Franz Künstler

[Pete1052]

From The Times

London, UK

June 5, 2008

Franz Künstler, veteran of the First World War

Veteran who survived the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian armies in 1918

Franz Künstler was not overimpressed with the sudden attention he attracted at the very end of his extraordinarily long life. Living quietly in the small German town of Niederstetten, in Baden-Württemberg, he was discovered to be one of the very few former First World War soldiers still alive, and the only one who had fought in the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This brought him visitors, inquisitive interviewers and letters from around the world. But he confessed that was “anything but proud, to be the last soldier of the Emperor”. “I was no Hurrah soldier and simply did what I had to do,” he told the German magazine Cicero. “Young people had to kill each other. Is that somehow justified?” was his bitter reflection on what the war had meant.

Künstler was born in 1900 into an ethnic German family in Soost, in today’s Romania, but then in the south of the Kingdom of Hungary. His schooldays were rudely interrupted in June 1914 when, returning from a holiday, his father collected him from the station with news that they all faced “tough times” as a result of the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne. That event set in train the diplomatic and military manoeuvres which led to the outbreak of the First World War.

“The Sarajevo assassination destroyed my life,” Künstler recalled later. A bookish boy, he had to give up plans to train as a lawyer and instead go to work on the family farm, replacing his older brothers who had been called up.

His own recruitment to a Hungarian artillery regiment followed as a 17-year-old in February 1918, after six weeks’ training. He was then sent to the Piave front to fight the Italian Army in a bloody campaign of attrition involving long lines of trenches and artillery barrages of varying accuracy. A Catholic chaplain came to bless the weapons and urge the troops to destroy the enemy, which gave Künstler a lifelong aversion to organised religion.

He was there for eight months until, in November 1918, the Italians, assisted by the British and French, finally broke through as the war approached its end. His unit abandoned its artillery. Each man, he recalled, was issued with a couple of pieces of bread and jam and 30 rounds of rifle ammunition. But a supposedly orderly retreat rapidly became chaotic and he and his surviving colleagues, remnants of a once proud Imperial force, eventually reached Vienna covered in lice, as they had been unable to wash for weeks, eating stew by hand out of their uniform caps, as they had neither cutlery nor plates.

Künstler settled after the war in Budapest, married and entered the household goods trade. During the Second World War he saw active service again on the Eastern Front in 1942, working as a motorcycle dispatch rider in Ukraine.

Künstler clashed with the Hungarian fascists after refusing to join their activities, and managed to bribe his way out of serious trouble. But he had admired Nazism in some respects, and his business interests prospered as Jewish competition was removed. “I didn’t ask where they had gone . . . I was a businessman, I had no time to think more deeply about it.” He claimed later that it was only after the war that he discovered what had really happened to the deported Jews.

After the war and the defeat of the Third Reich his own position was perilous as a member of the German minority in Hungary. He was imprisoned under the new Hungarian Communist regime but managed to escape and hide for some months in the countryside until he could arrange to move in 1946 with his wife to Germany. The couple were not reunited with their son, a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, until 1952.

Their reception in Germany was far from welcoming. When they arrived in Niederstetten they lived initially among aristocratic German refugees from East Prussia, who looked down on arrivals from Hungary, even ethnic Germans, as “Gypsies”. Künstler had to make a living from menial jobs, and lived in some poverty after ill-health forced early retirement in the mid-1950s.

Later he gained much satisfaction from his role as guide to a local museum. And he remained proudly independent after the death of his wife in 1981, continuing to look after himself at home. He said he had had enough adventure in life, but hoped to live to the age of 110 “when the devil can come and fetch me”.

His death leaves just a handful of men still alive in Europe who fought in the First World War. He was the last soldier of the 1914-18 conflict living in Germany. France’s last soldier from that war died earlier this year. Künstler, surprised by his belated fame as one of the few survivors, was determined to use the opportunity to remind his audiences of how awful that war really was.

He is survived by his son.

Franz Künstler, First World War veteran, was born on July 24, 1900. He died on May 27, 2008, aged 107

[Rab]

An interesting and thought provoking article.