Pages 1-10
Notes by Francis Mechner, December 2018 and May 2019
Page 1: 1923 Lower left – Adolph studying for his medical exams. This photo could equally well show him studying for his U.S. medical board exams in New York in 1944. He sat the same way but with much less hair, night after night for many months, usually until 2 or 3 AM, with the lamp on his little table.
The other photos on this page show Adolph, Hedy, Lisa and Benjamin Ziegler, and usually a friend of Lisa’s. They frequently went hiking in the mountains that surround Vienna.
Rax 1923: Left to right: Hedy, Adolph, Benjamin, Lisa and friend. The Rax is one of Vienna’s near-by mountains.
Page 2: All of the photos on this page were taken during a visit Adolph made to Czernowitz in 1923 to visit his family there. He had recently moved to Vienna, after WWI. He would have been 26. I remember his telling me that he started balding at 24. In the top photo, Adolph’s mother Berta Mechner is sitting at the far left. The two women who flank Adolph are probably two of Berta’s sisters.
The second photo from the top shows Berta at the far right, presumably one of her sisters next, then Adolph, and the man may be Heinrich Brunwasser, Berta’s second husband (her first having died months before Adolph was born).
At the lower right is (clockwise) Adolph, Walter Brunwasser (Adolph’s half-brother), his father, Berta, and presumably one of her sisters.
At the lower left is a later photo of Adolph, then already in his thirties.
Page 3: These are more photos from the same Czernowitz get-together. The top photo shows Adolph at the far left, his mother Berta fourth from the left, then her husband and sisters and unrecognized relatives. The round photo at the middle left is young Walter Brunwassser.
In the photo to the right, Adolph is in the center and Walter is at the far right. The man to the left of Walter could be Adolph’s brother Carl.
The photo at the bottom shows a typical Mechner musicale. The singer is probably Carl, who was a singer of opera and Lieder. Accompanying him is probably one of Berta’s sisters. Several of the sisters were excellent pianists. According to Adolph, Berta used to put him and his siblings to sleep by playing them Chopin’s Ballade #1 in G minor. At the far right is Adolph who was also Carl’s sometime accompanist. Walter is in the center and Berta is at the far left.
Page 4: The two women in the three photos at the upper right are Berta Mechner (Adolph’s mother) and probably one of her sisters. At the bottom are two photos of Berta’s second husband Heinrich Brunwasser, by whom she had Walter. I can’t identify the man at the upper left.
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