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Klara [Clara] Schiff [Hatschek]

born Aussig, December 30, 1881; died Prague, September 14. 1939

Documents associated with this person:

Younger sister of Jeannette Schenker (née Schiff), thus sister-in-law to Heinrich Schenker from 1919. Wife of Oskar Hatschek, mother of Hellmuth Hatschek.

All five of Jeanette Schenker's sisters were younger than she, and Klara was the fourth daughter of Wilhelm and Emilie Schiff. She was married to Oskar Hatschek, and the couple had one child, Hellmut.

After Jeanette left her first husband, Emil Kornfeld, and the family home town of Aussig an der Elbe, she apparently did not see Klara ‒ or any of her other sisters or her three brothers ‒ until sixteen years later, in October 1926, when Klara and her husband Oskar visited Heinrich and Jeanette in Vienna, on October 6. Klara, Oskar, and their son Hellmut, visited the Schenkers again two years later, this time in Galtür, arriving on July 30 and departing on August 26. Heinrich gives his impressions of her in his diary for August 3: My sister-in-law Clara is a splendid woman; she refuses here – sensibly – to preach in her innate way, and also takes care not to express her pacifist and world-blessing ideas (pazifistischen u. weltbeglückenden Ideen), since she knows that I am not comfortable with such things. I get the distinct feeling that the two of them are respecting my intellectual world, on account of which I willingly express my agreement to respect theirs.

On August 24 Heinrich and Klara went hiking in the Jam Valley, and Schenker reports their conversation: "We intentionally said farewell to all megalomania and communism in intellectual matters!" (diary). In bidding farewell to the visitors on the 26th, Schenker records in his diary that in spite of their intelligence he could not live "in the pretentious world of my Lie-Liechen's siblings," with its provincialism." Klara and Hellmut took many photographs of Galtür and the surroundings that they sent to the Schenkers in the October. Contrary to this portrayal, her younger sister Rosa wrote the following (OJ 14/10, [2], November 1, 1932): I have always marveled at her, her mental and physical vigor, her zest for life and strong will, with which she steered toward a goal, and above all her sturdy self-examination and self-castigation.

Klara’s life was upended on October 9, 1932, when Hellmut unexpectedly died in a climbing accident (see OJ 14/10, [1], October 10, 1932). This broke her spirit altogether, and she experienced bouts of insanity, pleading on more than one occasion to be given poison so as to end her own life. She was placed in the Veleslavin Clinic in Prague, and by late 1933 was having to be straight-jacketed. — In April 1936, when Jeanette, embarking on her six-month voyage to Santiago, Chile and back, headed first to Aussig on the 27th, she visited Oskar Hatschek, who gave her some items of Klara’s, and then went to see Klara herself, of whom she recorded in her diary of the voyage that she was “ill in bed – time has literally stood still there.”

Her death on September 13/14, 1939 was reported to Jeanette by Arnold Weil (OJ 14/10, [37]) and she was buried in a Prague cemetery.

Correspondence

Heinrich's diary gives evidence that Jeanette maintained correspondence with Klara, but no items are known to survive. Between at least 1932 and 1939, information was passed on to Jeanette and Heinrich from Rosa and Arnold Weil in letters and postcards (OJ 14/10). One letter from Victor Schiff to Klara from 1925 survives in a transcript by Anna Schiff (OJ 14/9, [1]).

Contributor:

  • Ian Bent

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Correspondence

Diaries