Alfons Hochhauser

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Alfons Franz Emanuel Hochhauser (born May 15, 1906 in Judenburg , Austria ; † January 15, 1981 in Veneto , municipality of Keramidi, today Rigas Fereos , Greece ) was an Austrian dropout .

Life

Hochhauser's career was shaped by his striving for freedom and independence.

His father, a wealthy timber merchant from Frohnleiten , came home late from the First World War and was unable to find proper access to the unruly boy. When Alfons was 14, he ran away from home for the first time. He dropped out of school, worked in a mine near Salzburg and as a lumberjack in his father's charcoal factory .

At the age of 17 he set out on a hitchhike . It took him through Italy , southern France , Spain , across North Africa and finally to Palestine . In Jerusalem he worked for a few months as a cistern cleaner , then he moved on through Turkey to Constantinople and after two years was back at home in Styria .

After a few weeks he was on his way again, this time to Greece. His parents had bought him a handy film camera in the hope that with the help of this promising technology he would still find a bourgeois existence. However, the expensive device had to be cleared for a considerable amount of money when it was imported , which Alfons was initially unable to raise. Together with three friends, including the later writer Ernst Kreuder , he tried to found a company for advertising films in Thessaloniki in 1926/1927 under the name "Zeitfilm". Advances were collected to release the camera from customs. When this was finally achieved, the device had to be relocated again because advances were demanded, there was no money for film material and the quartet lacked the bare essentials for survival. After the failure of the “Zeitfilm” company, Hochhauser lived from 1927 as a shepherd , fisherman and innkeeper in Pelion , a coastal mountain range in Thessaly . Werner Helwig visited him there three times between 1935 and 1938.

In 1938, Hochhauser was expelled from Greece on suspicion of espionage. After several ultimately unsuccessful objections, he left Greece in June 1939. He then worked for a fruit processing company in Leibnitz in Styria. In November 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in Graz . After completing his basic training, he was given leave of absence. He drove to Northern Germany and in 1940 he was hired as a stoker on a freighter to Leningrad . In 1941 he first worked as an insurance agent, from April 1, 1941 he was back in the fruit processing plant in Leibnitz. From December of the same year he was called up to work on an interpreting train in Graz , and in March 1942 he was transferred to an interpreting unit in Berlin. At the same time, diving pioneer Hans Hass was planning an expedition to the Aegean Sea . He had heard of Hochhauser through Helwig's novel Raubfischer in Hellas , got to know him in Berlin and managed to get him released for this expedition from July to November 1942.

After the Aegean expedition with Hans Hass in 1942, Hochhauser was initially back with his unit in Berlin and then from April 1943 in Greece as an interpreter for the Secret Field Police Group 640 , from December 1943 with the Secret Field Police Group 510 . Later he kept asserting that he had tried with the means available to him to help the accused Greeks or to save them from draconian punishments. Greek contemporary witnesses also confirmed this. From January 1944, Hochhauser, who was now stationed in Athens , was repeatedly on the move by ship in the Aegean Sea with reconnaissance missions. He himself had to manage a small civilian cargo ship with a Greek crew. Wheat, beans, oil and tobacco were traded in a lively and profitable way to cover up and finance the company. In this respect, the suspicion that is repeatedly heard in Pelion that Hochhauser worked as a spy for the Nazis is well proven and has not been denied by him.

After the war, Hochhauser first served a year imprisonment in a British penal camp in Carinthia . He then ran a charcoal burning plant in the Styrian mountains for three years. From 1950 he was again an employee of Hans Hass and participated in his expeditions until 1956. In Hass' book People and Sharks, the many anecdotes about "Xenophon" loosen up the expedition report, and in the three classic hate films People Among Sharks (1947), Adventure in the Red Sea (1951) and Company Xarifa (1954), Hochhauser is alias Xenophon can be seen in both documentary and small play scenes. On the expeditions he was the man for everything technical. In addition, Hass also appreciated his organizational talent and his skills as a clever and trustworthy businessman. Hochhauser is never even submerged.

In 1957 Alfons Hochhauser returned to Greece. On the island of Trikeri , at the southern tip of the Pelion peninsula, he leased an abandoned monastery and converted it into a simple hostel with 20 rooms. He married Chariklia, a friend he had met in Pelion 30 years earlier. The alternative operation was quite successful. However, the church drove up the rent for the monastery more and more, so that Hochhauser finally gave up in 1969. He dared a new beginning at Cape Koulouri near Veneto on the east coast of Pelion. Under difficult conditions - at that time Koulouri could only be reached from Veneto by Mulis and four hours by motorboat from the nearest settlement with shops - he accommodated his summer guests in simple leaf huts until 1980.

Alfons Hochhauser died self-determined. On January 15, 1981, he set out from Koulouri on an arduous hike high into the mountains. He froze to death on a lonely ridge. He left two illegitimate children: a son and a daughter.

Perhaps due to the loneliness he chose himself, Hochhauser was an avid letter writer all his life. Parts of his extensive correspondence have been preserved, including those with Ernst Kreuder, Werner Helwig and Hans Hass. The letters to Ernst Kreuder are in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . The correspondence with Hans Hass is archived in the Hans Hass Institute. Excerpts from the correspondence with Werner Helwig are published on the Internet.

effect

Hochhauser was the model for the figure of Clemens in Werner Helwig's Greek novels , with whom he had a problematic friendship. He was friends with the writer Ernst Kreuder , the painter Conrad Westpfahl and the ancient historian Peter Robert Franke . For many years he worked with the diving pioneer and marine researcher Hans Hass and was a pioneer of soft tourism in Greece.

Almost 30 years after his death, his person was again the subject of a literary work: The novel derοιος θυμάται τον Αλφόνς (Who remembers Alfonso?) By Kostas Akrivos was published in Greece in May 2010 . The book was also published in German in September 2012 under the title Alfons Hochhauser - The Barefoot Prophet of Pelion .

Movies

  • In the 1950s there was a long-term dispute between Hochhauser and Werner Helwig when the book Raubfischer in Hellas was to be filmed. Since Hochhauser did not want to have his life story processed in the film, the script was rewritten as a pure love story and was only allowed to be made into a film by Horst Hächler in 1959 .
  • In 1979 the Süddeutscher Rundfunk ran a 45-minute television documentary about high-rise buildings with the title I must constantly feel that I'm alive ... views of a loner .
  • The Stuttgart media artist Ulrich Bernhardt made a video film with Hochhauser in 1980 entitled Videolog: Epitaph Xenophon (25 minutes).
  • Lotte Hass's book A Girl on the Sea Floor (Vienna Heidelberg 1970) was filmed in the summer of 2010 . It is about the expedition to the Red Sea in 1950, in which Hochhauser also participated. Hochhauser is portrayed by Harald Krassnitzer . The film was broadcast on December 8, 2011 by ZDF and ORF .
  • The Greek TV channel ERT showed a 53-minute film portrait about Alfons Hochhauser on March 22, 2012 with the title Αλφόνς: Ένας μικρός Θεός στη Μαγνησία (Alfons: A Little God in Magnisia ). It describes in detail Hochhauser's time on the island of Trikeri and at Cape Koulouri near Veneto.

literature

  • Friedrich Graupe (with the assistance of Hochhauser): The Styrian Odysseus. A lonely chap in the Aegean Sea, far from civilization today is the second home of the Austrian Alfons Xenophon skyscrapers ... . Series in 33 parts in the Wiener Kronen-Zeitung , from late May to early July 1976.
  • Peter Robert Franke: Requiem for Xenophon. In: Hellenika - Yearbook for the Friends of Greece 1984.
  • Michel Sivignon: Alfonso et le Pélion. Un étrange histoire. In: Revue Desmos, No 31, 2009, ISBN 978-2-911427-49-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baptismal register X 1903-1916 - Judenburg-St.Nikolaus, http://matriken.graz-seckau.at/flashbook?id=12581¤tPage=137
  2. ^ Thessaloniki and the "Zeitfilm Company", http://www.alfons-hochhauser.de./thessaloniki.html
  3. ↑ The information in this section is taken from Hochhauser's written memoirs. Typescript, written from 1971 to 1973.
  4. ^ Graupe: The Styrian Odysseus , 20th episode
  5. ↑ E.g. in Akrivos, p. 35.
  6. ↑ a b Graupe: The Styrian Odysseus , 21st episode.
  7. ↑ Hochhauser reports on this time in his post-war diary: http://www.alfons-hochhauser.de/bei-der-wehrmacht.html
  8. ^ Franke: Requiem for Xenophon. In: Hellenika - Yearbook for the Friends of Greece 1984, p. 163 ff.
  9. ↑ Koromilia - the death Alfons high Hauser at YouTube
  10. ↑ http://www.wernerhelwig.de/briefe.htm .
  11. ↑ Κώστας Ακρίβος: Ποιος θυμάται τον Αλφόνς . Μεταίχμιο, Αθήνα 2010, ISBN 978-960-455-985-5 .
  12. ^ FRG 1959, director: Horst Hächler. With Maria Schell, Cliff Robertson, Cameron Mitchell, Fritz Tillmann a. A.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hochhauser, Alfons
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Xenophon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian dropout
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Judenburg , Austria
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1981
Place of death Veneto, Greece