Hermann Leopoldi: The Life of a Viennese Piano Humorist by Georg Traska and Christoph Lind (review)

Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959) was one of the most fascinating comedians in twentieth-century Austria. As a piano humorist, his wit was legendary in Vienna, and his biography is no less interesting. After the Anschluss, he was arrested by the Nazis and detained at the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald but managed to escape to the United States in 1939. Actor Paul Hörbiger and the Federal Minister of Education Dr. Felix Hurdes encouraged him to return after the war, and he returned to Vienna from the United States in 1947—a moment when the city was not welcoming to returning Jewish émigrés—and successfully reestablished himself, which is in itself a remarkable story. Vienna lost its Jewish population (9% of the city’s population in 1938) during the Holocaust, and Leopoldi is one of the very few who were invited back.

This book is an English translation of a 2012 Mandelbaum Verlag publication, and Dennis McCort has delivered a good translation, given that Leopoldi relied in his songs on witty word games drawing on Viennese and Viennese-Jewish terms and a specific contemporary context that would be difficult to understand even for native speakers of German today. The book is accompanied by an audio cd with twenty of Leopoldi’s songs in German; unfortunately, the book does not feature English translations of these songs, though in some instances this might have proved to be very difficult. Knowledge of German is therefore still a requirement to appreciate Leopoldi’s songs fully. “Meidlinger Buam” (The Boys from Meidling), “Soirée bei Tannenbaum” (Soirée at the Tannenbaums), “Buchenwälder Marsch” (Buchenwald March), “Die Novaks aus Prag” (The Novaks from Prague), and “An der schönen roten Donau” (On the Beautiful Red Danube) are some of the songs included on the cd and the songs’ German lyrics are included in the appendix of the book.

In addition to presenting Leopoldi’s songs, the book chronicles Leopoldi’s biography within the framework of his songs, replete with interesting photographs of people and programs from his performances as well as scanned images of correspondences from his Nachlass, which is housed at Vienna’s City Archives. Starting with Leopoldi’s grandfather Nathan Kohn and father Leopold Kohn, the authors of the book chronicle a family story, so common in Vienna at the turn of century, of a Jewish family that moved from the rural parts of Austria-Hungary east of Vienna to seek their fortune in the rapidly growing capital of the Empire. Born as Hermann Kohn, his father Leopold changed the family name to Leopoldi to obscure the family’s Jewish origins. Following in his father’s footsteps, Hermann Leopoldi became a professional pianist, which is how he became a piano humorist. Leopoldi’s songs adapted to the times and thus the reader learns about Austrian history through his songs as well. During the Austrofascist period he published “Komm gurgeln nach Gurgl” (Come and Gargle in Gurgl) and “Mit der Eisenbahn quer durch Österreich” (Straight across Austria by Train), which focused on tourism and “fit seamlessly into the corporate state’s imagery of landscape and culture” (193). The “Buchenwälder Marsch” was written while he was incarcerated by the Nazis at Buchenwald, and “An der schönen roten Donau” deals with the Soviet occupation of Austria after the war. When Leopoldi passed away in 1959, he was buried in an honorary grave at Vienna’s Central Cemetary, which is the ultimate lifetime recognition in Viennese culture.

Overall, this translation is a welcome contribution to English readers’ understanding of Viennese-Jewish humor and Leopoldi’s contributions to that worthy genre.