Brian TaylorTHIS IS THE SECOND of two articles that attempt, on the basis of inscriptions, stamps, booksellers’ labels, book plates and other such additions to books, to produce a mini-biography of each of the otherwise to me unknown former owners of two German libraries brought at some time to Australia. The first was published as “By their books ye may (get to) know them (1): Edgar Ederheimer” in Biblionews, 335th and 356th Issues (September and December 2007), pp.128–141.The philosopher and ethicist Professor Peter Singer in the “Talking Heads” program on ABC television on Monday evening, 28 May 2007, in speaking of his origins said that he was the son of Austrian Jews from Vienna who had left and come to Australia after what is called in German der Anschluss, ‘the attachment’, when on 12 March 1938 the Nazis took over Hitler’s homeland and attached it to what they called Großdeutschland, ‘Greater Germany’.The Singers do not seem to have been the only Viennese Jews to have done so. Saul Friedländer has stated that under pressure from the Nazis “by May 1939, approximately 100,000 [Austrian Jews], or more than 50 percent, had left” (Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1. The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (London: Phoenix, 1998), p.245, though at first Australia was not too keen to take any (p.249, and note 41). Over the years a number of descendants have rung the German Department at Sydney University asking us to take their parents’ or grandparents’ libraries off their hands, as no one in the family wanted to or could even read these German books anymore. At first it was my late colleague, the carless John Fletcher, who would take the smaller collections, but then it was me with my Volvo station wagon who would go off to collect the larger ones. In all I collected three substantial libraries of such emigrated Viennese Jewish people.I was struck by how they all seemed to have a core of the same books. Understandably there were the works of Jewish writers in German, such as Franz Werfel, Jakob Wassermann, Karl Kraus and especially the prodigious Stefan Zweig. It was often a thrill for me to find, using the reference book Erstausgaben deutscher Dichtung [‘First editions of German literature’] (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1967), by my old boss Professor Gero von Wilpert, that I had potentially valuable first editions, sometimes with dedications, among these books. Otherwise there were editions of the works of the great author of Germany’s classical period, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, editions of Shakespeare in German, but strangely also such things as the 1931 German translation, Das Buch von San Michele, of the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele , first published in London in 1929,1 and a translation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga.I certainly did not have space to store all these libraries, especially as they had so many volumes in common, so I gave two of them away almost completely, to the Fisher Library at the University and to colleagues here and overseas, with the not inconsiderable number of cookery books going to Professor Trude Ehlert of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who is an expert on and practitioner of medieval cookery and an author on the subject. I did keep back, however, most of the first editions of other books and those inscribed by famous writers. Details of some of those given away I kept on a small card index system.But one library was of special interest to me because of the books it contained and especially because of the various inscriptions etc. in some of them, so this one I have kept reasonably intact. How did I come by it? Somewhat differently from the others.One day in the early 1990s a man rang our department saying he was the solicitor of a lady who had recently passed away and who evidently had no relatives or descendants, so he was having to dispose of her effects, among them her rather large library. So off I went and collected quite a few boxes of what was the largest of these libraries and by far the most interesting, but I learnt from the solicitor nothing at all of the woman, not even her name.Once I looked through the books, I saw they contained quite a bit of interesting information that allowed me gradually to form some sort of picture of her and her life and contacts. That is when I first conceived the idea of some day writing a paper like this one about her and her books.Unlike the other libraries, this one contained as well as German books a very large number in English, something that will probably make it more interesting to an Australian audience than Ederheimer’s books discussed in my first article. Over the intervening years her books have also been moved around and got somewhat mixed up with my other books, but there is one feature that allows me to recognise most of them as hers, namely they contain near the front a rubber stamp with Arabic text. (Illustration 1) It was clear that this must mean that she had spent some time in the Middle East, but where and when I couldn’t be sure. I guessed it might have been Palestine in the 1940s, but it was only a guess. In the meantime I have asked a Sydney University colleague, Emeritus Professor Rif Ebied, who is a native speaker of Arabic, to translate it for me, and it turns out to mean, at the top, ‘Publication Supervision in Alexandria’, and, at the bottom, ‘Supervisor’, and then, to the right, ‘Date’. Sometimes there is a signature after ‘Supervisor’, but unfortunately in not one book is the place for a date filled in.At least I now knew that she had been in Egypt, and that was backed up by Cairo booksellers’ labels in two of the books and the occasional inscription. But back to the beginning: Who was she and what were her dates?The earliest book containing a manuscript date that I can associate with her is a 1918 printing of Waldemar Bonsels’ Indienfahrt [‘Voyage to India’] (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening), published originally in 1916. On the first righthand end paper is the dated signature in browned ink: “Liesel/ 21.II.1919”, so the female name Liesel, a form of Elisabeth, and the date 21st February 1919. On the second righthand end paper is a dedicatory inscription from the author, which after a handwritten biblical quotation on God’s love attributed just to “Johannes” (in fact it is the latter half of I John 4:16), says: “Frl. Liesel Künzler / zur freundl[ichen] Erinnerung / an den 26.[?] 1920 von Waldemar Bonsels.”, meaning: ‘Miss Liesel Künzler / in friendly memory / of the 26th of [?] 1920 from Waldemar Bonsels’. Unfortunately, I cannot decipher the abbreviation for the month here. Although the 26 is followed by a full stop, which in German is one way of indicating the ordinal number, so 26th, this actually seems to be followed by “ten”, the equivalent of English “th” and thus another German way of expressing the ordinal, so it looks to me very much as if Bonsels has doubled up on expressing the ordinal and distractedly left out the name of the month. (Illustration 2)[singlepic id=113 w=320 h=240 float=]Illustration 1Arabic stamp with inscription from Max (?). We now know that this woman’s maiden name was Liesel Künzler. She appears to have had an interest in literature, and the fact that her owner’s inscription is from the year before Bonsels’ inscription suggests that she may have gone to a talk by him on the 1920 date and asked him to sign her book. If he did omit to put in the date, it may indicate that she was just in a queue of people waiting for their books to be signed. The book contains the Arabic stamp, so she later took it to Egypt with her. Amongst the books that I picked up I also have Karl Rheinfurth’s 1920 study of Bonsels, Waldemar Bonsels. Eine Studie. Mit zwei Bildbeigaben und einer biograph[ischen] Skizze [‘W.B.: A study. With two accompanying pictures and a biographical sketch’] (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler), but it contains no inscriptions and no stamp, so I cannot be sure that it belonged to her. Bonsels was born in 1881 and died in 1952.[singlepic id=114 w=320 h=240 float=]Illustration 2Bible quotation and author’s dedication in W Bonsel’s Indienfahrt.Close in time to the Bonsels book is a little duodecimo volume of poems, Friedliche Welt. Erträumtes in Versen [‘Peaceful world: Things dreamed, in verse’] by Friedl Schreyvogl with original woodcuts by Carl Schulda Junior. Although it is dated on the title page as being published in Vienna in 1920, there is a dedicatory inscription by the poet Schreyvogl himself behind the title page, all of which is written in blue ink except for the words in the middle ‘liebes Fräulein Liesl Künzler”, meaning ‘Dear Miss Liesl Künzler’, using a slight variation – without “e” before the second “l” – of the way she spelt her name herself at the time. The inscription is dated “Weihnachten 1919. Wien”, so Vienna, Christmas 1919, and thus in the year before the book was purportedly published. (Illustration 3) It also contains the Arabic stamp.See second part of post for continuation of text.[nggallery id=13]
