(Vienna, 10.09.2018 - 12.09.2018) Coming to Vienna, one of my first walks takes me to the Freyung a triangular public square in Vienna, located in the first district of the city. The name Freyung has its origin from the old German word "frey", meaning "free". I love the mood of this square with its mixture of Austrian and Italian atmosphere in the middle of Vienna.
Apparently not too much has changed over the last century, the photo above showing the Freyung on June 7, 1917. I harvested this photo (Courtesy: ÖNB Photo Archives) from the catalog to the exhibition "Verwischte Grenzen • Jüdische Identitäten in Zentraleuropa nach 1918" [Blurred Borders • Jewish Identities in Central Europe after the year 1918]. The exhibition organized by the Institute for Jewish History in Austria and hosted by the former St. Pölten Synagogue is still running until October 6, 2018.
One of the exhibition walls is dedicated to Romania and Bukovina. We discover two photos, a short biography of my grandfather Elias Hauster as well as an excerpt out of one of his letters from September 1947, addressed to my father, Julius Hauster:
"Als die Bukowina im Jahre 1918 an Rumänien fiel, mußte ich, da ich höherer Stadtbeamter war, wohl oder übel als 40-jähriger Mensch A-B-C-Schütze in der rumänischen Sprache werden. Wir Minoritätler mußten nach Absolvierung eines Kursus durch eine Prüfung nachweisen, daß wir die rumänische Sprache so weit beherrschen, als sie zum 'Amtsgebrauche' notwendig ist, was auch richtig geschah. Die schöne rumänische Sprache nahm dabei keinen ernstlichen Schaden, denn Rumäne und Nichtrumäne gaben in herzerfreuender Einmütigkeit ihrer Überlebensfreude über den Weltkrieg hinaus in gutem bukowiner Deutsch mehr oder weniger beredten Ausdruck, je nach dem Vorrat an täglicher Speise - Mămăligă [Anm.: rum. 'Maismehlbrei'] mit Rübenschnitzelmarmelade - über die man verfügte. Als neugebackener Bürger des nunmehrigen 'Großrumänien' geriet ich oft in die Notwendigkeit, an Behörden Gesuche in rumänischer Sprache zu machen. Kleine stilistische Unvollkommenheiten waren nie ein Hindernis für die Abweisung dieser Gesuche, wenigstens waren die Abweisungen nie mit meinen Stilentgleisungen motiviert."
This letter deals ostensibly with the Romanian language examination, which 'senior civil servants' like my grandfather, raised in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, had to take in order to keep their position. As a matter of fact it's rather a reckoning with the supercilious treatment by the authorities in interwar Greater Romania, a tractate full of subtle irony and masterly worded in German language. This is just one out of 143 letters written by my grandfather to my father Julius Hauster on different subjects like aliya, politics in post WW2 Romania, Soviet Russia, Palestine, Transnistria, Czernowitz, Auschwitz, Radautz and much else. These letters are available online: http://radautz.blogspot.com/
Dr. Gaëlle Fisher starts her article "Between Liberation and Emigration: Jews from Bukovina in Romania after the Second World War", published in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 2017, as follows: "The more than one hundred letters written by Elias Hauster (born 1878) to his son Julius (born 1912) between 1946 and 1949 give a privileged insight into the circumstances of Bukovina Jews in the immediate aftermath of the war. [...] The preserved correspondence, Elias’s letters to his son, reveal a great deal about everyday life and circumstances as well as Elias’s visions of the future and the lessons drawn from the recent past. In 1946 when the correspondence started, Elias and his wife were in a desperate situation. They lived in a small, cold basement flat without a bathroom, and they were in need of everything: clothes, food, and medication."
No doubt about, Elias would have been proud to appear on the same exhibition board together with Prive Friedjung and Paul Celan!
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