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“The Hasterlik Family and Its Relations with Heimito von Doderer” – Alexandra Kleinlercher in Conversation with Giulia Hine
Heimito von Doderer and the Hasterlik Family
Heimito von Doderer and Auguste Hasterlik met in 1921, married in 1930, separated at the end of 1932, and divorced in 1938. Their relationship lasted eleven years but engaged them for the rest of their lives. Over and over again, Heimito von Doderer and his work are a main subject of discussion in the Hine Collection from the 1920s until after the author's death in 1966. Gusti Hasterlik is the person most frequently mentioned in Doderer's diaries through the 1920s and up to 1939, and recollections of her turn up again and again in his later diaries, up to a short time before his death.
As a frequent guest in the apartment of Gusti Hasterlik's family – on Wickenburg Gasse 18 in the Eighth Municipal District of Vienna – Doderer had regular contact with her parents, especially with her father Paul, whom he esteemed very highly, but also with her sister Mia. His relations with the Hasterlik family are likewise a central theme in the diaries. Beyond that, the members of the family inspired Doderer in his creation of a whole series of characters (the Siebenschein and Schedik families) in his novels Die Strudlhofstiege (The Strudlhof Steps) and Die Dämonen (The Demons), and the apartment on Wickenburg Gasse 18 became the model for that of the Siebenschein family in the building on Althan Platz 6.
The Hasterlik Family
The family Doderer knew consisted of the parents (Paul Karl and Maria Felicitas, known as Irma), their daughters Gusti (Augusta Leopoldine Hasterlik, divorced from Doderer, married Kalmus) and Mia (Maria Hasterlik, divorced from Weiss, widow of Koritschoner, married Heller), as well as Mia's daughters Suzanne Weiss (divorced from Seemann, married Wolff) and Giulia Maria Koritschoner (married Hine). Aside from Suzanne Weiss, who was of the Jewish faith at the wish of her father Ernst Weiss, the family was Catholic but was considered by the Nuremberg Racial Laws to be Jewish because of their Jewish ancestry.
The members of the family were scattered across several continents in 1938 and 1939, depending on whatever country of exile was prepared to admit them: Gusti Hasterlik went to the United States, her sister Mia to London, from which she also succeeded in emigrating to the U. S.; Suzanne Weiss emigrated to Kenya and Giulia Koritschoner to Switzerland. Irma Hasterlik died on July 13, 1938. Despite intense efforts energetically supported by the German philosopher of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, and his wife Ina, all efforts to have Paul Hasterlik follow his relatives to the United States came to naught. He was deported from Vienna on July 22, 1942 and died on March 7, 1944, in the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezín).
Giulia Hine
Giulia Hine, born in Vienna in 1925, went at thirteen (December 1938) to German-speaking Switzerland, where, through the agency of the children's refugee organization called Kinderhilfe , she was placed in Schaffhausen at the home of Alice Sigerist-Ott and her daughter Gretli. In 1946 she moved to New York, where her mother Mia was. Fr0m 1946 to 1948 she was employed as a laboratory worker in the Rockefeller Center for Medical Research. 1947—marriage to nuclear physicist Gerald Hine. 1949—relocation to Boston; 1964— relocation to Vienna as a result of Gerald Hine's appointment to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Among other occupations, work in an antique store. 1974—return to the United States, at first to Washington, then in Boulder, Colorado since 1976. In 1979 Giulia Hine established her own business (manufacturing feather beds), which she sold in 1997. Since that time she has been working on the Hine Collection.
The Hine Collection
After the death of her mother in 1973 and of her aunt in 1984, Giulia Hine came into possession of their extensive collection of letters and documents, later supplemented by letters belonging to other members of the family. The collection encompasses over 5000 letters and documents, several of which go as far back as the eighteenth century. A significant part of the collection consists of letters to and from members of the Hasterlik family from the beginning of the twentieth century until the time after the Second World War. Giulia Hine rediscovered these documents in the 1990s and, with the support of a former librarian, Barbara Hass, began sorting and dating them, as well as assigning key words to them and translating most of the letters written in German into English. In 2003, all the original documents in the collection, ranging over dates from 1777 to 1969, were given as a gift to Florida State University. Since December 2004 the English translations of the letters prepared by Giulia Hine have been available on the website of Florida State University (http://www.fsu.edu/~ww2/Hine/hine_collection.htm), and additionally through Database of Letters (currently up to 1949).
The interview presented here (in German) in thematic arrangement is a brief extract from e-mail correspondence between Giulia Hine and Alexandra Kleinlercher that took place between summer 2004 and spring 2005. A greatly expanded version of this interview will appear in volume 5 of the Publications of the Heimito von Doderer Society (Schriften der Heimito von Doderer-Gesellschaft) (estimated for 2007).
- Remembering Heimito von Doderer and Gusti Hasterlik
- Heimito von Doderer's novels Die Strudlhofstiege and Die Dämonen
- Heimito von Doderer and Gusti Hasterlik: Relationship - Marriage - Breakup - Divorcement - Escape
- Paul Hasterlik
- After the war
Copyright © Alexandra Kleinlercher, Berlin 2005.
All rights reserved.
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