Postcards, Curiosity, and Serendipity

A few more written words about the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection

Quite a few of you, dear readers, are wondering about the collection and its many nice picture postcards. Hence, before we return to the posting of imagery, a few (more) words about the collection and its collector, Erich Sonntag are in order.

A Man and his Hobby

The collection of some 40,000 individual postcards from around 1900 until around 1980 was compiled over the decades after the Second World War by my maternal grandfather, Erich Sonntag.

Born in Vienna 1922, he experienced the Interwar period as a teen, WW2 mainly in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front (from December 1941 through the end), and, after working several jobs in the 1950s, joined the Austrian Bundesheer in the early 1960s. He retired a Colonel with the anti-aircraft units around 1980, and he passed after a rather serious illness in early 1988.

I was six years old by then.

What do I remember about my grandfather? Not a whole lot, most of which is this strange mixture of what I think I remember mixed with family lore and the occasional snippet of information I gather from my relatives. I’m trying to sort poetry from fiction (apologies to J.W. Goethe for that one).

One of the few pictures that I have of my 5 year-old self and my grandfather in my parents’ Vienna apartment; the picture was taken around the mid-1980s.

His “scrapbooks” from his military service with the Wehrmacht have survived. I do have future access to a few more photographs as well as a partial (fragmentary) narrative he put together after his retirement. Two more boxes with content are still with my parents in Vienna, and I hope to be able to go through them net year.

In the meantime, my parents thankfully visited the Austrian State Archives and sent me photographs of most of his surviving personnel file from the Ministry of Defence. I also contacted the Archdiosese of Vienna’s archivists (as my grandfather worked in various capacities for Catholic schools in the 1950s), but, sadly, only one page remained.

In the Austrian State Archive, courtesy to suggestions by Linda Erkner (a historian at the U of Vienna, Austria) and an ‘old colleague’ from my dissertation days some 15-20 years ago, Richard Germann (also U of Vienna), one of, if not the, expert on “Ostmärkische” units in the Wehrmacht—that is, units based in, and recruited among, what used to be Austria before the Anschluss in March 1938—sent me what remains of the NSDAP’s files concerning my grandfather.

Once I get my hands on the materials at my parents’ apartment, I’ll be able to write a proper biographical sketch, and until then, these things will have to wait.

As to his scrapbooks, well, the names and photographs of a quite few of his comrades-in-arms in his scrapbooks show the word “missing” (orig. vermißt) or a cross (for fallen) next, to, or below, the photographs of his comrades. Sometimes, there are photographs of burials or wooden crosses somewhere “in the east”.

A page of one of these scrapbooks; it’s actually the last page, it looks very different from the other pages, and it shows two portraits with the word “missing” (vermißt) net to the pictures as well as one of his friends, Ernst, while “at the Reich Labour Service” (Reichsarbeitsdienst, RAD)

I will say this right now: Erich Sonntag survived three years on the Eastern Front when so many others didn’t.

May they—and all other dead of this dreadful conflict—rest in peace.