies that clearly used Schönpflug's postcards as inspiration for the scenes. 

The first clip is from "Die Deutschmeister" – "The German Master", directed by Ernst Marischka abd released in 1955. The story is set is late 19th century Vienna where a young girl named Stanzi meets a soldier of the famous “Deutschmeister” regiment and they fall in love. The girl's new boyfriend is a composer of a popular march that somehow causes some trouble for him and his regiment. Stanzi saves the day by smuggling the sheet music inside a pretzel stick to the emperor for whom her aunt is the baker. Kaiser Franz Joseph approves and all is forgiven and the girl gets the boy. 

The second clip comes from a film "Wiener Mädeln" ~ Viennese girls produced during WW2. It was directed and starred Willi Forst as Carl Michael Ziehrer, (1843–1922), a popular Austrian composer and rival to Johann Strauss Jr. The storyline is a romantic musical comedy similar to the other movie. A supporting character seen at the beginning and later playing a bass drum in a marching band, is played by Austrian actor Hans Moser (1880–1964) who was in two film clips in my story from two weeks ago. Music for a Wine Garden. The 

Wiener Mädeln was released in 1949 but was originally produced during the final months of the war, filmed in Vienna from March 9, 1944 to March 26, 1945. The director Willi Forst delayed finishing the film to protect his actors and crew from being called up for military service. During the filming the cast and crew had to stop several times due to air raid warnings of approaching allied bombers. It was the first color film made by the production company Wien-Film, but the final version of the movie was not released to public cinemas until August 1949 when Austria was under military occupation by the Soviet Union. 

The movie has a lighthearted exuberance that mimics the chirpy American and British movies made during the war. It's a kind of biopic romance that respectfully portrays Carl Michael Ziehrer, the composer and bandleader, with pride and admiration, if not historical accuracy. In another clip there is even a "battle of the bands" at a festival where an American bandleader, looking vaguely like John Philip Sousa, tries to outplay a Viennese band. Any guesses who wins?  I'll find a way to include it in a future story.  

What is not revealed is that unlike movies made in Hollywood or at Shepperton Studios, this film was made in a city that was under attack during a brutal war. From March 1944 to March 1945 during the filming in , there were 52 allied bombing raids on Wien and the vicinity around it. In February and March 1945 bombing intensified with 80,000 tons of bombs dropped by US and British aircraft, that destroyed over 12,000 buildings, and left 270,000 people homeless. A final tally estimates  that nearly 9,000 lives were lost during all the bombing of Wien.

We have to admire the artistic skill and determination of the actors 
who were able to smile, sing, and laugh despite the risk of imminent destruction.

CODA

I now have hundreds of Fritz Schönpflug's postcards in my collection and will doubtless add many more in my quest to complete some of his series. I find them fascinating for the social and cultural history he records in his caricatures of the people of Wien. But there is another more distrubing element of history that I only just discovered this week as I was researching Schönpflug's publisher, the Brothers Kohn – Salomon, Adolf, and Alfred Kohn. 

In this last example of his work from a different theme series, Schönpflug depicts a pair of gentlemen, one short and portly and the other tall and thin, travelers being welcomed to their Wien hotel by a courteous concierge and his staff. I can't sure but to my eye the two men look foreign rather that Austrian or German. The taller one especially looks English. 

Schönpflug's signature in the lower right corner includes the numbers 909 which was his way of dating a painting made in 1909 as he followed a European convention of leaving off the 1000.  Like all his other postcards this one was part of a series,  B. K. W. I. 543 - 1. 

What makes this card different from the others in my collection is that it was posted in 1943, nearly 25 years after Schönpflug painted it.

  

It was sent from the spa town of Marienbad, now known as Mariánské Lázně in the Czech Republic, and though the postmark date is unclear, the writer left a date of 6.7.43 – 6 July 1943. In the corner is a purple 6 pfennig stamp of the Deutsches Reich with the profile of Adolf Hitler. 

Needless to say, Hitler's offensive image taints Schönpflug's otherwise humorous card about two tourists in Wien. But what I learned this week makes this postcard and the history hidden in it much more disturbing. 

According to his short biography in the German Wikipedia (translation by Google) Salomon Kohn was born on July 31, 1873 to a Jewish family living in Wessely, Moravia, then a part of the Austrian Empire. His publishing firm, B. K. W. I., which he established in 1898 with his brothers Adolf and Alfred, produced countless postcards and greeting cards marketed all over Europe. Judging just from the huge variety of Schönpflug's postcards, it must have been a successful business, especially as it continued operations after the end of WW1 into the 1920s and 1930s, when all of the former empires of Central Europe were broken up into new independent nations.

After the Anschluss in 13 March 1938, when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, annexed Austria, all Austrian businesses owned by Jews were confiscated, which included Salomon Kohn's B. K. W. I. Salomon received no compensation for the "sale"  of his firm, but was retained as the unpaid manager. During this brief respite before the outbreak of  WW2, Salomon and his wife Gittel Kohn was able to get their two children, Walter , age 15, and Minna, age 19, safe passage to England during the Kindertransport rescue operation which saved neatly 10,000 Jewish children from death under the evil Nazi genocide program.

Shortly after their children escaped Wien, Salomon and Gittel Kohn were arrested and interred first at the infamous Theresienstadt Ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia and then transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they and a million more people were murdered. Salomon's older brother, Adolf Kohn, had died in 1918 while serving in the military. His younger brother, Alfred Kohn and his family, also perished in the Shoah.  

The history of Salomon Kohn's family might have been lost forever were it not for the good fortune that their children, Minna and Walter, were able to seek refuge in England in 1938. In 1940 on the outbreak of war, Walter Kohn (1923–2016), was sent to a detention camp in Canada as he was still considered an Austrian national. There he was able to continue his education at the University of Toronto, and later Harvard. He became a noted scientist in theoretical physics and chemistry making several important and significant contributions to science.  In 1998 Walter Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In April 2014 he was interviewed for The Current, the magazine of the University of California Santa Barbara where Kohn was a professor of physics. In it Walter shares the story of his father and his early life in Wien and how he was able to escape the horrors of the Shoah which tragically took his parents. 

My discovery of the terrible deaths of Salomon Kohn and his family in the Holocaust changes the way I look at my collection of Fritz Schönpflug's postcards. Schönpflug died in 1951, after a lifetime of witnessing earthshattering changes to Europe, Austria, and especially Wien. The cartoons he drew of the people of Wien document a colorful world that was filled with many layers of society, from the proletariat to the aristocracy. But his artist's eye could not help but see the undercurrent of racism and bigotry that flowed through the cracks of this complex multi-layered city. I don't know anything about Schönpflug's background, much less about his political or religious views. But his relationship with Salomon Kohn must have been close as both men benefitted from a long collaboration between artist and publisher. Now I can't help but look at his postcards from the perspective of Salomon Kohn and wonder what their relationship was like. There are now more layers hidden in that postcard paper.

As the the other nations of the world began to recognize the dangerous threat posed by Hitler's dictatorial ambition and wicked genocidal policies, two United States senators, Senator Robert F. Wagner (Democrat, NY) and Rep. Edith Rogers (Republican, MA) proposed the Wagner-Rogers Bill in the United States Congress as a complement to Britain's Kindertransport program. This bill would have allowed 20,000 unaccompanied refugees under the age of 14 from Germany and areas under German control to enter the U. S. with special visas. Most of those child refugees would have been Jewish. However, due to opposition from Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, the bill never left the committee stage and failed to secure Congressional approval. 

Senator Reynolds (1884–1963) was a Democrat from North Carolina and represented the state from 1932 to 1945. This was in the era when the southern Democratic Party held ultra-conservative positions on segregation, immigration, and states' rights. Reynolds was a passionate isolationist and outspoken apologist for Nazi aggression in Europe. Robert Rice Reynolds was born, raised, and died in Asheville, North Carolina the city where I live now. History like this leaves a dark stain that is impossible to remove unless we preserve the difficult memory of abominable individuals who perpetrate such loathsome political views. "Never Again," is not a slogan. It is a moral commitment to humanity.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where no one ever lets a parade pass them by.