Max Riccabona

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Max Riccabona concentration camp jacket from the Dachau concentration camp (half-linen; private loan, Vorarlberg Museum, Bregenz)

Max Riccabona (born March 31, 1915 in Feldkirch ; † October 4, 1997 in Lochau , Vorarlberg ) was an Austrian collagist , author and lawyer .

life and work

Max Gottfried Eduard Riccabona was the first child of the merchant's daughter Anna Perlhefter (1885–1960) and Gottfried Riccabona (1879–1964). In his youth he fell seriously ill with pneumonia several times and had to spend some time in the Gaisbühel lung sanatorium and in Davos. After graduating from high school in Feldkirch in 1934, he studied law in Graz. During this study he became a member of the K.Ö.St.V. Traungau Graz . Summer courses followed in Paris, Cambridge, Perugia and Salamanca. From 1936 to 1938 Riccabona trained at the Vienna Consular Academy . As a mixed race, he was denied a position in the diplomatic service by the Nazi racial legislation. In Vienna he worked - according to his own unproven information, which he made when he was released from the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 - in conspiratorial circles in the resistance against National Socialism and - also according to his own unproven information - worked for the English secret service. From 1939 to 1940 Riccabona was in Paris for two months and, according to his own statements, worked there for various newspapers. In 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, took part in the French campaign as a soldier and then in the same year became special leader in Stalag XVIIa ( Kaisersteinbruch ). At the end of 1940 he was released from the Wehrmacht, presumably because of his - according to contemporary terminology - "unworthy of military service " as a so-called " half-Jew ", arrested in Vienna in mid-1941 and transferred to the Salzburg police prison. From 1942 to 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp , where he was part of the precinct staff of the concentration camp doctor Sigmund Rascher and remained imprisoned until the concentration camp was liberated. During the Nazi regime, his father protected his so-called Jewish wife and her so-called Jewish brother from the ongoing marginalization and harassment and from kidnapping and murder in the east and was also continuously active with financial bribes for his son in the Dachau concentration camp, so that Max in the Concentration camp function prisoner was and remained, and thus was able to survive.

After the end of the war Riccabona returned to Vorarlberg, where he was involved in the resistance movement and in 1946 became chairman of the Austrian democratic freedom movement . He became known to Josef Böckle, Max Haller , Rudolf Högler and Claus Pack. In 1949 he received his doctorate from the University of Innsbruck and joined the law firm of his father Gottfried Riccabona as a trainee lawyer , who enjoyed a great reputation as the longstanding president of the Vorarlberg Bar Association . After his death (1964) Riccabona practiced the profession of lawyer in his own way until 1967:

"Tasks like those as a poorly paid public defender , which every lawyer had to take over on a regular basis [...] he met with joke and provocation, until he was left alone with such harassment. He often and happily told the story of his last compulsory defense when he had to defend a truck driver who had overlooked, knocked down and injured a cyclist. Riccabona pleaded for acquittal, referring to paleontology and Darwin : Nobody would think of it, he argued, to hold a dinosaur accountable if it trampled on any reptile . In road traffic, too, as in other areas of life, one should accept the right of the fittest as a selection principle . With this plea, he had got rid of a chore and annoyed the judge, a former National Socialist, but at the same time damaged his reputation as a serious lawyer. But he was heading towards that anyway. "

Max Riccabona's interests were in art and literature. After giving up his office in 1965, he lived in a nursing home; in May 1967 Riccabona was partially incapacitated . He worked as a journalist, wrote prose and designed collages. His novel about the character of Dr. Halbgreyffer - an unfinished magnum opus with autobiographical features - appeared in excerpts in 1980 under the title “Components for the tragic comedy of the x-fold Dr. of Halbgreyffer or protocols of a most progressive half-educational infection ”. Above all through his reports on his - sometimes only pretended - personal encounters with James Joyce (1932), Joseph Roth (1939) and Ezra Pound (1959), his work on his tragic comedy of the multiple Dr. von Halbgreyffer or protocols of a progressive half-education infection as well as his activity in the monarchist resistance Riccabona became known as the Vorarlberg original.

Riccabona was a member of the Graz Authors' Assembly and Literature Vorarlberg . His stories met with great interest and approval, especially from the Graz and Vienna literary scenes. His literary followers and friends include Wolfgang Bauer , Manfred Chobot , Gerhard Jaschke , Reinhard Priessnitz and Hermann Schürrer .

Status of biographical research

For decades, not only Riccabona's literary friends, but also representatives of literary and historical studies have taken over the reports and descriptions of the partially incapacitated Riccabona without checking as eyewitness accounts and passed them on as facts in articles and lexicon entries, although their truth or factual content is highly questionable was. Essential aspects of Riccabona's biography have not been checked for plausibility and truthfulness for decades, which the Vorarlberg writer Kurt Bracharz has repeatedly discussed: “As far as I know, they are nowhere proven or authenticated by another person, at least not for Riccabona who always claimed , especially in the relationship with Joseph Roth extensive friendly intimacy. In the essay volume (= Johann Holzner and Barbara Hoiß (eds.): Max Riccabona. Bohemien. Writer. Contemporary witness.) Riccabona's reports on this matter are apparently more or less unquestionably accepted by most of the authors. "

The Vorarlberg literary scholar Petra Nachbaur made the first corrections to Riccabona's biography in 2001 and made it clear that he was neither an officer nor from , let alone count , as whom he introduced himself to Joseph Roth and his Parisian circle of friends and acquaintances in 1939. Nachbaur also questioned Riccabona's legendary work for a secret service: Riccabona speaks in retrospect of his stay in France as a targeted mission 'as a secret courier for a Tyrolean monarchist resistance movement', although this group is not documented in the relevant archives and publications. In addition, she has shown that Riccabona has doubled and tripled the period of his brief acquaintance with Joseph Roth over time in order to be able to attach more importance to him and himself:

“Max Riccabona arrived in Paris on April 11th [1939]. Joseph Roth died on May 27th, so the acquaintance was limited to one and a half months. In letters to [David] Bronsen and Ingeborg Sältemeyer, Riccabona tried to portray this period as longer, probably in order to give itself more credibility. At the beginning of March, he said, occasionally he even came to Paris at the beginning of February. Soma Morgenstern's memories, however, who wrote that Riccabona had only been in town for a few weeks, probably apply. Riccabona even stated in letters from the 1960s that they were intended to be Joseph Roth's estate administrator together with Friederike Zweig . "

Later, the Vorarlberg historian Werner Dreier examined Riccabona's imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp and touched on some aspects with regard to Riccabona's membership of the precinct staff of the concentration camp doctor Sigmund Rascher that had not been considered until then:

“We don't know how close the inmate Max Riccabona was to the medical experiments and the related crimes and how long. We don't even know what he did or didn't do. However, we know under what terrible circumstances he existed in the Dachau concentration camp and with whom he was with. This suggests that he saw terrible things in Dachau and had to let them happen, that he was there or knew about them - and that his own life was always threatened. What is certain is that, unlike other prison functionaries, he was not prosecuted for complicity after 1945. "

Riccabona's legendary encounter with the Irish writer James Joyce, which took place in Feldkirch in 1932 and is said to have particularly shaped Riccabona's life and work, has now been clearly refuted. The Germanist Andreas Weigel was able to prove that the then 17-year-old Max Riccabona himself was in inpatient treatment at the “ Deutsche Heilstätte ” in Davos during the three weeks that Joyce spent in Feldkirch in the summer of 1932 , which is guaranteed by letters and postcards , which Riccabona wrote to his mother at the time, "which is why the meeting with Joyce, which had a lasting impact on him, can confidently be buried as the Münchhausiade ". Riccabona's eyewitness report that the writer Stefan Zweig met his friend Joseph Roth a few weeks before his death in Riccabona's presence in Paris is an invention that Andreas Weigel discovered through documents (correspondence between Roth and Zweig as well as Zweig's stay in England ) has been unequivocally refuted.

Well-founded doubts also exist with regard to Riccabona's activity in active resistance against the Nazi regime: “If Riccabona's resistance activity was to be a construct similar to his encounter with Joyce and his emergency baptism for Roth, the award of the honorary mark for services to the The liberation of Austria from the National Socialist tyranny in 1979 at Max Riccabona was a certain irony, ”concludes Kurt Bracharz his contribution in the catalog for the exhibition of the vorarlberg museum “ The Riccabona Case ”. Two years earlier, on the occasion of Riccabona’s 100th birthday, Bracharz had asked Riccabona Research whether there was "any [...] evidence outside of Riccabona's own stories" that proved Riccabona's active resistance. In addition, the historian Brigitte Behal mentions in Wolfgang Proske's documentation on "Perpetrators, helpers, free riders", "Nazi-burdened people in the Lake Constance area", that Riccabona helped the Feldkirchen lawyer and journalist Theodor Veiter through his brown past immediately after the end of the Nazi dictatorship To clean up invented acts of resistance: On October 2, 1945, Riccabona, in his function as regional chairman of the Democratic Resistance Movement, Vorarlberg regional leadership, confirmed Theodor Veiter's fictitious activity in the resistance by assuring that “that shortly after Austria joined the Vienna resistance group“ W -Astra ”and in 1945“ made himself available to the armed Austrian resistance group Alois Hoch (Stellagarten) for the fight against the SS ”. This raises loud Bracharz "new light on Riccabona, for which he himself vehemently claimed espionage and resistance activities there is no single document, but rather for his time as a special leader in the rank of lieutenant in STALAG XVII A . While Riccabona in his little book with Dachau memories "Auf dem Nebengeleise", Innsbruck 1995, and in conversations in those years repeatedly rattled about the Nazis and especially about Hitler himself, in 1945 he was also under the fresh impression of his time in Dachau was quite ready to issue the ex- Nazi Veiter a clean bill of health. "

In March 2017, the literary scholar Thomas Rothschild also stated in his review of the catalog of the Bregenz Riccabona exhibition that there was a need for clarification about Riccabonas (alleged resistance activity and) his work as a prison officer of the notorious SS doctor Rascher :

“Kurt Bracharz […] mentions […] not only that there is not a single evidence of Riccabona's active resistance against the National Socialists, but also - with reference to a publication by Werner Dreier, which Alfons Dür and Nikolaus Hagen explained in more detail above formulated more cautiously - which Riccabona himself has always kept silent about, namely, that he was a prisoner functionary with the notorious SS doctor Dr. He was quicker to conduct human experiments on the subjects of negative pressure and hypothermia '. Despite all the sympathy for Riccabona's predilection for mystifications, there is a need for clarification - not for the sake of cheap moral judgment, but for the interpretation of human contradictions and the mechanisms by which one lies to oneself and the world. It should be time to be able to understand the involvement in guilt without relativizing it. "

Riccabona lived in a home in Lochau until his death in May 1967.

Recognitions

Solo exhibitions

Exhibitions

  • 2016: The Riccabona case, December 3, 2016 to April 17, 2017, vorarlberg museum , Bregenz

Publications

  • Riccabona also published under the pseudonyms "Spectator alpinus" and "Eduard von Hochpruck".
  • Translations by the authors Ezra Pound, Henry de Montherlant , Ives Becker .
  • Components for the tragic comedy of the x-fold Dr. von Halbgreyffer or Protocols of a Most Progressive Half-Educational Infection (1980).
  • Poetatastrophen (edited by Wilhelm Meusburger and Helmut Swozilek ) (1993).
  • Max Riccabona: On the side track. Memories and excuses . Edited by Ulrike Längle (1995).

literature

  • Wilhelm Meusburger, Helmut Swozilek (eds.): Vorarlberger Landesmuseum : Max Riccabona. Catalog. Bregenz, June 21 to September 3, 1989.
  • Johann Holzner, Barbara Hoiß (Ed.): Max Riccabona. Bohemian. Writer. Contemporary witness (= Edition Brenner Forum. Volume 4). 2006.
  • Andreas Weigel: Max Riccabona's fictional encounter with James Joyce. Required correction of a dubious contemporary witness. In: miromente . No. 25 September 2011, pp. 34-44.
  • Andreas Weigel: Max Riccabona's "James Joyce" Münchhausiaden. Correction of his dubious contemporary witness. In: Rheticus. Series of publications by the Rheticus Society . No. 55, 2012, pp. 92-107.
  • Kurt Bracharz : Max Riccabona's birthday is the hundredth anniversary - a question for Riccabona research. In: Culture. Magazine for culture and society. December 2014 / January 2015, pp. 72–76.
  • Peter Melichar , Nikolaus Hagen (ed.): The Riccabona case. A family story between acceptance and threat (= vorarlberg museum writings. 22). Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar / Bregenz 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Short biography and sources, pp. 259–260. In: Susanne Fink, Cornelia Rothmund: Fine arts in Vorarlberg. 1945-2005. Biographical lexicon. Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bucher-Verlag, Hohenems 2006, ISBN 978-3-902525-36-9 . The article contains numerous biographical claims coming directly from Max Riccabona, most of which have so far remained unchecked and some have since been unequivocally refuted.
  2. ↑ Peter Melichar and Nikolaus Hagen (eds.): The Riccabona case. A family story between acceptance and threat (vorarlberg museum Schriften 22), Böhlau Verlag - Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, Bregenz 2017
  3. ↑ Max Riccabona: On the secondary track. Memories and excuses . P. 108.
  4. ↑ Peter Melichar and Nikolaus Hagen (eds.): The Riccabona case. A family story between acceptance and threat (vorarlberg museum Schriften 22), Böhlau Verlag - Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, Bregenz 2017
  5. ↑ a b c d e Werner Dreier: Max Riccabona in the Dachau concentration camp. What he couldn't write about. First published in: Johann Holzner and Barbara Hoiß (Eds.): Max Riccabona. Bohemian. Writer. Contemporary witness (2006). Pp. 41-50.
  6. ↑ Meinrad Pichler: From the budding diplomat to the dissolute writer. In: Johann Holzner and Barbara Hoiß (eds.): Max Riccabona. Bohemian. Writer. Zeitzeuge (2006), pp. 31–40. In a note, Meinrad Pichler states that Riccabona told him this anecdote in the 1970s. Without evidence from any court files or newspaper courtroom reports, this story may also be just another Münchhausiade.
  7. ↑ "Tabular curriculum vitae". In: Johann Holzner and Barbara Hoiß (eds.): Max Riccabona. Bohemian. Writer. Contemporary witness (2006). Pp. 253-255.
  8. ↑ Kurt Bracharz: metasuperMAXimal. In: Culture. Magazine for culture and society. No. 7 (1989). P. 7.
  9. ↑ Kurt Bracharz: "... not so powerful in its core." In: "Miromente". No. 7 (2007). P. 15ff. P. 16.
  10. ^ Soma Morgenstern : Letter to Max Riccabona . December 30, 1963.
  11. ↑ a b c Petra Nachbaur: Table discussion about the Atlantic? Soma Morgenstern and Max Riccabona - two letters. In: exile. Research. Findings. Results. No. 2 (2001). Pp. 74-81.
  12. ^ Andreas Weigel: Max Riccabona's fictional encounter with James Joyce. Necessary correction of a dubious contemporary witness In: " miromente ". No. 25 September 2011. pp. 34-44.
  13. ↑ "I remember a short visit from Stefan Zweig, who said: 'Yes, if I could write as well as you.' He admitted Roth's poetic superiority in front of everyone at the table. ”(Max Riccabona:“ Alphonse, un Pernod sʼil vous plaît… ”. From the last days of Josef [sic!] Roth. In:“ St. Galler Tagblatt ”. Sunday, August 10, 1969. Feuilleton, Sunday supplement, No. 370, p. 7.) Riccabona's contribution was reprinted a little later, slightly changed, in the “ FAZ ”: “I remember a brief visit by Stefan Zweig and one sentence 'Yes, if I could write as well as you ...' He admitted Roth's poetic superiority in front of everyone at the table. ”(Max Riccabona: Mr. Roth in Café Tournon. Memories from Joseph Roth's last days. In: " Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung " of September 10, 1969. Features. P. 32.)
  14. ^ Andreas Weigel: Max Riccabona's "James Joyce" -Münchhausiaden. Correction of his dubious contemporary witness. In: Rheticus. Series of publications by the Rheticus Society. No 55 (2012). Pp. 92-107. P. 105.
  15. ^ Kurt Bracharz: Max Riccabona. L'homme 100 têtes. In: Peter Melichar and Nikolaus Hagen (eds.): The Riccabona case. A family story between acceptance and threat (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, Bregenz 2017). Pp. 470-484. P. 484.
  16. ↑ Kurt Bracharz: Max Riccabona's birthday is the hundredth anniversary - A question for Riccabona research. In: Culture. Magazine for culture and society. No. 10 December 2014 / January 2015. pp. 72–76. P. 74.
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Proske: Nazi victims from the Lake Constance area.
  18. ↑ See Brigitte Behal: The Feldkircher lawyer Theodor Veiter - Catholic and German-national. Backgrounds of an Austrian career 1929–1994 and Brigitte Behal: “Continuities and discontinuities of German national Catholic elites in the period 1930–1965”. Her path and change during these years using the example of Dr. Anton Böhms, Dr. Theodor Veiters and their Catholic and political networks.
  19. ↑ Kurt Bracharz: Spricker. In: Culture. Magazine for culture and society. October 2016. P. 72ff. P. 72.
  20. ↑ Thomas Rothschild: The lawyer as a rogue. In: Die Presse , Spectrum. March 4, 2017, p. 41.
  21. ↑ Armin Eidherr: Riccabona, Max. Lexicon entry.
  22. ^ Petra Nachbaur: Max Riccabona. Biographical summary.
personal data
SURNAME Riccabona, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spectator alpinus (pseudonym); Hochpruck, Eduard von (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian author
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Feldkirch
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 1997
Place of death Lochau