MAID SERVANTS IN ENGLAND: AUSTRIAN JEWISH WOMEN IN EMIGRATION 1938/39

LIVES OF THE NON-ÉLITE IN VIENNA FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE TO THE NAZI REGIME AND POST-WAR AUSTRIA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Passport of Agnes Katz, issued in Vienna on the 7th of July 1939, marked with a red “J” for Jewish by the Nazis
Agi landed in Dover on the 18th of August 1939 and there is a handwritten note : “for domestic employment”. She was allowed to take only 30 pounds with her.

Käthe as a young woman in Vienna

My great-aunt Käthe, born in 1901, was a bank clerk at the Wiener Bank Verein and had lost her first husband, Poldl Kluger, soon after the wedding, victim of a lung disease, in illness that was wide-spread in Vienna at that time. When she lost her job at the bank in 1924, being tall and slim, she made ends meet by accepting occasional jobs as a fashion model. After the civil war in 1934 and the coup d’état of the Austrian fascists, Käthe, an assimilated and agnostic Jewess and a socialist, realised that sooner or later she would have to flee Austria. Being single facilitated the decision-making process. She diligently prepared for her escape from the Nazis by learning English and acquiring cooking skills. She then applied for the position of cook in a wealthy English household and landed in Dover on the 7th of November 1938. Having arrived at a safe haven in England with a domestic permit, she tied to get out of Austria as many of her family as possible. She worked in 25, Warkworth Gardens in Isleworth in Middlesex and managed to convince her generous and understanding mistress to hire her younger sister, Agi, as a maid in the same household and by that offered her a last-minute escape from deportations from Viennese collection points in the 2nd district to the concentration camps of the Nazis. So let’s look at this special rescue model, a window of opportunity for young Jewish women from Austria in 1938, which was closed in 1939.

Käthe’s employment as a bank clerk at the “Wiener Bank Verein” 1924

Käthe’s passport stamped with a “J” for “Jude”

Detail of the passport

Around 20,000 Jewish women, three quarters from Austria, fled in 1938/39 to England with a so-called “domestic permit”. This was a work permit for foreign domestic staff which British employers could use since the 1920s to alleviate the chronic shortage of maid servants despite otherwise very strict immigration restrictions. A considerable percentage of these women were not actually domestics by trade, but had only been able to enter the UK on permits for domestic work. They found themselves in a relationship of dependency to their mistresses, but work as a maid guaranteed a livelihood because domestic servants were the only ones who had permission to legally work in England. Yet they were officially not allowed to leave the areas of these private households. The majority of male refugees with a permission to enter the UK needed an affidavit from an influential personality or an institution.

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“KINDERTRANSPORTS” FROM VIENNA TO GREAT BRITAIN 1938/1939

LIVES OF THE NON-ÉLITE IN VIENNA FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE TO THE NAZI REGIME AND POST-WAR AUSTRIA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Passports of the twins Susanne and Josephine Katz, issued in Vienna on the 7th of July 1939
The visa for the UK was granted on the 2nd of August 1939 and on the 18th of August the twins Susanne and Josephine Katz landed in Dover. The passport shows a handwritten note: “accompanying mother”

Agi with her twins, Susi and Josi

Agi Katz, the younger sister of my grandmother had found refuge in England as a maid in the household of her sister Käthe’s mistress, but she could not bring her two-year-old girl twins, Susi and Josi with her. Käthe had helped to organise from across the channel to have the girls transported via a “kindertransport” to England to Quaker foster families. Unfortunately the twins had to be separated not only from their mother, but also from each other, which caused serious and long-lasting emotional damage. They were reunited with their parents after the war. The family then decided to become British citizens and remain in the UK. In 1948 the Evening Standard printed a picture of the twins then aged 12, “Flowers at Victoria Station. 12-year-old twins Susan and Josephine Katz of Isleworth (Middlesex). They were waiting for their grandparents, septuagenarians Herr and Frau Ignaz Sobotka to arrive from Vienna for a holiday here.” (see below)

The twins, Susi and Josi, still in Vienna

With the permission of the British, Dutch and Swedish governments aid organisations in “Greater Germany” (Germany and the occupied territories) organised kindertransports in 1938 and 1939 on special trains to send endangered children west to safety. The children on board these trains left their parents and other family members at the railway stations of Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, Leipzig, the free city of Danzig and the Polish city of Zbonszyn. Descriptions and eye witness reports abound of chaos, tears and the pain of the parents. The kindertransports from Austria took the train route through Germany via Cologne, over the border to the Netherlands, up to the Hook of Holland, across the North Sea by boat to dock at Harwich. Some of them were sent to London from there, others were transported to Dovercourt Bay, a holiday camp taken over to accommodate arriving youngsters. Newspaper reports describing the violence of the November pogroms prompted public sympathy and government action in the UK. The Times reported on 14 November 1938, “The position of Austria’s Jews is becoming daily more precarious… Although the more violent demonstrations have ceased the Nazis have prohibited non-Jewish stores, restaurants and cafés from selling to Jews. As no Jewish shops have been allowed to reopen the effect has been to reduce many Jews to a position dangerously near starvation.” The plight of children struck an especially resonant chord. Stories circulated in the UK about attacks against Jewish orphanages and children roaming the countryside on the verge of starvation.

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INTRODUCTION: THE SETTING

LIVES OF THE NON-ÉLITE IN VIENNA FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE TO THE NAZI REGIME AND POST-WAR AUSTRIA
Leopoldine and Ignaz Sobotka, my great-grandparents

This social and economic history research website looks at various aspects of the lives of ordinary people in Vienna; their different backgrounds, their lifestyles, their occupations and pastimes. It deliberately chooses “common people”, not artists, not industrialists, not high bourgeoisie or nobility. My family constitutes the template on which the blog is based and the different chapters are linked to the destiny of one of those “common people” that were members of my family and are representative of the lives of many of their contemporaries. The chapters analyse from a social and economic history point of view various aspects of life of indigenous Viennese, of immigrants and emigrants.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, “It is more difficult to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the famous. The historical reconstruction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.” And furthermore, “History is not just the history of those who triumph, who dominate and who survive, but most of all the history of the suffering of the world…..It’s what history is based on: those anonymous people without name and without memory.”

Their four daughters: Käthe, Lola (my grandmother), Agi, Mitzi

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THE BALKANS & THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE AROUND 1914

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Novi Sad, Serbia

In the context of World War I the marginalization of the Serbian and thereby of the larger Balkan dimension already began during the July crisis itself. Serbia and its actions occupied a subordinate place. Furthermore the fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the murder of the Austro-Hungarian crown prince and his wife on 28 June 2014. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was sympathy with south Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Habsburg Empire. But our moral compass has shifted by now. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, it has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as a historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically on the vanished imperial patchwork of Habsburg Austro-Hungary. Putting Sarajevo and the Balkans back at the centre of the outbreak of World War I does not mean demonizing the Balkans or their politicians. We need to understand the July crisis of 1914 as a complex event. Far from being inevitable this war was in fact inconceivable for most Europeans of the time, at least until it actually happened. So the conflict was not the consequence of a long-run deterioration, but of short-term shocks with the Balkans at the centre.

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THE BALKANS: ANCIENT TRADITIONS & SOCIAL STRUCTURES

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Belgrade, capital city of Serbia

On the Balkans nationalism has been a significant characteristic of political and social life since the 19th century. There was an ethnic nationalism in former Yugoslavia that is still very powerful and which has to be differentiated from a bourgeois or political nationalism. Bourgeois nationalism is based on the idea of common blood relations, common culture and excludes any kind of multiculturalism. The concept of political nationalism is based on a common territory and the acceptance of the laws in this territory. In contrast ethnic nationalism is founded on myths and legends of a nation that is God-sent. Even nowadays these myths dominate public communication in the Balkans. The fascination with such myths concerning their own nation which are propagated and perpetuated by autocratic and democratic leaders alike is the reason why the people in these countries are often prevented from seeing  future potential and realising it. One famous example is the “Kosovo myth”. The Serbian historian Popovic already stated in 1976 that that was a secondary artificial myth developed by politicians from folklore legend dealing with the historical battle between Turks and Serbs on the Kosovo Polje in 1389. The rather irrelevant defeat escalated in the historical memory of the Serbs to a catastrophe and was scandalously distorted.

 

The various national movements in the Southern Slavonic countries concerned themselves thoroughly with their respective village cultures. In them they sought to find their origins in a world of rapid modernisation. This resulted in a romantic transfiguration and idealisation of rural or village value patterns. These patterns were supposed to be “characteristic” of the nation and should serve as models. The processes of industrialisation and urbanisation fundamentally changed and influenced the existing traditional society. In spite of the growing economic and social differences between the urban and the rural world the influence of the village culture in the development of the nation and society must not be underestimated. These “traditional” values had persevered despite the processes of modernisation in the socialist society of former Yugoslavia. In the Balkans rural traditions had their impact on life in the cities and shaped the cities rather than the other way round. Mass migration to cities led to the urbanisation of the villages, but also to the ruralisation of the cities. Almost all Serbian cities for example, due to centuries under Turkish domination, developed only in the last 150 years from small villages and market communities. Until the 20th century there existed no specific Serbian urban tradition whatsoever. The village roots remained strong, mutual obligations between the family in the city and the kin in the country further strengthened these ties. Children often still spend their holidays in the country and village children move in with their relatives in the city for higher education. The process of urbanisation began very late in former Yugoslavia. In the beginning of the 20th century the urban populations began to grow and then especially after World War II.

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FIN-DE-SIECLE CULTURE IN VIENNA AROUND 1900

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  

Vienna Secession, architect: Joseph Maria Olbrich 1898

In most fields of intellectual activity, the early 20th century Europe proudly asserted its independence of the past. The modern mind was growing indifferent to history because history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, seemed useless to it. The sharp break from the tie with the past could be seen as involving generational rebellion against parents and a search for new self-definitions. Emergent “modernism” tended to take the specific form of a “reshuffling of the self”. Here historical change not only forced upon the individual a search for a new identity, but also imposesd upon whole social groups the task of revising or replacing defunct belief systems. The attempt to shake off the shackles of history paradoxically speeded up the process of history, for indifference to any relationship with the past liberates the imagination to proliferate new forms and new constructs. Thus complex changes appeared where once continuity reigned. Vienna around 1900 with its acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegration, proved one of the most fertile breeding grounds of the 20th century’s a-historical culture. Its great intellectual innovators – in music, art and philosophy, in economics and architecture, and, of course, in psychoanalysis – all broke, more or less deliberately, their ties to the historical outlook central to the 19th century liberal culture in which they had been reared. This secession from liberalism grasped a social-psychological reality that the liberals could not see. This intellectual development in Vienna constituted part of the wider cultural revolution that ushered in the 20th century.

 

The era of political ascendancy of the liberal middle class in Austria began later than elsewhere in Western Europe and entered earlier than elsewhere into a deep crisis. Actual constitutional government lasted only about four decades before its defeat and the whole process took place in a temporal compression unknown elsewhere in Europe. In France this process gradually started in 1848 and lasted until World War I, in Austria however modern movements appeared in most fields in the 1890s and were fully matured two decades later. Thus the growth of a new culture seemed to take place as in a hothouse, with political crisis providing the heat. Austria became, as the poet Hebbel, said “the little world in which the big one holds its try-outs.” In Vienna, contrary to Paris, London or Berlin, until about 1900 the cohesiveness of the whole social elite was very strong. The salon and the cafe retained their vitality as institutions where intellectuals of different kinds shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a business and professional elite proud of its humanistic education and artistic culture. The development of an avant-garde subculture, detached from the political and social values of the upper middle class, came later in Vienna, though it was perhaps swifter and more self-confident. Most of the pioneering generation of culture-makers were alienated along with their class in its exclusion from political power, not against it as a ruling class. Only in the last decade before World War I does there appear alienation of the intellectual from the whole society.

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Roma Integration Efforts

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , ,

Roma Girl in Romania

The unfortunate failure of social inclusion of the Roma in the Danube region is a direct result of measures taken to address their exclusion. The last decades prove that member states as well as the EU institutions seem to be unwilling and sometimes incapable of designing or implementing measures to bring about change to the increasing alienation and exclusion of Roma citizens. So far the focus has been on “Fixing the Roma problem” through disjointed, small and unsustainable projects. The failure to acknowledge and address anti-Gypsyism, grassroots empowerment and the inability to stimulate active citizenship of both Roma and non-Roma citizens are the main reasons for the current unsatisfactory situation. Awareness of the problem is the first step in addressing it effectively. European societies regard the life style of Roma as a deviation from the established and expected social norms of those living in Europe. The integrated Roma remain invisible and are either perceived as non-Roma or pretend to be non-Roma. Racism against Roma is not a deviation in Europe, but is rather the accepted normality. In that way the rights and responsibilities of citizens in an increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural Europe remain biased or are at the very best ambiguous. In most countries the policy target is to somehow “fix the Roma” or get rid of them. The heterogeneity and the lack of experience in dealing with elections or advancing their interests in the newly created national democracies in CEE after 1989 make Roma almost irrelevant in elections. Infighting, incompetency and corruption of their representatives are some other serious reasons for the present abysmal situation. …

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ROMA INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , ,

“Romanipé” stands for the identity and sense of belonging of a people – a timeless, placeless people with uncertain roots but a rich spirit, the “bravalipé”. Throughout their history stretching back over a millennium, these people have been the victims of many injustices. During their endless journey in search of a “friendly soil”, they have become scattered all across the world. All the Roma, Sinti, Manush, Kale and Romanichal – “Gypsy” is a discriminatory term applied to them by non-Roma – have one thing in common: they are one people. They are bound by “phralipé”, which means brotherhood and envelops and binds them together as members of a family with a great sense of solidarity. Confusion about the Roma makes it difficult to understand the reality and the needs of Europe’s largest linguistic and ethnic transnational minority. Most people in Europe know virtually nothing about Roma culture and policies to disseminate Romani culture are either virtually non-existent or have been influenced by folklore and by that confirm people’s mental images of a minority that cannot be integrated. In the course of history there have been many attempts at forced assimilation of the Roma people, which have taken different forms, though all with the ultimate aim of destroying the Romani culture.…

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ROMA DISCRIMINATION

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , ,

Roma settlement, Slovakia

A new actor has emerged in European politics: “the threatened majorities”. They feel like minorities, they talk like minorities and they feel betrayed by their elites. European societies have started to view globalisation as an existential threat to their prosperity. A majority of people already psychologically live with the fear that they have lost control of their own social environment. While the Western European debate has been Islam-centred since the beginning of the 21st century, the Central European debate has been Roma-centred. More than 75% of the Roma community living in Europe is settled in the Danube basin and above all, in the EU accession states of 2004/07. While the fear of Islam is the incarnation of cultural fears of Western European publics, the anti-Roma sentiment in Central Europe is the embodiment of predominantly social fears of post-communist societies. …

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AUSTRIAN ROMA AND SINTI

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , ,

The official estimate for the Roma population in Austria is 10,000-20,000. At the 2011 census a little more than 4,000 Romani speakers with Austrian nationality were recorded and approximately 2,000 with other nationalities. Yet Roma representatives estimate 10,000 autochthonous Roma plus 25,000 – 30,000 Roma immigrants. The Roma are the only ethnic minority group which is since 1993 officially recognized throughout the Austrian territory, whereas the Slovenian, Croatian and Hungarian minority is officially recognised in some federal states only. The Roma Advisory Council was established in 1995. The “Burgenland Roma” are considered as mainly rural, whereas other Roma groups are city dwellers. The majority of autochthonous Roma live in Vienna and eastern Austria. As the religious affiliation of Roma is usually determined by that of the majority population of the respective emigration country which in turn correlates with the socio-cultural background, the “Burgenland Roma” and “Lovara”, the biggest Austrian autochthonous groups, are generally Catholic.…

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