Vienna revisited

While the story teller came through the horrors of the Holocaust relatively unscathed, soon after the end of the war he became cognizant of the fact that others were not so fortunate.

By BARRY DAVIS
Robert Bober (photo credit: PR)
Robert Bober
(photo credit: PR)
Robert Bober is a storyteller. That, one might point out, is a prerequisite for any filmmaker regardless of genre, but Bober is more of a raconteur than most.
It can also help to have a vested interest in the storyline, which is certainly the case with Vienna before Nightfall, Bober’s documentary that was screened at this year’s Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival on Wednesday evening.
The central theme of the movie is the life story of Bober’s great-grandfather Wolf Leib Frankel who, like many residents of Vienna’s Second District, came from Poland. (Frankel himself originated from the village of Przemysl, near Poland’s border with Ukraine.) That part of the Austrian capital was populated by numerous Ostjuden – Jews who gravitated to Vienna from the East, which generally meant from Poland. Mind you, Frankel took quite a circuitous route. His initial plan was to try his luck in the New World and in 1900, he boarded a boat for New York. The idea was to find his financial footing there and then send for his wife and children. Unfortunately, during the trip Frankel contracted a highly contagious eye ailment, and as a result was summarily rejected by the US immigration personnel at Ellis Island and sent back whence he came.
For some reason, possibly to make himself more presentable and seem more acceptable to the American authorities, Frankel had his beard shaved off while on the ship. “I don’t know exactly why that happened,” said Bober, a couple of hours after arriving from France to attend the Jerusalem Cinematheque screening. “But I was told that he cried while he was being shaved.”
Disappointed at not reaching his chosen destination, Frankel made his way back across Europe by train, but decided to stay in Vienna until his beard grew back before reuniting with his family. However, he ended up living there for the rest of life, resuming his daytime job as a tinsmith specializing in the creation of various Judaica artifacts.
Frankel died in 1929, two years before Bober was born in Berlin. Shortly after Hitler came to power, Bober relocated to France together with his parents. Fortunately, they all survived the war. Bober grew up French but felt drawn to Vienna and the past, his great-grandfather’s time there, and the lives and work of such Viennese and German Jewish cultural luminaries as movie director and scriptwriter Max Ophuls, and world-renowned playwright, novelist and journalist Stefan Zweig. Zweig fled Vienna in 1934, ending up in Brazil, where in 1942, despairing of the situation in Europe, he committed suicide at the age of 60. German-born Ophuls moved to France shortly after Hitler’s rise to power. He later found his way to the US and tried to resurrect his career in Hollywood in the early 1940s.
In fact, it took a while for Ophuls to find work in Tinseltown, and he only got his first stateside directorial opportunity thanks to the help of scriptwriter-director Preston Sturges, who was a fan of Ophuls’s work. La Ronde, made in 1950, is considered by many to be Ophuls’s finest work, and Vienna before Nightfall opens with scenes from the film with Bober watching the onscreen action. The excerpts we see from La Ronde depict a fantasy world in which the first character flits between the man-made story and reality. He tells us that he could be just a passerby, or an MC, or “anyone of you.”
THAT IS the sense you get from Bober’s film, too. The French director takes us with him to Vienna, to Leopoldstadt in the Second District. He stays at the Hotel Stefanie on Taborstrasse. The Austrian National Tourist Office website notes that the hotel is located in the “Jewish Quarter” of Vienna, while Bober said he chose his accommodation because he discovered that a Yiddish theater once operated there.
The film is ostensibly about Frankel but naturally Bober’s own life is inextricably intertwined with that of a man who – despite Bober never having had the opportunity to meet him – provides a powerful backdrop to the French director’s own bio. So, is Vienna before Nightfall about Frankel or Bober? “It comes from me. But I didn’t ask myself that kind of question,” said Bober. “My great-grandfather has been around [in my work] for 50 years.”
Frankel made a previous contribution to his great-grandson’s evolving oeuvre, when his picture appeared in a TV documentary about legendary Russian Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem that was made by Bober. “I thought I was done with my great-grandfather back in 1967. I never thought that, one day, I would make a film about him.” It was a long-awaited happy event in Bober’s own life that brought him back to his antecedent. “This whole project was sparked by my becoming a grandfather myself,” he explained.
“That’s when I thought it was time to make this documentary.”
Vienna before Nightfall is about Frankel, but it naturally references the history of Viennese Jewry in general. Just as all imperial capitals throughout history attracted immigrants, Vienna lured newcomers – including Ostjuden – from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond. My own maternal grandfather and his family were among them. Emperor Franz Josef, who reigned for almost 70 years and died in 1916, was a liberally minded monarch, and the Jewish population of Vienna generally flourished under his rule. In the early 1920s, Jews accounted for over 10% of the city’s residents.
Of course, the good times came to an abrupt end in the aftermath of the National Socialist election victory in Germany in 1933, and more palpably, after the Anschluss in March 1938 and Kristallnacht in November of that year. Prior to that, there were also acts of antisemitism, including attacks on synagogues. With my own Jewish Viennese background, I have mixed feelings about my frequent visits to Austria. Does Bober also have an ambivalent take on Vienna? “When I go there I feel like a Polish Jew, because my family originates from Poland – on my mother’s side and my father’s side” he noted. “My first film, which I made in 1975, was about my father, about Radom [in central Poland], where he was born.” To date, Bober has made more than 120 documentaries, with the Holocaust and Holocaust-related themes a recurring baseline.
Bober may have not had the pleasure of an actual encounter with Frankel, but he does possess tangible evidence of his great-grandfather’s artistry, in the form of a pair of candlesticks made during Frankel’s 29-year Viennese sojourn. “His physical image is like a fantasy grandfather,” said Bober, connecting the dots between a photographic portrait of Frankel and his own life and creative work. “In 2008, there was a tribute event held in my honor at the Jewish Museum in Paris. I went onto the stage and lit candles – in my great-grandfather’s candlesticks – and then the picture of my great-grandfather appeared on the screen there. That’s how it all began.”
WHILE BOBER came through the horrors of the Holocaust relatively unscathed, soon after the end of the war he became cognizant of the fact that others were not so fortunate. He came across children who were the sole survivors of their families and resolved to do everything he could to better their lives. That included acting as a counselor at Jewish summer camps attended by such children. “You knew who the Holocaust survivors were, because they didn’t get any letters from relatives while they were at the camp,” Bober observed.
Those well-intentioned Jewish camp stints subsequently provided Bober with a much-desired opportunity to get into the film industry. “I was a cinephile,” he said, “and I always wanted to get into movies.” Bober was a fan of then-young French director Francois Truffaut and sent him a letter offering to help with some of the on-set logistics. That was in 1958, when Truffaut was making his celebrated film 400 Blows, which features a large number of teenagers. “I wrote to him that he would probably need someone to keep the kids under control during the shooting, and that I had experience as a camp counselor.”
When Bober didn’t get a reply, he got himself over to the film location and somehow managed to collar Truffaut, who was not convinced he required Bober’s babysitter services. But it all worked out for Bober when not too long after, Truffaut sent out an SOS pleading with Bober to come and keep the youngsters in order, so that Truffaut could get on with the business of making the film. The two quickly struck up a good relationship, and Bober ended up working as an assistant on 400 Blows and two other Truffaut classics, Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim. “But I wanted to make documentaries, so I started working in TV after that,” Bober explained.
Bober’s back-door entry into the movie business was preceded by some traditional, down-and-dirty trade learning. “I left school at the age of 14 and I became a tailor’s apprentice,” he recalled. That, he said, revived his bond with his long-lost relative. “I worked in a family’s living room and it was like being in the shtetl, just like my great-grandfather when he learned his trade back in Poland.”
Watching Vienna before Nightfall, one does get a strong impression of personal angst. While Bober would have loved to have met Frankel, the film comes across more as a paean to his great-grandfather and the bustling pre-Holocaust Viennese Jewish community than a lament for a way of life that was brutally curtailed.
Even so, during his filmed visit to Vienna, Bober tested the contemporary collective Holocaust consciousness at one of the city’s most celebrated eateries, Café Central. The sumptuously appointed coffee house has been around for almost a centuryand- a-half and was frequented by such leading Jewish intellectuals of the day as Zweig, Sigmund Freud and poet Peter Altenberg.
Bober tried out a little experiment. With the permission of the owners, he placed a number of facsimiles of newspapers from the 1930s in a stack of papers of the day, to see if people would express an interest. He was disappointed to find that as they filed in, patrons ignored the historical documents and went straight for the current stuff. Somewhat discouraged, Bober pushed his luck a mite further and circulated the facsimiles among the tables. But again his exercise went largely unnoticed. “There was a young couple who really read the newspaper on their table,” Bober noted. “It was heartwarming to see how they read it with great interest and sort of cuddled up together while they read.”
Despite his powerful emotional attachment to his great-grandfather, Bober said he does not feel a particularly strong personal bond with Vienna. “I feel I got there too late for that. You see that in the scene at the Prater [a park near the Second District], after the funfair has closed down for the night. I am there on my own, after all the kids and parents have had a good time during the day. I missed out on that.”


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