Otto "Schloime" Fischer

The cuckoo shall take you away, with thunder and pistols, if you forget who your Uncle Otto is. In memory of your Uncle Otto Fischer. These lines were written by the famous Austrian football star and national player Otto Fischer in 1932 in the poetry album of his niece Alice Tichy. Perhaps he already sensed that the memory of him would fade. During the interwar period, Fischer was part of the first generation of professional footballers in Vienna and wore the Austrian national jersey seven times. Celebrated as a gifted dribbler on the football fields of Vienna, he was also a target of anti-Semitic attacks as a Jew. Fischer represented the Viennese (football) school and worked as a coach in Eastern Europe after his active career. In Liepaja, Latvia, he found both sporting and personal happiness, married, and led the local club Olimpija Liepaja to three championship titles. In 1941, the popular coach was murdered by the Nazis. After his death, Otto Fischer fell completely into oblivion. This monograph for the first time depicts his life and work as a piece of Viennese cultural history in the tension between Jewish participation and anti-Semitism on the eve of the Holocaust.