For years friends have urged him to write this book.
The writer Erich Hackl conducted the first interviews as early as 2005, followed fifteen years later by the journalist Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, and finally Rudolf Schönwald and his second wife Britta Schinzel supplemented the material.
The story of his life belongs to the series of fates of the twentieth century which, in all their inner turmoil, are characterized by continuity – the will to survive.
Hannes Hintermeier
Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.
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Born in Hamburg in 1928, Schönwald grew up in Reinbek until he started school.
His father Ludwig, who came from Vienna, was a half-Jewish convert to Catholicism, a publicist and a paranoiac, his mother came from the Pringsheim family in Breslau, so that one knew at least that Thomas Mann was more or less related by marriage.
For the National Socialists, that was enough to classify the family as "Jewish relatives", which Rudolf and his brother Peter, who was one year younger, were not according to the Nuremberg Race Laws.
And the love life?
Not very productive
The move to Salzburg in 1934 made nothing better, four years later Hitler was received there by frenetic crowds.
The father commits suicide, the mother moves to Vienna with the sons, to her Czech grandmother, who has converted to the Jewish faith.
In 1943 the three flee to Budapest, where the situation for “valid Jews” is initially even better.
When the Germans marched in, the boys ended up in a camp and their mother was deported to Auschwitz.
The Jewish tailor who worked for Schönwald as an apprentice during the day killed himself.
As so-called submarines, the Schönwalds learn all the tricks of the daily struggle for survival.
After the end of the war it turns out that the mother survived several concentration camps.
A fresh start is attempted in Vienna.
Schönwald catches up on his A-levels, attends the art academy (without a degree), becomes friends with the sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka and the painter Georg Eisler, son of the composer Hanns Eisler.
And of course Schönwald became a communist, although not a very strict one, because severe disappointments were inevitable.
He likes the American occupying soldiers – although they are class enemies – because of their nonchalance, later he is no longer on good terms with America.
Schönwald keeps his head above water with all sorts of jobs, as a sign and scenery painter, office servant, theater propsman, extra - "a failing existence", which one predicts "at best a career as an unskilled worker".
Despite his "backstage career", he never gives up the plan to work as a painter and graphic artist.
His love life "is not very fruitful", but the history of the post-war years in Vienna in the genres of art, theatre, literature and coffee houses.
Traveling celebrities such as Jean Genet, Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal, Georg Lukács, Arthur Koestler and Klaus Kinski come to the panopticon of the Viennese scene.
He admires the intellectual historian Friedrich Heer.
He failed to maintain friendships
He was particularly taken with a certain Erich Brauer, "terribly nice, imaginative and brilliant".
Later he should make a career under the first name Arik.
"I didn't like the pictures he painted, I didn't like the songs he sang either, I didn't like the millions he collected years later, but otherwise I liked everything about him." Schönwald can be pretty He pointedly and does so a lot, for example when he describes the Nazi relatives of his painter friend Fritz Martinz, who “on closer inspection turned out to be strange elves who had confused the Führer with the Savior or the Urschlamm”.
Schönwald would like to work in a collective, an etching workshop is to be founded with Hrdlicka and Eisler, but Hrdlicka is already floating away into higher spheres.
Schönwald disliked the painterly trend of fleeing into abstraction – “Art that ignores social conditions seems meaningless to me.” From 1968 onwards he drew a style-defining comic strip about a monster named Goks for the magazine “Neues Forum”.
Without pathos and bitterness
The relationship with his brother remained difficult throughout his life, he didn't like it at all when people "got on his nerves", then he quickly turned away.
Of course, Schönwald is traumatized, but that's a finding that wasn't as inflationary back then as it is today.
He regrets that he hasn't been able to maintain friendships, which he has often "thrown away, willfully or out of convenience, so that today I'm touching my head".
This is particularly true in the case of the Viennese Jew Pinkas Spiegel, who in Bergen-Belsen "was pulled from a pile of corpses by British soldiers after they noticed that one of the skeletons was still showing faint signs of life".
Calculated over his life span – Schönwald is now ninety-three years old living in Vienna and Freiburg – the largest part of the book is spread over the war years and the immediate post-war years, the last four decades are cursorily dealt with on twenty pages.
In 1976 Schönwald received a professorship for visual design at the Technical University of Aachen, which he held until 1993;
his first wife Gilli Hillmayr died in 1984 at the age of only fifty-one.
Schönwald turns artistically to industrial archaeology, travels to areas all over Europe and comes as far as Russia.
He draws mines and steelworks, blast furnaces.
Schönwald refrains from pathos and bitterness, which certainly also existed.
In the end, despite all the lightness of his retrospect, the oppressive feeling remains: having survived the "madhouse" could not protect him from an existential sadness.
Rudolf Schönwald: "The world was a madhouse". my life story
Retold by Erich Hackl.
Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2022. 302 p., hardcover, €26.