Jews on the Way from Bohemia via Prague to Vienna

In 1931/32, Charlotte von Weisl, born in 1868 in Lokšany, the Jewish quarter of the Bohemian small town of Bresnitz/Breznice, moved from Prague to Vienna in 1888, and wrote her family history at the age of 63. The narrator may have felt this being a twofold turning point in her life history: biographically through the death of her beloved and revered husband, Ernst Franz von Weisl on June 18 1931, politically through the imminent establishment of authoritarian forms of government in Austria and Germany, through the entry into the Age of Hitler, as Charlotte von Weisl herself wrote. The series of ancestors described by the author goes back seven generations, to the 17th century. A specific sense of family is to be left to the descendants as a legacy, through family consciousness and a family canon of virtues. Janus-headed, Charlotte von Weisl looks back into a past, marked by the social, economic and cultural advancement of her ancestors and ahead into an uncertain, life-threatening future for her children and grandchildren. Until the 1880s this family chronicle was located in Bohemia in the countryside, in villages, small towns and finally in the capital Prague. In the last quarter of the story, in which Charlotte mostly describes her marriage to Ernst Franz von Weisl, Vienna becomes the main scene of the action. As in other Jewish family histories, the Habsburg metropolis is seen as urban, cosmopolitan ultimate destination of migration, where the social ascent process reaches its high point in terms of possessions and education, and at the same time reaches its end. The encounter with Zionism in the characters of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau as well as the First World War, in which Ernst Franz von Weisl served as a respected military lawyer, while his sons were detached to the front as officers of the Imperial and Royal Army, are the other most striking historical events. The volume contains an extensive and detailed commentary on the text and an introductory monographic part, which examines the work from a genre-poetical, socio-historical and thematic point of view. The appendix offers an overall view of all branches of the family and a timeline of the historical, social and political environment dating back to the Thirty Years` War, into which the life data of the more important members of the family are inserted. A bibliography and a register of persons form the conclusion. The edition is intended to provide an informative and new insight into the eventful history of Jewish family branches in the Austrian-Bohemian countries of the Habsburg Empire. It illustrates once again, enriched with many unknown details that the history of all these Jewish generations represents an outstanding, integrative component of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which was irrevocably destroyed in 1938/39 with the Anschluss of Austria to Hitler`s Germany and the subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia, with the World War and the Shoah. Many members of the last generation of this family history fell victim to the catastrophe unless they managed to save themselves, their children and grandchildren like the narrator herself by fleeing to either America, Canada or Palestine.