Erika Pluhar tracks down the past

2023-07-15 14:20:05

The photo shows a mysterious, beautiful woman with a swan neck, taken in “New York, ca. 1958”. You see Brigitte King, née Pluhar, the older sister of Erika Pluhar, a few years after emigrating with her husband, the photographer Roland Pleterski. The photo concludes a story that ends before it gets really exciting. In “Gitti” Erika Pluhar tells the story of her sister’s childhood – and only briefly hints at the adventure of her later life.

As little Erika, the middle one of a “house of three girls”, the author herself is always present in the plot, looking up to the woman who is a few years older, constantly looked after by her, observing many things and sometimes asking naive questions. And indeed, Brigitte, the reserved, dutiful, quiet child, comes close to the reader. So close that one would have liked to have witnessed the transformation into a model, into an emigrant, into a self-confident woman.

But even what Erika Pluhar knows how to report in a simple, unadorned retelling of the first two decades of her sister’s life is adventurous enough. Brigitte was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1933, where her father worked for an oil company. When she was three, she moved to Munich with her parents, “home to the Reich”. Josef Pluhar is a convinced National Socialist, works actively on building up the NS state, later moves with his family to Vienna, then to occupied Poland, where he is adjutant to the governor in Lemberg, and offers his wife Anna and his soon to be three daughters (after Brigitte and Erika, Ingeborg is born) as part of the official elite a life of prosperity.

The tide is turning. Nazi Germany is on the defensive, and the crimes of the National Socialists can increasingly be guessed at for the children. The father volunteers as a private at the front (which later, after returning home from English captivity, is credited to him for denazification), the family is sent back to Vienna, which was badly hit by the bombing raids, and later on to Upper Austria, where the mother goes with them her three daughters are billeted in the country.

“Gitti” tells an archetypal Austrian family fate of the 1930s and 40s, and of course it also tells of the first years of Erika Pluhar’s life herself. What prompted her sister, who lived with her grandmother, to start a relationship as a 16-year-old student at the Michelbeuern fashion school entering into a relationship with a teacher (which today would probably end up in court rather than at the altar), marrying him and breaking with all bourgeois conventions, that’s what Pluhar can only guess at – and last but not least draws on her own life. Last but not least, portraits of the young Erika Pluhar herself are among the photos that were shown at exhibitions by her brother-in-law Roland Pleterski (1920–2000). (whl)