AHC interview with Dorothea Scher.

December 2, 2014Dorothea Scher, née Hauptmann, was born on 7/14/1933 in Vienna, Austria to Kurt Hauptmann and Anne Hofmann. Kurt Hauptmann was an attorney, who had lost his license due to "dishonest behavior". Dorothea's mother however, descended from a rich upper-class family, whose father came up for all expenses: Alfred Hofmann was the CEO of the prestigious production community "Wiener Werkstaette", and in 1955 he donated thousands of fabric patterns and drawings to MAK, the Museum for applied arts in Vienna. http://www.mak.at/sammlung/mak-sammlung/wiener-werkstaette-archiv. Dorothea’s parents married in 1927 and divorced in 1937, two years before they fled Germany. Dorothea Scher was six years old when she left with her maternal grandparents and her mother to Trieste. From the Adriatic coast, they set sail on the "Vulcania" to New York, where the family decided never to speak German again, which was possible due to the fact, that all family members had acquired good English skills in Vienna. In 1945 Dorothea and her mother Anne Hofmann moved to their own apartment in New York’s Washington Heights. Dorothea’s father had come to New York in 1941 and took care of his daughter only on Sundays. He had his own shoe business, which failed and went bankrupt in the 1960s. In 1951, Dorothea graduated from High school in Washington Heights. After two years of College, she had to quit, since her father was not able to finance the studies of his daughter anymore. Subsequently, she started to work at "Life Magazine" in the PR-department. In 1955 she married "her high school love" and got her first of two daughters in 1957. in 1963 she started to work as a photographer's assistant and decided to commence a carrier as a freelancing photographer's agent/representative. She retired in 2000.Austrian Heritage Collectio