ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his autobiographical narrative,1 Peter Treumann, born in Vienna in 1921, leads us to the house in Wachaustrasse 282 where he spent his childhood. Built in 1924 under a socialist communal housing project, this social housing complex was situated in a neighbourhood near the Prater whose working population was for the most part employed at the local power station and the nearby freight-harbour of the Austrian steamship-line navigating on the Danube. In the early twenties the Wachaustrasse 28 complex, Peter Treumann recalls, was inhabited by a ‘real variety of people’:
a harbour boat skipper, dockers, and unskilled workers; a managing clerk, Brandstätters, lived on the third floor, ordinary people; above them a Hungarian Jew, a functionary of the socialists, and so on…. Across the street a brushmaker had his shop in the basement, Serva was his name, a Polish Jew, who immigrated, I believe, in 1919, with shoe-laces in his pedlar’s bag, short, inconspicuous, but he was one of those I liked best there. (2/13–14)
