Born: 1888 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)
Died: 1967 Vienna, Austria
Year of Migration to the UK: 1939
Other name/s: Kathe Braun-Prager, Käthe Prager, Käthe Braun, Katharina Maria Braun, Anna Maria Brandt, Käthe Braun Prager, Kathe Braun Prager
Biography
Writer and artist Käthe Braun-Prager was born Katharina Maria Braun into a liberal Jewish middle-class family in 1888 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria). Her mother, Karoline née Kohn, died during childbirth, following which her father married her mother's sister, Laura. She had an older brother Felix and a younger half-brother, Robert. She attended a secondary school for girls in Vienna, where she won a competition for shorthand at the age of 15 and received her diploma at the age of 17. In order to help the family financially, she worked as a private teacher and as a civil servant in the Creditanstalt bank in Vienna from 1907. In 1917, she converted to Protestantism and later to Catholicism. She met and married the writer and philosopher Hans Prager, who had also converted to Christianity, in 1917, leaving the Creditanstalt the same year. In 1920 their daughter, Ulrike, was born and Braun-Prager worked as a freelance writer from then onwards. She was involved in the intellectual culture of Vienna, hosting artists and writers in her city apartment, and was a close friend of a fellow artist, Ella Iranyi, who later perished in the Holocaust. Braun-Prager wrote poems, short stories and plays, and also directed the 'Literary Women's Hour' weekly for Radio Vienna between 1928 and 1938. As well as working and publishing under her own name, she also adopted the pseudonym Anna Maria Brandt throughout the 1930s. In 1930, she held literary lecture evenings in the Hotel de France in Vienna.
Following the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany), Braun-Prager immigrated to England with her stepmother in February 1939, where they were reunited with her brother, Felix. Her husband and daughter had already immigrated to Paris, where Hans died in 1940, previously weakened by time detained in various internment camps, while Ulrike later joined her mother in England. The family relocated a number of times in the first few years, spending time in Cumbria, first in Finsthwaite, then in Kendal, before finally settling in London, where Felix became an active contributor to the highly-regarded journal produced by the Austrian Centre (AC, a cultural organisation established for Austrian refugees). In 1939, struggling financially, she sold approximately 50 letters from the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf to the British Museum for the sum of 50 pounds. During this period of uncertainty Braun-Prager, aged 50, first began to draw, paint and make models using plasticine. The pieces or 'visions' as she called them, were mainly inspired by figures from the Old and New Testaments, such as Moses, King Solomon, Christ on the Cross and Mary/the Madonna, or portraits of family members and close friends, all executed in a naive expressionist style. She also gave lectures about Austrian composers at the University of Durham and for the BBC, wrote stories and poems, and translated a biography of Dickens and John Keats' poems, among other works. In her book Reise in die Nähe (Travel Nearby, 1954) she described her inspiration as 'a revelation or message from an unknown power that breaks into blossom under her hand when the time is right'.
In 1951 she returned to Vienna together with Felix and her stepmother. Her artworks, which her brother described as 'poems, represented by another means', were included in group exhibitions in Austria and in Zagreb in Croatia in 1961. She also became an editor of anthologies. Braun-Prager died in hospital in Vienna in 1967 and was buried in the Ehrenhain (Grove of Honor) in the Vienna Central Cemetery. Her work is in the collection of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and the Austrian Gallery in Vienna, while her archives (along with those of Felix) are key holdings in the Vienna Bibliothek.
Related books
- Jutta Vinzent, 'List of Refugee Artists (Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists) From Nazi Germany in Britain (1933–1945)', in Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933–1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006), pp. 249-298
- Tatjana M. Popovic ed., Schattenflamme: Lyrische Visionen (Austria: Alekto-Verlag Klagenfurt, 2000)
- 'Braun-Prager, Käthe', in Lexikon Deutsch-jüdischer Autoren, Vol. 3, Birk–Braun (Munich: Saur, 1995), pp. 442-446
- Käthe Braun-Prager, Reise in die Nähe (Salzburg: Stifterbibliothek, 1954)
Public collections
- Austrian National Library, Vienna
- Belvedere, Vienna
- Deutsche National Bibliothek
- Federal Ministry Republic of Austria
Related web links
- Austrian National Library resource for 'Women on the move'
- catalogue of drawings
- official website of Käthe Braun-Prager's estate
- Homage to Braun-Prager and Felix Braun
Selected exhibitions
- Exhibition of Drawings, Reading Room, Zagreb (1961)
