Central Europe in the Interwar Years
Autograph album, c.1926-42
AUTOGRAPH ALBUM – Collection of autographs, drawings, musical quotations, photographs, and ephemera from over 100 contributors, including Albert Einstein, Béla Bartók, Max Brod, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Magnus Hirschfeld, Oskar Kokoschka, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Liebermann, F.T. Marinetti, Armin Stern, Oskar Stössel, and Tristan Tzara. Various places, mostly Vienna, c.1926-42.

Album, 232 x 185mm, c.67 leaves, entries in German, Yiddish, Czech and other languages, on recto and verso, followed by several blank leaves; some entries accompanied by laid-in photographs, newspaper clippings, conference stamps or mounted documents. Contemporary reverse calf, edges gilt, covered in paper (spine fragile, many leaves loose). Provenance: Dr. Friedrich Blau, Bratislava (d. 1945; ownership labels).

A monument to the dynamic intellectual community of interwar Central Europe, including social and civic activists, musicians, artists, poets and scientists that traveled from afar to convene in Vienna. While we lack early biographical details of the autograph album’s compiler, Dr. Friedrich Blau, we have an exhaustive record of his scientific, social and aesthetic tastes. Attending conferences that span the earliest sparks of European unification at the First Conference of the Pan-European Union in 1926 to conventions that articulated applications Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; to the World Congress of Sexual Reform spearheaded by gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld; to cultural events where contemporary composers like Béla Bartók, Wilhelm Kienzl, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Richard Strauss signed using musical quotations, and artists like Kokoschka, Armin Stern and Max Liebermann doodled with their pens—Blau immersed himself in the groundbreaking discourses of the early 20th century. Blau also participated in the Second World Congress of Agudas Israel and befriended important Jewish rabbis that coordinated the evacuation of Jewish children from Austria during increasing Nazi hostility. Blau, a veteran of the First World War, saved his brother-in-law when Nazi forces began deporting the Jews of Bratislava in 1942. Consequently, they were interned together in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Blau died during the forced march of prisoners as the Germans evacuated Sachsenhausen in April 1945, only two weeks before V-E Day.