One of the earliest memories I have of my father were his feet. He would pass a ball with me, barefoot, and his toes seemed damaged. When I was older, I asked about their appearance. He explained that when he was a boy, he played football (soccer) barefoot in the streets of Vienna. In the working class district where he was raised, there were only dirt lots or the streets to play in. Football was immensely popular, Austria having some of the better teams in the world during the early 1930’s. The youth were playing however they could. Balls were sometimes constructed of bound rags. No one had proper footwear and years of playing in the streets, led to feet looking like his. Even toward the end of his life, I recall him juggling a ball, barefoot in our yard, with his football worn feet.
Karl Johann Joseph Tabéry was born at the beginning of November in 1921, in Vienna, Austria. His mother Theresia, was Czech, born into a peasant family. His father, Johann, was a “monteur”, a mechanical engineer at a diesel locomotive factory. An older sister, Mia, had been born two years earlier.
In the 1920’s, things were looking up for the working class in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Karl was born at the outset of what came to be known as Red Vienna, the flourishing of socialist governance that came to the capital city following WW1 and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, giving birth to the Austrian Republic. Flush on the heels of the October revolution in Russia and related uprisings in Hungary and Münich, Germany, the Socialist Democratic Workers Party came to power electorally and brought enormous social reforms that improved life for the working class in Vienna. Massive new housing projects included communal kitchens, day care facilities, and public health centers that qualitatively augmenting the general welfare of workers. Women won the right to vote. There was public education for adults as well as children, and workers were encouraged to take advantage of sport facilities, cultural activities, mountaineering and bike clubs. What took place in Red Vienna became the model for much of European social democracy during the ensuing decades.
This history is pertinent to Karl’s art because these reforms created the possibility for a young working class individual to enter the world of art. It was only in recent years that I have come to understand how profoundly this background provided the context for his work that followed in the decades to come. It’s likely he was inspired as a boy watching his father try his own hand at painting, having participated in the newly available cultural programs. It made profound the pride he expressed, when relating how his parents who had no formal education, attended classes and studied late into the night together. It provided a rational for his love of all things in nature, facets of which emerge in his work in a variety of ways. It’s why he told me opera and classical music are not just reserved for the elite, but were something the working class enjoyed in Vienna as well. This attitude, much to my mother’s chagrin, did not transfer into an ability to waltz. “Imagine,” she would say, “a Viennese who does not waltz!”
Some of his early work touches on these aspects of life in the 30’s, but others reveal a growing anxiety. As the gains of Red Vienna began to unravel under pressure from the Austrofascists during the 1930’s, Karl’s father, who was a Socialist Party organizer, must have had to confront this increasingly fraught political landscape. My father would tell me, that streets once used for soccer were now filled with demonstrators, and later armed battles between Fascists and Communists. While Karl’s student work only intermittently broached these subjects, they came to be explored more deeply in later years, with work evoking portrayals of despair, struggle, annihilation, and hope.
The rise of fascism in Austria, the persecution of Jews and others not of the “master race”, culminating in the Anschluss, which annexed Austria into Hitler’s greater Reich, formed the backdrop of Karl’s adolescence. It ended with his conscription straight out of the factory where he was working, into the German army. What began with the promise of Red Vienna, now descended into the horror that would become the Second World War.
