Well nigh all communities in the Bamberg district had to sell their common land with woods and fields in order to pay war taxes. They were still partly in debt in the eighties from those times.
My father was the eldest of five siblings.
He had a brother and three sisters. His brother Hans trained as a cooper and moved to Vienna later on, where he obtained a well-paid position at the well-known
Dreher Brewery·in Klein-Schwaecht. He visited Bamberg several times and presented himself dressed in Viennese national costume and showing off, pretending to be very grand and a social lion.
All our relations were even more aghast when another time he brought his wife with
him. She came from Bohemia, was no beauty, wore flamboyant clothes and a lot of jewellery and spoke only a broken bohemian German. The whole family circle believed that my uncle had abandoned his nationality and traditions. My father had to make many excuses for him, saying that
his brother had married very young and rather foolishly. Uncle Hans always lived in the hope of returning to his hometown when he was older and start his business there. He never made it, but died in 1880 in Vienna from heart disease with dropsy, a disease from which our family seems to die.
The eldest sister of my father was Aunt Babette Gruber. Her husband was good at many things, useful everywhere, a man who seemed to fall on his feet very quickly in the most varied situations in life but never stayed anywhere for long.