Daughter of Sophie and Salo Guttmann, sister of Hans and Julian (Julko), niece of Heinrich and Jeanette Schenker.

Life summary

Frieda was born in Suczawa, in the Sereth district ofBukovina, on November 18, 1899. Nothing is known of her childhood or schooling. The family had lived in Bukovina until 1914, when they moved briefly to Vienna. Heinrich wrote impressions of the whole family, his remarks on Frieda being: The daughter benefits from a sincere urge to communicate, in which flirtatiousness is less in play than one is accustomed to finding among girls of her age who are talkative or gossipy.

How long the family remained in Vienna is unclear, but by 1917 they were sending food parcels to Heinrich from Sereth in Bukovina.

By July 1921, Frieda was being courted by a Mr. Goldschläger, and Moriz Schenker agreed to contribute 20,000 Kronen for her dowry. Goldschläger earned his doctorate in law in 1923. In 1926 there is talk of an engagement, but there were growing concerns in the family about his suitability, and Frieda turned him down in April 1927 in favor of Oskar Fränkl, their wedding being announced in May 1928. By October of that year Frieda was pregnant, and gave birth to a girl (Hilde) in March 1929. Her second daughter (Edith) was born in May 1932.

By 1934, she and her husband were living in Cernauti (Czernowitz), in Rumania, where they still were in 1939, and where Sophie and Salo were planning to move to be with them in their old age. In her letter of December 1934, Frieda tells Heinrich that Hilde, aged 5, “is learning Rumanian,” which is a reminder that Sophie and her siblings were brought up speaking principally German, and that this had quite likely passed down to Hans and Frieda and their families. Nothing is known of how Frieda’s family fared during World War 2, but 50,000 Jews of Czernowitz were placed in a ghetto and then transported to the camps in 1941 and 1942.

Frieda Guttmann and Heinrich Schenker

When Frieda first appears in Schenker’s diary in 1914, it is probable that she was already well-known to Heinrich and Jeanette, and also to Heinrich’s mother Julia. In 1921, Frieda borrowed opera glasses from Heinrich, suggesting that she had attended either an opera-house or a theater. In April 1934 Frieda invited Heinrich and Jeanette to spend the summer in the mountains of Bukovina, but the Schenkers eventually chose Böckstein in Austria.

In the August of that year Schenker sent her a copy of Oswald Jonas’s Das Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerks, Frieda responding that she would preserve it “as a sacred object.”

Correspondence and photographs

Receipt of many postcards and letters from Frieda are recorded in Heinrich’s diary, but only one letter survives: OC A/289, December 16, 1934, which is informative about the Guttmann family.

There are two surviving photographic portraits of Frieda: OJ 72/18, items 6 (c.1909 Suczawa, inscribed to Heinrich), and 7 (c.1911, Sereth, inscribed to Heinrich), and Frieda figures in several family photographs, items 3 (c1901), 4 (c.1903), 5 (c.1907 Suczawa), 8 (c.1912 Sereth, inscribed to Heinrich), 11 (c.1916/17), 13 (c.1919), 14 (c.1920), and 15 (c.1922).

Sources

Contributors