Hans Georg Friedmann

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Hans Georg Friedmann (November 23, 1928 in Vienna - March 15 or 16, 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp ) was an Austrian student who was murdered by the Nazi regime . From 1939 he had to live with his family in a collective flat in Vienna's Leopoldstadt , where he wrote thirteen crime stories that were published in 2016.

Friedmann was described as the Austrian counterpart to Anne Frank .

life and work

Friedmann was the son of Hildegard and Hugo Friedmann, he had a younger sister, Liselotte. The family had become prosperous with diligence, and the father was the owner of a jersey factory. Little Hans Georg and his sister grew up in their parents' house at St.-Veit-Gasse 15 in Hietzing . From autumn 1938 Hans Georg was supposed to attend the nearby Fichtnergasse grammar school. Immediately after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, however, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler took up quarters in the school building. As a result, pupils of Jewish origin were denied classes in the grammar school.

The father's company was Aryanized and the art collection stolen. The German National Library , which states 1944 as the year Hans Georg Friedmann died, writes: "Hans Georg's father was a curator at the Jewish Museum in Vienna and a leading figure in the Jewish community ." In 1939 the family had to move into a collective apartment in Leopoldstadt move. Before the deportation  , one of the family's domestic workers was able to bring some of the Friedmann's belongings to safety, including the crime stories by Hans Georg Friedmann. On October 9, 1942, parents and children were deported from Haidgasse to the Theresienstadt ghetto . There, the father took over the management of the camp library and organized artistic events. "Received documents prove how the family tried for two years to simulate a humane everyday life." On October 19, 1944, mother and sister were deported to Auschwitz , where they were murdered by the Nazi regime. Father and son were sent to the Dachau concentration camp . On March 15 or 16, 1945, Hans Georg Friedmann died in the Kaufering satellite camp .

A suitcase that was left in Vienna contained, among other things, Mother's Day tickets hand-painted by Hans Georg, written teasing by the siblings (“Li is a pig this is how she looks” or “Hans is very shlimm, stupid and a Trotel”), a few photos and his novel Tom Lasker's adventures around the world. Marie Mikesch, the Friedmanns' former nanny, guarded the suitcase until the end of the Nazi regime and later handed it over to Hans Georg's cousin Toni Spielmann, a survivor of the family. Spielmann was a member of the Swiss Korczak Society for the Promotion of Children's Rights and had a few facsimile editions of the booklet novels printed. One of these issues came to the Austrian historian Heide Manhartsberger-Zuleger, a member of the Austrian Korczak Society, who found the topic suitable for contemporary history work with school classes. However, no AHS or other school was interested in this project, neither in Vienna nor in the federal states, until Manhartsberger-Zuleger met the vocational school teacher Klaudia Lassacher at a specialist conference. This took hold and worked on the life story of Hans Georg Friedmann and his crime novels in a two-year project with the 2E in the vocational school in Vienna's Embelgasse. “The silent girls and 'tough guys', who at the beginning sometimes responded with a“ not again ”to the topic of contemporary history, became increasingly committed advocates of memory, until the meeting with Spielmann as the climax and conclusion of the project.” Result the two-year discussion was also a radio feature for the students. The Hietzing Adult Education Center , which has long been involved in contemporary history, was also interested in the young writer and in 2016 designed an exhibition on the person and work of Hans Georg Friedmann. This exhibition also found recognition abroad and was shown again in 2018 at the European Janusz Korczak Academy in Munich.

The classmates of the former 2E of the vocational school Embelgasse accepted Hans Georg Friedmann as one of their own, a student expressed this in monosyllabic recognition as follows: Yes, Hans Georg is “cool anyway”.

To discover his stories

“The whole world knows Anne Frank's diaries  - and nobody knows Hans Georg Friedmann. The Viennese boy left the world with an equally poignant testimony to the Shoah in his own way: self-written adventure thrillers in which the ten-year-old dreams of being far away from persecution, fear and humiliation and instead with his super detective Tom Lasker around the world for ensures real law and order. That we now know about it is thanks to young people who are as old today as Friedmann when he was murdered. "

- ORF

reception

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hans Georg Friedmann in the database of the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Lukas Zimmer: Escape impossible, except for Tom Lasker. ORF , May 21, 2016.
  3. ^ Sophie Lillie : What was once: Handbook of the expropriated art collections of Vienna . Czernin Verlag , 2003, ISBN 978-3-7076-0049-0 .
  4. ↑ Lukas Zimmer: Correctly stamped greed and deceit. ORF , May 21, 2016.
  5. ↑ A Viennese boy dreams away from the Nazis. May 21, 2016, accessed May 24, 2016.
  6. ↑ enken.at : Death does not have the last word. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Friedmann, Hans Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian author of thirteen crime stories, victim of the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1945 or March 16, 1945
Place of death Dachau concentration camp