Biography of Gerti Frankl
Gertrude Frankl, was a journalist and translator.
Gertrude Frankl, born in Graz in 1902 and known to her friends and family simply as “Gerti”, is the young Austrian-born, Trieste-naturalised woman who inspired Eugenio Montale to write his poem “Il Carnevale di Gerti”.
She was from a family of typical middle class assimilated Jews, of which there were many in the late nineteenth century in the various cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father Leopold owned a private bank and the family enjoyed a comfortable life.
Gerti was educated as society dictated: she attended her local primary school, followed by the girls’ secondary school, in her home town.
She studied singing and took piano lessons privately in Graz, leading her to obtain a teaching diploma in Vienna in 1925, although she would never put it to use. She became interested in modern dance, cinema and photography from a young age. Having completed her education, Gerti moved to Dresden to study under Mary Wigman, a German dancer and choreographer considered to be one of the top representatives of free dance and a forerunner of modern dance, whose performances had conquered both the European and American public of the times.
For Gerti, this was only a brief experience, as her father called her back to Graz, disapproving the somewhat untraditional choices made by his daughter. She returned to frequenting her friends and the lounges popular with the young, well-read, cultured locals and it was here that she met her future husband, Carlo Tolazzi, a young student from Trieste enrolled at the local polytechnic university.
The family did not approve of their relationship but with the help of Bobi Bazlen, an old school-friend of Carlo’s, the two exchanged letters and messages until they decided to marry in secret in London, in 1925.
As newly-weds, they set up home in Trieste, where Carlo joined his father in the family business and Gerti met her husband’s friend group.
She often met up with the Saba family and made close friends with Linuccia, the poet’s daughter. Equally, the writer Svevo and his wife Livia frequently invited her and her husband and it was there, that she met Piero Rismondo, Svevo’s first translator into German, Carlo Gruber and Aurelia Benco, as well as Giani Stuparich, who describes her in “Giochi di fisonomie”:
“You have encountered her and noticed her around for a few days now, but you cannot explain the curiosity she arouses in you. There are none of those specific hallmarks of elegance, beauty or even oddness in her that would tend to call a passer-by’s attention to a woman [...] Where is she from? It is immediately evident that she is not from this city [...]. You will meet her at the café. You too, although you have seen here on multiple occasions walking the streets, are amongst those who were struck by her simple presence from the very first evening: for nothing else but not the singular way in which she, upon entering, shrugs off her fur coat, abandoning it to the hands of the person behind her [...] Perhaps everything in this woman stems from a need, reasoned or instinctive as it may be, we are not to know, to be adored”.
She was welcomed to the lounge of Elsa Dobra, Elody Oblath’s sister, where scholars and intellectuals met. The early years of marriage were happy ones: in 1927, Carlo Tolazzi was attending the School for Trainee Officers in Lucca and Gerti would go to see him, staying at Hotel Universo, from where she would visit the city and surrounding area. In December, Gerti moved to Florence, to the home of the historian and art critic Matteo Marangoni and his wife Drusilla Tanzi, met through Bobi Bazlen, a friend in common.
During this same time, Eugenio Montale was also a guest of the family and Gerti celebrated the New Year with them. Gerti introduced her new friends to the Austrian tradition of reading the future by casting lead melted on a spoon into cold water to see the resulting shape and it was precisely this that then inspired Montale’s poem “Il Carnevale di Gerti”, published in the “Le Occasioni” collection.
Gerti stayed in contact with Mr and Mrs Marongoni and with Montale even when she moved back to Trieste in 1928. It was again Bobi Bazlen who suggested that the poet prepare a new publication: he proposed writing a lyrical work about Dora Markus, a friend of Gerti, described as the Viennese Jew “with wonderful legs” and whose legs were thereafter immortalised in a picture probably taken by Gerti herself and sent to Bazlen in Montale, who composed “Dora Markus”, published in 1939 in the “Le Occasioni” collection.
The marriage did not, however, last long. Carlo left his wife in 1932, having fallen in love with Dušika Slavik, former fiancée of Bobi Bazlen, with whom he then moved, in 1935, to Bergamo, where their two children, Marco and Sonia, would later be born.
Gerti continued living in Trieste and from here monitored the tragic events of the racial persecution that upturned her parents’ lives with the requisition of their property, their arrest in Vienna and finally deportation to the prison camps where they would ultimately lose their lives.
Gerti spent the war years in Trieste but after 1943, following the Nazi occupation of the Adriatic coastline, her life changed radically. Thanks to her understanding the occupiers’ language, she first found work as a translator at the German Command of Palmanova, with a proper salary and lodgings. She worked as a translator for eight months. In 1944, after being reported as a member of a Jewish family, she was forced to escape Trieste and sought refuge in the areas near the Swiss border, hosted by a Sicilian family she had met through Armando Tipaldi, a fellow prisoner of Giani Stuparich in the Great War, as she herself tells in an interview given to the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDEC) Foundation.
In a letter sent to her friend Dora Markus dated 14 December 1952, Gerti describes her life in Trieste after the war:
“I am still living in the same flat. My health is fairly good, apart from a general weakness I have suffered since the war [...]. I have a fun, fairly superficial, group of acquaintances but no real friends; those I spend time with are significantly younger than I am, in their 30s. People often come to me. I [attend] many conferences, as well as frequenting the cinema and theatre but deep down I am very often alone, perhaps because this is really what I want. I have been working as a journalist for some years now. I started out as a standard reporter, always in contact with my colleagues and the police. Now I have been promoted, I write when I want to, mainly literary criticism - for which the publishing houses send me books - or art criticism, which allows me to travel”.
Her articles are a valuable testimony, recounting, with critical spirit, the cultural and news events of the complicated war aftermath in Trieste; they were published in the “Gazzetta Ticinese”.
Gerti Frankl Tolazzi died in Trieste in 1989.
Selected bibliography
AA. VV., Gerti (1902-1989). Documentary exhibition 8 - 21 May 1995, Trieste 1995
AA. VV., Il viaggio di Gerti - Gerti Frankl Tolazzi (1902-1989). Documentary exhibition, 14 December 2005 - 12 January 2006, Trieste, 2005.
FISCHER W., Gerti, Bobi, Montale & C. Life of an Austrian in Trieste, Parma, 2018.
External link
Gerti Frankel - Intervista a Gerti Frankel
Publications