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Reminiscences of Elfriede Fischinger
Her Life was Oskar
Dr. Joerg Jewanski
"Dear Mrs. Fischinger" -- that’s how I began my first letter to Elfriede, in December 1994. I was just about to receive my degree in Music, with a thesis on the relationship between colors and musical tones, and I had accepted an assignment to do an article on Alexander Laszlo’s Color-Light-Music. At that time I only knew that there must be some connection between Laszlo and Oskar Fischinger. I had seen the Fischinger exhibit at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, but the real traces led me to Long Beach. Elfriede passed my letter on to Bill Moritz, who wrote me "Mrs. Fischinger is now 84, and it is difficult for her to write letters."
From then on we stayed in contact, and one day, around the beginning of 1995, Elfriede invited me and my wife Karin to California. We could stay with her. For us, that was fabulous. We had never been to America, and that we could combine vacation with research seemed ideal to me. Shortly after that, Elfriede and Bill found Laszlo’s only living heir, a nephew, and visited him in Encino, discovering that much of the estate had been shipped to an archive in Laramie, Wyoming. This made everything even more interesting. That was April. In May, Elfriede and Bill came to Germany and I met them at the Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, where some of Oskar’s estate was. From there we went to Gelnhausen. Two months later, Bill picked Karin and me up at Los Angeles airport, and we drove right to Elfriede’s house in Long Beach. She showed us the icebox, explained the kitchen, how the door to the garden was always left unlocked-- we felt right at home immediately. Of course, we couldn’t forget that we were staying with a woman of our grandparents’ generation, but her warmth and openness (which is rather rare in Germany) indelibly marked our first impression of America.
Most of the time Elfriede went around in an armless light-blue smock (which I immediately associated with the Germany of my childhood) and swore against the terrible heat of July. But we came from cold, rainy Germany, thirsting for sunshine, and were astounded by the air conditioner that blew like a polar storm through the house. We froze in the kitchen while she sweated. Although she had lived almost 60 years in California, she still spoke a mixture of German and English. We also wavered between the two languages. In the evenings she showed us videos of Oskar and other artists that she had known personally, and usually dozed off on the couch, so we would turn off the TV quietly.
Her life was Oskar. He and his art wove through the time we stayed with her. Together with Bill, she showed us Los Angeles, and she knew exactly what Oskar thought about everything, in which stores he and she used to shop...We experienced Los Angeles with the eyes of Oskar and Elfriede, and loved the city. Despite her friendly warmth, it was difficult for me to use the familiar "Du" when I spoke German with Elfriede -- in English you just use one "you" for everyone, and avoid the problem. I think it wasn’t just the difference in our ages (nearly half a century), but also a respect for her self-appointed dedication to preserving Oskar’s legacy.
Two years later we came to California again, with our one-year-old daughter Teresa, to do more research on Laszlo, and naturally we stayed with Elfriede again. This time there lay three generations between her and Teresa. When we arrived, Elfriede simply reached out her arms, and the otherwise shy Teresa embraced her as if she were her great-grandmother. When Elfriede waved goodbye to us, we had already made plans to come visit her again in the summer of 1999. Now she is dead, and someday when we’re looking at the family slides, Teresa will ask us "Who is that woman holding me in her arms?" We’ll have lots to tell her.
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