Eugenie Kleinmann

This photograph shows Lya Kleinmann in a folk costume [tracht] which consists of a skirt, apron, blouse and bodice. This style of dress, known as a dirndl, is based on the clothing worn by rural populations in southern German lands (inclusive of what is today Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Tracht became popular in the nineteenth century as a response to the industrial revolution, and reflected romantic attachments to the supposedly ideal rural lifestyle. In the twentieth century, many middle- and upper-class Austrians and Germans wore a modified version of tracht when holidaying in rural resort towns, and this developed into a form of fashionable dress known as trachtenmoden.

Lya was born in Vienna on 27 March 1921, the only child of Emil Kleinmann and Eugenie Rosenberg. Emil was a director at Anker Insurance, and the family enjoyed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. They had a cook and a maid, and all of Lya’s clothes were made by a dressmaker. As a child Lya enjoyed family holidays in the mountains, and wore this costume in celebration of her Austrian citizenship. Jews in the newly-formed Austro-Hungarian Empire were fully emancipated in 1867. By adopting thachtenmoden, as Lya did, Austrian Jews could declare their political and cultural loyalty, while also demonstrating their engagement with fashion and modernity (Kaplan 2020).

When wearing her dirndl, Lya probably felt assured that her Austrian citizenship would guarantee her certain freedoms and securities. The emancipation of Jews exposed new forms of antisemitism and a new set of hateful stereotypes, however, and anti-Semites accused Jews wearing trachtenmoden of appropriating a culture that was not their own (Kaplan 2020). When German forces marched into Austria on March 12, 1938, one of the discriminatory restrictions they introduced was to forbid Jews from wearing trachten. Anti-Semitic actions and violence escalated quickly, and Jews were attacked, humiliated, and their businesses seized or looted.

Lya and her mother Eugenie were among the 117,000 Jews who left Austria between 1938 and 1940, but Lya’s father Emil stayed in Vienna. He was deported to Minsk on 14 September 1942 and murdered four days later at Maly Trostinec. Emil lies with tens of thousands of other victims in the regenerating forest; his name, date of birth and date of death printed on a yellow notice which has been attached to a tree.

After the war Lya met a Londoner named William (Bill) George Alexander Riley, and she followed him to New Zealand in 1948. They were married in Dunedin in October that year, and quickly purchased an old Victorian cottage at 247 North Road. Their first child Lysette was born in January 1950, and Peter followed in December 1951. 

Lya is fond of the dirndl. As a child her daughter Lysette loved it too – connecting it with the popular movie The Sound of Music – but as she learnt more about her family history and had an opportunity to travel to Austria herself, her feelings changed. Lysette now looks at this photograph of her mother and sees that it is full of irony, so it makes her feels sad. The outfit is, for Lya and her family, a reminder of their Austrian heritage. It represents happy family holidays in the years before the war, but is also a painful reminder that Lya and Eugenie were forced to leave the country of which they were so proud, and that citizenship did not protect them from the atrocities of the Nazi regime.

References:

• Engel, Karen. 2013-2014. Should a Jewish Girl Wear a Dirndl? (And Other Questions About Jews and Tracht). Lilith (Winter). https://lilith.org/articles/should-a-jewish-girl-wear-a-dirndl-and-other-questions-about-jews-and-tracht/
• Kaplan, Jonathan C. 2020. Jews and Trachtenmoden: Rural Dress and Self-Fashioning in Austria during the Fin-de-Siecle and Interwar Periods. Lecture for Picturing Jewish Dress: Online Workshop Series, 14 October 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S02mfdcVri8
• Riley, Lysette and Helen Riley-Duddin, 2021. Conversations and emails with curators Katie Cooper and Stephanie Gibson.
• Riley, Lysette, 2021. Unpublished biography of Lya Kleinmann, born 27 March 1921 Vienna.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. Austria. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/austria