Finally Got My Coin after 2 months

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by tibor, Jan 26, 2021.

  1. tibor

    tibor Supporter! Supporter

    After two months of waiting I finally received my auction purchase. This
    is coin is the first dated (1456) for the Habsburg Territories, in this case
    Austria. Minted in Wiener Neustadt, it is a Kreuzer.

    [​IMG]
    Less than seven are collectible, others are tied up in museum collections. The
    date is on the image on the right. Starting at 9 o'clock it reads 1&56. The date
    numerals are separated by annulets. The 4 is Medieval style looking like a ribbon
    with the 5 looking like a 7 with a curl at the top. Still waiting on two others.
    Post anything relavent.
     
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  3. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    Wow. Very cool, @tibor. Gotta love those early, 15th-century prototypes of modern arabic numerals. Magnificent.
    ...The one time I ever was in Europe, on a family trip in 1973 (I was 11 --optimally impressionable), we spent most of the time sponging off of a naturalized aunt and her husband in western Germany (...as it still is; my uncle regaled us with translations of jokes about Saarlanders). We were in one of several exquisite, small local towns. Going down the street for (see if I can remember this: ) Eis Krem, you could pass a whole row of houses, with the dates of their construction engraved above the doorways. They were all impressively old, but one that stood out was from the 1490's, with a numeral "4" very similar to the one on your example.
    ...The scarcity of which is only now starting to really 'register.' Hearty congratulations on your coup!
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2021
  4. panzerman

    panzerman Well-Known Member

    Beautifull coin Tibor! Better late then never. I still have one from San Marino (sent Dec. 1st/2020) somewhere between there and Orleans/ Canada. Also three other shipments in December.;)
     
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  5. yakpoo

    yakpoo Member

    The final leg of a 565 year journey...

    [​IMG]
     
  6. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    HaHaHa.... That Good. Given the postal service in my town, that might be preferable!!!!
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
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  7. serafino

    serafino Well-Known Member

    Just think of the many generations of families that have lived in those homes built in the 1490's.
     
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  8. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    And the history they witnessed, from Maximilian I on, decade by decade, regime by regime. All on the organic level of individual families. Kind of amazing.
    Nope, people in America simply don't have the option to experience this kind of historical gestalt, on this chronological scale. (Granted, over the last couple of centuries, we've compensated for the lack by sheer drama --lots of shooting! Kind of like our movies.) Which was why, when I was there for those precious weeks, I deep-inhaled all of it.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
  9. tibor

    tibor Supporter! Supporter

    In December, 1956 my parents escaped Hungary and went across
    the border into Austria. After a week in a refugee camp a Catholic
    priest and his family took them in. They lived in Wiener Neustadt.
    This coin and and a couple of others in my collection have a special
    meaning for me. We visited with them in 1971 and I visited them
    again in 1973.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
  10. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    @tibor, thank you very much for your willingness to share that. I can only speak for myself, but you just, summarily expanded my immediate mental landscape by orders of magnitude.
     
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  11. DonnaML

    DonnaML Well-Known Member

    That sort of continuity wasn't really so uncommon in Europe. My maternal grandmother was born in a house in a village in the Black Forest where her family had lived since 1815, and continued to live until October 22, 1940. (I've written before what happened on that day.) The house was built in the 1560s, approximately 460 years ago. The house in the same village where my family lived from August 1724 (when my 6th great-grandfather bought half of the house) until 1815, is across the street and down a couple of blocks; relatives continued to live in that house until 1940. In fact, everyone in the village with my grandmother's family surname in the 20th century was descended from one of the three sons of my 5th great-grandfather.

    Here's a photo of the house taken ca. 1910; that's my great-grandfather standing in one of the upstairs windows:

    Bloch family house Sulzburg.JPG

    And here's a photo of the same house I took in 2018:

    Bloch house, Sulzburg, Hauptstr. 70, Sun. 2.25.18 (# 2).JPG

    Edited to add: and a photo of my mother, age 15 months, with her Aunt Martha (who perished in 1942), next to the same house in July 1924. She grew up in Berlin, but spent many of her summers at that house with her grandparents.

    Marianne with Martha Bloch July 1924, Sulzburg.jpg
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
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  12. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    That's brilliant, @DonnaML. Your earlier mentions of your family history are --well, from here, let's just say they're going exactly nowhere. But this pitch of sustained history, specifically as experienced through a filter as organic as (...to say it again) family history, defies replication by any other means.
    (Edited to add: ) Who ever said men shouldn't cry? Part of This Daily
    Mental-Hygenic Regimen.
    (...Instead of, 'Part of This Nutritious Breakfast!' --Oh no, since I'm in deep stream-of-consciousness mode, mine runs to a hamburger patty in the microwave, with help from anything from jalapenos, Tabasco sauce, powdered Cayenne, or --on a bad day-- bottom-shelf hot sauce. ...Not that anyone would, but Please, Don't Ask me about the bottom-shelf hot sauce. If you can drink it out of the bottle, it's unworthy of further discussion.)
    ...The picture almost looks as if your great-aunt and your mother were feeding birds. Predicated on your great-aunt having seeds, or some kind of bird food, in her hand. ...Is that even a plausible guess?
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
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  13. DonnaML

    DonnaML Well-Known Member

    I added a photo of my mother at the house, to make the connection more direct. Speaking of history and continuity: the remnants of a Roman wall lie directly behind the house.
     
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  14. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    Not to get all '70's on you, but, Oh, Wow....
     
  15. DonnaML

    DonnaML Well-Known Member

    Could be. I always sort of got the impression that maybe there was some water sprinkling near them?
     
  16. +VGO.DVCKS

    +VGO.DVCKS Well-Known Member

    If you're talking about the lower mid-right of the picture, that's looking like an effect of the light and the camera. --No expert, but I grew up with c. 1950's box cameras as an integral part of the frame of reference. ...Lovely picture, regardless.
    ...Oh, Dang, @tibor, Sorry for highjacking your thread! Nope, me, not @DonnaML, who had substantive things to say relative to your own family background.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
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  17. Orielensis

    Orielensis Well-Known Member

    Splendid coin, @tibor ! Dated coins of this time are, as you said, often of the greatest rarity. Also, I very much like that the Arabic numbers are still written in pretty much the Arabic fashion on your coin.

    Here is an early, non-dated Habsburg coin:
    MA – Deutschland etc., Zofingen, Vierzipfliger, Mauritiuskopf .png
    Zofingen (Habsburg mint, under the Counts of Frohburg), bracteate penny ("vierzipfliger Pfennig"), ca. 1285–1300 AD. Obv: ZOVI; male frontal bust (St. Maurice?) flanked by two stars, crescent above. Rev: negative design. 18mm . Ref: Berger 2445–6; Slg. Wüthrich 134–5; HMZ I–149a.
     
  18. Only a Poor Old Man

    Only a Poor Old Man Well-Known Member

    Sorry for hijacking the thread further and going off-topic, but @DonnaML , has your family been compensated one way or another from the German government for having to abandon their property like that? I have no idea how that works, but I imagine being within living memory there may be some general legal arrangement regarding these matters. Did you meet the current owners?
     
  19. DonnaML

    DonnaML Well-Known Member

    @Only a Poor Old Man, please understand that loss of property was the least of it. Coincidentally, today happens to be Holocaust Memorial Day, and I would be thinking about all of this anyway, but it's difficult to talk about. So I'll try to do it once here, so I can refer people to this post if they ask about it in the future. (I don't think @tibor will mind this further derailing of his thread, given our communications today by private message.)

    As briefly as possible, my mother lost 11 people in her immediate family to the Holocaust -- seven uncles and aunts, two grandparents, and two first cousins. Seven of the 11 were born and/or lived in the family house in the photos, and were deported by the Nazis on Oct. 22, 1940, along with most of the rest of the Jews of Baden, to concentration camps run by the Vichy French in Southern France. Four of those seven were later gassed at Auschwitz before the end of 1942 (including my mother's Aunt Martha, the one in the photo), and the other three died elsewhere -- one of them, my mother's Uncle Gustav, machine-gunned in a ditch in May 1944 in Lithuania or Latvia, where the "Convoy 73" train from Drancy near Paris had taken him and 900 other Jews, one (my great-grandfather Moses) who died of the cold and disease at the age of 86 in March 1941, four months after his deportation from Baden to a French-run concentration camp, and one (my great-grandmother Lina) who survived four years in two camps until Liberation in 1944, in the hope of seeing her children again, but died a few weeks later.

    By comparison, my mother herself was lucky enough to be on the first Kindertransport to England in Dec. 1938, three weeks after Kristallnacht, leaving her home and country and parents at the age of 15. Her parents managed to survive in Berlin until May 27, 1941 (a few months before the borders of the Reich were closed to Jewish emigration and the deportations from Berlin to the "East" began), when they were able to get a ship to the USA after taking a sealed train from Berlin to the French-Spanish border under Gestapo guard, and then another train through Spain to Portugal and Lisbon. My mother joined them in NYC in late 1943, after spending nearly five years with two foster-families, mostly in London, and then living on her own.

    Thus, the compensation proceedings begun in West Germany circa 1949 or 1950 by the surviving family members, the heirs of those who perished, involved
    more than the loss of the house (which was confiscated) and the property it contained -- which was all sold at public auction, down to the last used pillow, a couple of months after the deportation, on Dec. 13, 1940. This is the list of auction results for the sale of my great-grandparents' property, which I was able to find a few years ago in one of the restitution files I obtained from the archive in Freiburg. It includes the names of the buyers of each item, with the proceeds to the German government totaling 1,020 RM.

    Bloch house auction p. 1 13.12.1940.jpg
    Bloch house auction p. 2 13.12.1940.jpg

    In addition to compensation for the property inside the house, I believe the family (including my mother as heir to my grandmother, who died in 1947) also received perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 DM in total compensation for the house itself, sometime in the early 1950s. I don't remember the exchange rate with the dollar back then, although I once looked it up. (As mentioned, I was able to order copies of the restitution case files from the archive in Freiburg, one file for each murdered family member.)

    I do remember as one other example that in 1956 the family received a total of 600 DM in compensation for the "wrongful imprisonment" and death of my great-grandfather, calculated as 150 DM (considerably less than that in dollars) for each of the four full months he was in the camp from Oct. 22, 1940 until his death on March 19, 1941. Compensation for the two partial months was denied, because not specifically authorized by the restitution laws. Here is the relevant portion of the decision, translated into English:

    Detail Moses Bloch 1956 decision (English) p. 2 (2).jpg

    Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s -- some of these proceedings dragged on well into the 1970s -- my mother was awarded about $5,000 on her claim for "interruption of education."

    You have to remember that many of the West German judicial officials who made these determinations had rather dubious histories themselves under the Nazi regime. Complete de-Nazification would have left nobody to run West Germany, as the rationale went.

    The reason I was in the village of my grandmother's family in 2018 (together with my son), and was able to photograph the old family house, was to be present, and to speak, at the ceremony to install seven "Stolpersteine" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein) on the sidewalk in front of the house, one for each perished member of the family. Unfortunately, my mother couldn't be there; she died many years ago, when I was 20, as a result of a car accident we were in while she was driving me home from college at the end of a school year. So my son and I represented her, and her branch of the family. Other family members, also descendants of my great-grandparents, attended from France, Belgium, and Israel.

    Here are photos of the seven Stolpersteine, before and after installation: .

    Stolpersteine before installation.jpg

    Stolpersteine after installation.jpg

    Five of the seven have no actual graves, so these will be the only tangible individual memorial they will ever have.

    This has all been a brief summary of my family's history in the mid-20th century, written in a way that I hope avoids specifically identifying myself too much. I could write a book! And, in fact, an 85-page journal-sized booklet about my family was written by a group of German people living in the area, with my involvement, and was published in conjunction with the Stolpersteine ceremony, with photos and documents (mostly old family letters I have from the 1933-1945 period) that I contributed. An expanded version into a full-length book is in the works. Both are in German.

    I hope this explains things a little.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2021
  20. Limes

    Limes Well-Known Member

    That's a tragic story @DonnaML. Soo much suffering during those times. Thanks for sharing.
     
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