When in Vienna, my grandparents had been middle-class intellectuals; my grandfather a well-paid lawyer, my grandmother a socialist and music-lover. The Second World War put […]
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Freud was jealous of my great-aunt’s lover
With some dogged digging, the internet can sometimes divulge the most unexpected stories. It recently revealed Hilde Loewe, wife of my great-uncle Otto Flatter of […]
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A Jewish blessing
My father was 12 when he learned that he was Jewish and that life was no longer safe. Just after the Anschluss, his mother told […]
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Jindřich Blum – My Uncle Otto’s sorely lamented friend
Great-uncle Otto wrote a moving tribute in his memoir to his friend the Czech architect Jindřich (Heinrich) Blum, which didn’t make it into my book […]
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Mahler, Freud and me
I based my book “Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theatre” on seven family memoirs, but I also read as much as I could about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. […]
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Einstein’s helping hand for my refugee family
Albert Einstein must have had hundreds of letters from desperate European Jews asking for help. My grandmother Emma was among those 1930s letter-writers to him […]
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The family’s “shameful” secret
A good many stories didn’t make it into “Uncle Otto’s Puppet Theatre”. One of these was about the lovely illegitimate Martha. Born of unmarried Adelheid’s […]
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Snake, lizard and toadskin: my family’s handmade shoes
Hand-made shoes were once the nec plus ultra, and my family made some of the very best. Artists, aristocrats and business tycoons wore Graumann shoes […]
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The girl with the military tattoo
Tattoos may be ubiquitous nowadays, but it wasn’t always thus. So I was amused by an anecdote of my great-uncle Richard Flatter, lawyer by day, […]
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Smutty art in Vienna
When Uncle Otto was trying to become an established figure in the art world, the Viennese had sex on the brain. Vienna could be called […]
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