Lisl (Liesl; Lieserl) Schenker
Documents associated with this person:
Wife of Moriz Schenker, maiden name unknown.
Nothing of Lisl Schenker’s birth or early life is known. She and Moriz probably married in the 1900s and lived in Egypt, where for a time he worked. Moriz was Jewish, Lisl apparently not so. The couple had two children: Helga (born 1907) and Georg (born 1908). Lisl’s mother is mentioned occasionally in the Moriz–Heinrich correspondence by the epithet “mother-in-law.”
Lisl, described as “bank director’s wife,” first appears in a society list of those having “arrived on May 27” at the spa town of Baden bei Wien with her family and household, at the address Elisabethstraße 17 (Cur- und Fremden-Liste ..., May 28, 1912). Her first appearance in Heinrich’s diary is in 1913, but not until 1917 is there a promise to introduce her to Heinrich, and not until 1926 is a visit from Moriz, Lisl and the two children to Keilgasse 8 recorded; she seems to have held herself aloof from the rest of Moriz’s family.
News first arrived in 1920 that Moriz and Lisl were separating (diary, Jan 1, 1920). Their lives seemed after that to fluctuate between being together and separation, until in June 1928 she moved from the family home in Baden bei Wien to Vienna. In September 1928, she finally left Moriz and transferred her affections to Leopold Richtera, physicist and pioneer of Austrian radio broadcasting. Divorce proceedings began in late December 1929. At the news, Schenker commented: Even in this relationship, she will have to do without all conversation day and night; in spite of this, she will be able to take part just as little in the mathematics and physics of Richtera as in the bank dealings of Mozio, and without doubt she will come away empty-handed, even erotically – thus there remains only a futile ruination for this woman, in every respect a futile one.
The couple married in April 1930, but two weeks later Leopold Richtera was taken to a sanatorium suffering from angina pectoris; he died on the night of April 29/30.
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- Ian Bent