And yet, if such a situation really happened, this ineffective graphics would put viewers in an electrifying state of excitement. Here we are in 1909, only five years before the First World War, we are in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still under the reign of the a priori eternal François-Joseph, and we are witnessing the meeting of two people whose ideas and deeds are already too much, they will soon bring the world to the brink of catastrophe, lead to the death of millions of people and plow the map of the world and the fate of people in such a way that there is no will be no return to the old order. Plus, they both play chess, a figure of war for millennia!
Wouldn’t each of us want to stand in a corner of this room with a lump in our throat, watching this incredible scene and imagining what will happen next? Or maybe not just watching, but also grabbing the board, throwing the pieces and shouting at the players in the face what we know now, and what at the time seemed unthinkable to people? Helpless sleep.
The owner of the graphic art, son of a certain Felix Ednhofer, long-time caretaker of the building in which this scene was to be drawn, presented the auction house with 300-page documentation, which his father had painstakingly collected throughout his life. in the hope of proving that a small, ineffectual photo represented the situation that would make it famous and enrich its owner.
First, it proved that the author of the graphics was Emma Löwenstamm, born in the Czech Republic at the time the game was played, a 30-year-old art teacher who was to be Adolf Hitler’s art director during his study attempts. at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Born in 1879, Emma Löwenstamm was a Czech Jew, author of mediocre graphic and drawn works, realistic but in the spirit of symbolism. The representative of the auction house that put the work up for sale said that Hitler befriended her and protected her during the period of persecution.
There is no data to know if this was the case, because Emma Löwenstamm was to die a natural death in Prague at the beginning of 1941, that is, before the deportations of Jews from Prague, which began in the second semester of this year. French site ArtCult claims that she “disappeared during World War II”, but the attempt to find her name on Yad Vashem did not work. So Emma Löwenstamm really died in Prague of natural causes, at the age of 62, in the second year of the war, before the actions of her alleged student and concentrated chess player had gained momentum. necessary and the necessary organization in this city.
The authorship of the graphic design is indisputable, since it is signed and both the signature and the artistic form of the work raise no objection that its author was a solid and average Miss Löwenstamm. On the other hand, what aroused emotion were the two discreet signatures on the back, allegedly folded with the hands of the characters represented in the engraving. The story of this was probably part of the caption composed by the owner of the image.
It is much worse with the similarity of the characters and the probability of their meeting. Lenin was clearly already bald by this time, while his hair appears to be abundant in the graphics. Hitler was exactly 20 this year, but in the photo he looks older than Lenin, who was actually 19 years older at the time. Moreover, Lenin probably did not go to Vienna in 1909… There remains faith in the fervent assurances of the descendant of the enterprising guardian.
