Edmund Engelman

Edmund Engelman (1907 – 2000) was a Jewish Austrian (Viennese), and later American, photographer and engineer who became famous for photographing the home and workplace of Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, shortly before the Freud family escaped Austria for England in 1938.

Edmund Engelman's parents were Jews from the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia who had moved to Vienna, where he was born on May 21, 1907.

He grew up in the Brigittenau district of Vienna, which had historically been part of Leopoldstadt, in the northern corner of the former Jewish ghetto.

As a child, he exhibited a strong interest in technology and science.

At the age of ten he built his own lens-less camera, and subsequently received one of Austria's first licenses for a ham radio receiver.

He graduated from the Real-Gymnasium Leopoldstadt (today's Sigmund Freud Gymnasium), the same high school Freud had attended half a century earlier.

He subsequently studied at Vienna's prestigious Technische Hochschule (now Vienna University of Technology) from 1927 to 1931, receiving a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering.

In this period he was one of a handful of Jews to attend the school, which otherwise was a hotbed of nationalist and Pan German activism.

His studies included classes in chemistry, photography and cinematography that would prove to be important in his subsequent career.

In 1932, Engelman founded Foto City, a photography store and studio at 45 Kärntner Straße, Vienna's leading commercial avenue, near the Opera.

Foto City became Austria's preeminent center for photographic equipment and experimentation and amateur cinematography.

Its clientele included prominent government officials, diplomats and entertainers as well as pioneering photographers and filmmakers and included members of the Hapsburg family, Austria's chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, opera singer Richard Tauber, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl.

The French filmmaker François Reichenbach purchased his first movie camera at Foto City.

Engelman explored innovative use of photography in the arts and sciences.

He also served from 1932 until 1938 as an advisor for the educational use of photography in the anatomical institute of the medical school of the University of Vienna.

Engelman was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, which led the February Uprising of 1934 against the clerical-fascist government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.

Following the suppression of the uprising, Engelman photographed the devastation by heavy artillery of the landmark socialist housing project Karl Marx Hof, where the rebels were barricaded.

The photographs documented bombed-out apartments and homeless women and children.

He served as technical director for the play “Lights, Camera…Action!” (“Achtung...Grossaufnahme”), directed by Martin Magner starring Felix Bressart and Herbert Berghof at Vienna's Kammerspiele Theater in 1936.

Engelman filmed the audience as it entered the theater, quickly processing the film and incorporating the footage into the play after the intermission.

After the Anchluss in March 1938, he destroyed the negatives, which he feared would be “incriminating evidence” if discovered by the Nazis.

Following the Anschluss incorporating Austria into Nazi Germany Foto City was “Aryanized” in May 1938, with a non-Jewish man called Alfred Baier appointed as official administrator.

The document confirming the expropriation of the business was signed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which included the Gestapo.

Engelman was arrested under suspicion of stealing Leica cameras from his store, but subsequently released.

During the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht in November 1938, Engelman learned that SS officers were looking for him.

He first hid in the apartments of friends and then in a hospital, where he underwent elective surgery.

Engelman applied for a visa at the American consulate and was placed on a waiting list.

He bribed a consular official to obtain a Bolivian visa and booked a liner from Marseilles to Bolivia, enabling him to get a four-week transit visa in France.

He left Vienna for France on January 1, 1939, where he was joined by his Polish fiancé, Irena Lipnowska, who had a student visa for the United States.

They stayed in Nice for nine months, bribed local officials to get extensions on his transit visa, until September 1939, when Engelman finally received his visa for the U.S. While in Nice, he supported himself by selling some photographic equipment and giving photography lessons.

After the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, Engelman was briefly held in a detention camp near Bordeaux as an enemy alien.

Engelman and his fiancé made multiple attempts to get tickets on liners traveling to the U.S., finally booking passage on the Italian S.S. Conte di Savoia, which left from Genoa on September 15 and arrived on September 23, 1939, in New York City.

In New York, Engelman worked from 1940 to 1946 on war-related projects as an aeronautical engineer for International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT).

He developed electronic equipment for combat planes, resulting in several patents assigned to the company, including an alternator failure warning system that became a standard fixture for all aircraft.

Beginning in 1944, he was a member of the Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers.

After the war, from 1946 to 1958, he was the co-owner of the camera store Midway Camera Exchange in Manhattan.

He subsequently worked as a consulting engineer developing photographic processing equipment, with a specialty in electrolytic silver recovery from spent photographic chemicals, for which he received a patent in 1970.

At the end of WW II, Engelman regained ownership of Foto City in Vienna.

However, he was nonetheless required by an Austrian court to pay Mr. Baier for his duties as “caretaker” of the enterprise during the war.

“The judge was a Nazi,” Engelman later observed, “he helped the other Nazi—there was nothing I could do.” Engelman eventually sold Foto City to his former Austrian employee and business partner, Kommerzialrat Franz Denner.