Cup and saucer of Gina Segré-Brunner. Jewish Museum Hohenems, Carlo Alberto Brunner Estate
Gina Segrè (1867-1948) descended from a Jewish industrialist family from Trieste. Her brother, Salvatore Segrè, got involved already early on in the irredentist movement, which demanded Trieste’s disengagement from the Habsburg Empire and annexation to Italy, while the growing number of Slovenian laborers in the city championed the Pan-Slavic movement. For his aid to refugees who had fled the Austrian army in World War I, he was ennobled and made a baron, henceforth carrying the name Segrè-Sartorio. His sister, Gina, who had married Rodolfo Brunner in 1888, was also a passionate adherent of irredentism (the movement of the “unredeemed”) and was thus in political opposition to her husband. Rodolfo and Gina Brunner had four children, their older son, Guido, was killed in battle against Austria in World War I; from then on, his parents hardly spoke with each other anymore. In 1937, Gina Brunner was appointed president of the national association of mothers and widows of war victims. The tableware features the Segrès’ old family coat of arms “Omnia pro patria libenter.”
Moritz Julius Bonn: The Crisis of European Democracy. New Haven 1925 / Die Auflösung des modernen Staates (The Desintegration of the Modern State). Berlin 1921. Jewish Museum Hohenems
Moritz Julius Bonn was born on June 16, 1873 in Frankfurt am Main as son of the banker Julius Philipp Bonn and Elise Brunner of Hohenems. Following studies in Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, Freiburg, and London as well as research visits in Ireland and South Africa, he started his successful career as a political economist. In Italy, he met Theresa Cubitt, a native of England and married her in London in 1905. That same year, he completed his habilitation on English colonial rule in Ireland. From 1914 to 1917, he taught at various universities in the USA. As a political consultant, he took part in numerous postwar conferences, wrote on the topics of free trade and economic reconstruction, and drafted critical studies on colonialism as well as European democracy, which he considered viable only if based on pluralism and ethnic diversity. As rector of the Berlin College of Commerce and head of the Institute of Finance, founded by him, he eventually became one of the leading economic experts of the Weimar Republic. In the wake of the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, Bonn was forced to emigrate, initially to Salzburg, then London, and finally to the USA where he began his autobiography Wandering Scholar (German: So macht man Geschichte). After the war, he permanently settled in London where he passed away in 1965. Moritz Julius Bonn had spent his childhood summers at his grandparents’ in Hohenems and also
Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Education of a liberal and synagogue service in Hohenems
Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Multicultural diversity in “Felix Austria”
Moritz Julius Bonn, So macht man Geschichte, 1953: Memory and Return from Exile?
German editions of Gerald Reitlinger’s books: The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945, turned into Endlösung. Hitlers Versuch der Ausrottung der Juden Europas 1939-1945, Berlin 1956) / The SS-Alibi of a Nation, turned into: Die SS. Tragödie einer deutschen Epoche, Munich 1957 / The House built on Sand, the conflicts of German policy in Russia, turned into Ein Haus, auf Sand gebaut. Hitlers Gewaltpolitik in Russland 1941, Hamburg 1962. Jewish Museum Hohenems
Following their enormous social ascent in Trieste, Carlo Brunner and his wife Caroline, née Rosenthal, married their three daughters to three Reitlinger brothers, bankers in Vienna, London, and Paris. Gerald Reitlinger (1900-1978) was born as the youngest son of Albert Reitlinger and Emma Reitlinger, née Brunner, and pursued cultural studies and art. From 1930 until 1931, he participated in an excavation in Iraq and subsequently undertook several research trips to Iran, Turkey, and China. After World War II, Gerald Reitlinger published the first complete overview of the National Socialist mass murder of the European Jews: The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 appeared in 1953 in London. In 1956 followed The SS. Alibi of a Nation 1922 – 1945. Gerald Reitlinger was an enthusiastic collector of Asian and Islamic ceramics. He bequeathed his large collection, which was damaged by fire shortly before his death, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where it now forms the Gerald Reitlinger Gallery.
Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, 1953. Questions of Responsibility
