Otto Skall

Self-portrait with Contax (1935)

Otto Skall (born February 10, 1884 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; died January 24, 1942 there ) was a Czech-Austrian photographer.

Life

Otto Skall grew up in Prague and worked as an accountant. He moved to Lemberg because of love in 1914 and married Helene Schein there in 1914. After the outbreak of war, they fled to the west before the Russian conquest of eastern Galicia. Their son Heinz was born in Vienna in 1915. He moved to Italy as a student in 1933 and stayed there. The marriage broke up in 1918, and Skall married Augustine Mandler from Vienna, she too was of Jewish origin, she wrote film reviews and published a serial novel in 1937. From 1920 Otto Skall was registered in Vienna. He lived on Vegagasse in the 19th district . Skall was friends with the Viennese studio photographer Trude Fleischmann , who probably encouraged him to change jobs. In the period from 1925 to 1938 he worked as a press photographer and also showed an interest in artistic work with photography. At the end of the 1920s he made his first theater recordings. a. in Max Reinhardt's theater in der Josefstadt . Skall used the rapidly developing technical possibilities of the camera and photographed the lively, unset scene with a small-format, powerful camera directly on site. An example of his work is the photo report on the dance piece Fridolin's first love of the Swiss expressive dancer Trudi Schoop in 1935.

In the following years he photographed many actors, dancers and musicians (including Lotte Lehmann , Arturo Toscanini and Alban Berg ). In the 1930s he reported regularly on the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna Opera Ball .

Skall toured Italy with his wife and published his photos in newspapers and magazines, and in 1935 he produced a series of reports entitled Two to the borders of Europe . The texts were often written by Gustl Skall, who also wrote Fleischmann's reports. In Austria he photographed reports from trivial everyday life, but also social reports. In 1937 he illustrated an interview with Thomas Mann when he was visiting the Czech city of Proseč , which had given him Czechoslovak citizenship.

In his photographic aesthetics, Skall was a representative of the modern age, but not a supporter of the radical avant-garde. In addition to Trudi Fleischmann, the circle of friends in Vienna included the photographer Dora Horovitz , the writers Elias Canetti and Veza Canetti , the pedagogue Eugenie Schwarzwald , the journalist Hans Oplatka and the illustrator Bil Spira .

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in March 1938, the couple fled to Czechoslovakia and lived in a small room in Prague. But when Czechoslovakia was broken up in March 1939, the CSR also came under National Socialist rule. Skall started working with the Prague photographer Miroslav Hàk , but was then only able to live in the illegality of portrait orders and photography lessons because of the professional ban. An emigration to the USA, where two Gustis brothers lived, who also got them the affidavits , or a transfer to Shanghai failed because of the lack of financial resources and the time passed.

Skall and his wife Auguste Skall committed suicide in early 1942 when the couple were about to be deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto . They are buried in the family grave on Olšanské hřbitovy in the Olšany district of Prague .

The son Heinz Skall, who was also persecuted as a Jew in Italy, survived the period and saved some pictures of the father in the post-war period.

Namesake

Apparently, according to a party hearing in 2004 before the Claims Resolution Tribunal (CRT), there were two people with the name Otto Skall in Vienna, in addition to the photographer from Prague, a Viennese retailer who was born in 1886 and who became a victim of the in Lviv in 1942 Holocaust became. The CRT therefore decided, Solomonic, that the compensation amount from the already fictitious Swiss account “an Otto Skall from Vienna” should be divided equally between the two families. Samanta Benito-Sanchez seemed to mix up the two résumés in her Vienna master's thesis in 2009, only to state for the photographer that the information given by the [2009] relatives who were still alive about his death dates were different. Since Roberto Lughezzani published Skall's biography in collaboration with his granddaughter in 2013, there should be greater certainty about the photographer's vita.

• photos
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  Felix Salten (before 1934)

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  Reportage photo

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  Albert Rothschild Palace (1931)

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  Expressive dancer with Trudi Schoop (1935)

literature

• Anton Holzer : Spotlight and everyday scenes , in: Wiener Zeitung , September 14, 2014
• Anton Holzer : The tentative departure into the modern age. Photography in Austria 1900-1938 , in: Photo history . Issue 113, Marburg: Jonas, 2009, pp. 21–48
• Roberto Lughezzani: La lunga strada sconosciuta. Una famiglia ebrea nella morsa nazifascista . Introduction Elena Skall. Cava de 'Tirreni: Marlin, 2012 (not viewed)
• William Laird Kleine-Ahlbrandt: Bitter prerequisites: a faculty for survival from Nazi terror . West Lafayette, Ind .: Purdue Univ. Press, 2001 (not viewed, the book with interviews contains statements about Augustine Mandler and Otto Skall when they fled Vienna in 1938).

Web links

Commons : Otto Skall  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Anton Holzer: Spotlight and Everyday Scenes , in: Wiener Zeitung , September 14, 2014
2. ↑ Otto Skall , photo of the grave site at billion graves
3. ↑ Otto Skall ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at CRT 
4. ↑ Samanta Benito-Sanchez: Press Photographers Between the World Wars. A collection of biographies from press photographers who worked in Vienna between 1918 and 1939 . Diploma thesis, University of Vienna, 2009, p. 66f.
5. ↑ The Czech database of Holocaust victims also includes Otto Skall , born in 1916, who was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and died on March 3, 1945 in Dachau.