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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

About renamed streets and job descriptions 1940















Here are two letters written by my grandfather to my grandmother. The one on the left was from his office at the Dollfussplatz 6, where he was Primarius, or chief surgeon at one of Vienna's largest hospitals. The date on that one is September 1939. Less than a year later things had changed; gone was his professional designation and the street had been renamed Herrmann Göringplatz. The street, which has been renamed several times during history according to the political style of the day, is now known as the Roosevelt Platz, and is very close to the family house in the Währingerstrasse. If you look closely, you can see that the phone number remained unchanged during all this.

There's an interesting footnote about Dollfuss, who was Austria's anti-facist chancellor until his assassination in 1934 by the Nazis. His children had been given a miniature motorised Italian made sportscar. Having no appropriate place to use this fantastic object, Dollfuss brought it, with his children, to my father's house, which had extensive gardens and paths, and there it was driven around in circles between the greenhouses and the carriage house. As far as I know, neither my father or any of his siblings were ever allowed to have a turn using it!