Freud’s Butcher is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when I think I’m about finished with the story of my maternal grandparents’ family, another member turns up.
This time it is Andreas Oberndorfer, grandson of Valerie Oberndorfer-Kornmehl and nephew of my second cousin once removed, Bruno Oberndorfer-Kornmehl.
My newfound Viennese relative appeared out of the blue. He would occasionally google various lost family members, he said, with few results — until he found this blog. Remarkably, like me, he is a food and travel writer. I’m only sorry I missed the chance to meet him and incorporate the story of his family into my talk at the Freud Museum in Vienna last October.
That family story turned out to be quite a doozy–and I have full permission to share it (you’ll see why I worried about it in a minute, aside from the fact that I generally tend to worry about everything).
Andreas said two things to ease my concerns:
If I had wanted you to keep my information confidential, I would have told so. In contrast: I was aware (and would have been a real idiot not to be) that you are feeding a blog about Freud’s Butcher. So when I wrote to you, I wanted the information I could provide to be used by you to complement your site.
And
I am not ashamed of anything that happened long before my birth.
This last is going to have to become one of my Rules to Live By.
A bit of background
Emmy, George, Hans, and Lilly Kornmehl, Vienna, 1915
I wrote about the family of Martin Kornmehl, one of my grandmother’s three brothers, in The Return of Martin Kornmehl. Of the four children in the above picture, the one whose family family fate remained a bit of a mystery was Hans.
Things I knew:
- Like his father and uncles and his brother George, Hans went into the family butcher business.
- Hans married Valerie Johanna (Wally) Oberndorfer, who was born Roman-Catholic, in 1904. She converted to Judaism in 1929, and was married in the Jewish faith to Hans in 1932.
- A son, Bruno Oberndorfer-Kornmehl, was born in 1925, four years before Hans and Valerie had a Jewish wedding.
- Valerie converted back to Roman Catholicism in 1938, which probably saved her life, given the Anschluss that year.
- Hans was sent to Auschwitz in 1942.
Things I did not know:
- Where Valerie was born, how she met Hans–or really anything about her.
- What happened to their son Bruno during and after the war.
And then I heard from the aforementioned Andreas Oberndorfer, who was very excited to find the aforementioned blog post about Martin Kornmehl. He wrote:
[Bruno] was my uncle, a very nice and funny guy with red hair and millions of freckles whom I loved very much. My mother was Valerie Kornmehl’s daughter, Emma Oberndorfer, born as a illegitimate child in 1922, while Bruno was born in 1925.
Who Was Valerie?
According to Andreas (whose language I only edited in a few places for clarity):
Valerie Oberndorfer, ca. 1918, when she was about 14 years old.
Valerie Oberndorfer, my grandmother, grew up in Küb/Semmering, about 80 kms from Vienna, one of the places, where the Viennese aristocracy spent their “Sommerfrische” in the villas in Semmering, Reichenau etc., trying to stay near to the members of the Habsburg court, who often vacationed there in the summer.
Valerie was one of the poorer children in that village, raised by her mother in a small house. She was the illegitimate child of a shoemaker, Josef Kerschbaumer, who owned the house and the associated workshop. When she grew up, she decided to leave and moved to Vienna.
Having no relatives and no chances to work there, she became a prostitute.
Valerie seems to have been a very attractive women. My mother Emma was the result, as she told me, not really knowing, of an encounter between Valerie and two former Italian soldiers who were coming home from a Russian detention camp, crossing Vienna in 1921 (my mother was born in 1922).
A few days after her birth, Valerie brought my mother to Küb, where she grew up in her grandmother’s house.
Valerie got to know Hans Kornmehl while working, if I may say so. He obviously was very convinced of her, ehm, attractions. They married, and they made Bruno.
Valerie Oberndorfer-Kornmehl 1932
What I Got Wrong & What I Still Don’t Know
I thought that Valerie was born in Vienna, not Küb, and I wasn’t sure whether or not Bruno was Hans’s son; I thought he might have been from a previous marriage. Now it seem clear that Hans and Valerie got married civilly before she gave birth to Hans.
The fact that she was not Jewish was clearly an issue with the Kornmehl family — thus the conversion to Judaism in 1929 and synagogue wedding in 1932. But, I wondered, what did the family know about her past? My research into Jewish attitudes towards prostitution in post-World War I Vienna led me to — where else? — Freud, but I decided not to go down that particular path into the male psyche.
Instead, I turned again to Andreas:
My mother only told me that grandma was very much integrated into the Kornmehl family. I always had the impression that Valerie wanted her former identity to vanish. My mother was not welcome [at the Kornmehls’ home], and it could be that the Kornmehls did not really appreciate her upbringing and that Valerie wanted to completely forget about her past, including my mother.
Valerie Oberndorfer and her grandson Andreas, late 1950s. The man in the picture atop the toy shelf, is Andreas’s father, Paul Kurz.
Stay tuned for a bit more about Hans and for the story of Valerie and Hans’s son, Bruno.
