Biography

Susanne Friedländer was born in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 as the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.

With the Anschluss

Anschluss

The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

of Austria and Nazi Germany in March 1938, her family were destructed and her father was transported to an unknown destination.

Years later she wrote the book A Ballad by Johannes Brahms. A journey to understand a childhood in Vienna shattered by Nazism that explores Susanne′s journey as she traces her Jewish ancestry through the changing times of Imperial Vienna in an effort to make sense of the influences of the Enlightenment, anti-Semitism, assimilation, intermarriage, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.