Speech by Bernd Siegler on the occasion of the laying of stumbling stones on 26 June 2022
Who was Jenö Konrad, who was this man, commemorated from today onwards by two stumbling stones in Nuremberg?
Eugene (known as Jenö) Konrad was born on13 August 1894 in Nemeth-Palanka, a small town on the Danube in the Serbian Hungarian border area. He grew up with his two brothers and two sisters.
The Konrads were so-called rural Jews (Landjuden). Jenö Konrad’s father was a shoemaker, and like many rural Jews, the family moved to the big city at the beginning of the 20th century, to Budapest.
Already as a child, Jenö had only one thing on his mind: football. Every spare minute he played the game on the street, together with his brother Kalman (two years younger than Jenö). Both were talented, quickly climbed the career ladder and went down in the history of Hungarian and Austrian football as the Konrad Twins.
Already at the age of 17 Jenö played his debut match for the MTK Budapest first team, the dream team in European football at the time. He won the championship twice with MTK. At the age of 21, he played for the Hungarian national side. Technically gifted, he played at inside right or centre half and was therefore the central distributor of the ball. Today one would say that he was the game’s pace-maker.
Then came the First World War. Konrad spent 22 months as a prisoner of war in Russia. Once freed, he went with his brother to Austria, where one could already earn good money playing football. He played for Austria and Vienna Wien, won the league championship once and the cup twice.
Following a severe meniscus injury, he had to stop playing football in 1925. He became a very successful trainer in Austria and Rumania.
That was exactly what Nuremberg Football Club was looking for in 1930. The golden years of the 20s, when the club won five titles and was the undisputed number 1 in Germany, had come to an end. The aging club team had prematurely dropped out of the race for the German championship on two occasions.
The club’s members decided that a trainer was needed who could integrate young talent into the aging team. In August 1930 they brought the famous Jenö Konrad to Nuremberg.
Success followed quickly afterwards, until two extremely narrow defeats against Bayern Munich in August 1932 (Bayern Munich later won the championship) attracted the attention of the anti-Semitic smearsheet “Der Sturmer”, which was published in Nuremberg. The inflammatory article against the Jewish trainer bore the headline “Nuremberg Football Club in Ruins because of the Jew”.
Neither in Austria nor in Germany had the fact that Konrad was of the Jewish faith played any sort of role up to this point. What had been of interest was that he was a good footballer and a successful trainer. In Nuremberg he became a target because he was a Jew.
“A Jew as a true sportsman is inconceivable” claimed “Der Stürmer”, printing for the umpteenth time its drawing of the physically degenerate Jew. What the paper demanded from Nuremberg Football Club was unequivocal: “Club, reflect on this, give your trainer a ticket to Jerusalem. Become German again and you will be healthy again”.
Jenö Konrad did not spend a lot of time pondering over the matter. He saw exactly what was brewing in Germany and anticipated what it would lead to. That very night he packed his suitcases and left the city for Vienna, together with his wife Grete and his daughter Evelyn.
“The two years with the club was not a minor episode that one can forget in the train from Nuremberg to Vienna. It was an experience that will live on with me, even when I have lived for a long time somewhere else”, he wrote to the board members of Nuremberg Football Club. Konrad left behind an autograph card bearing the words: “The club was number one. And it must be number one again!”
With regret, Nuremberg Football Club said goodbye to the successful trainer. For Jenö Konrad it was the beginning of an odyssey across Europe, before he and his family left Lisbon in May 1940 and travelled to safety in New York in a small freighter.
Five months after his departure the Nazis came to power in Germany. The systematic marginalisation of Jews began immediately, at all levels. As one of the first associations to do so, the club struck off Jews from its membership list – on 30 April 1933, 142 names were removed.
From one day to the next it became clear to them that they no longer belonged, deprived of a part of their social homeland. This autumn a book will be published that will give these 142 former Jewish club-members a name, a face and a history.
And Jenö Konrad? He started a new life in the USA – one without football. He worked initially in a sewing machine factory and then in a curtain shop.
When in 1953 and also two years later, Nuremberg Football Club toured the USA for three weeks, Konrad insisted on meeting the club at the hotel. When the club played in New York against FC Liverpool and FC Sunderland Konrad was in the stands. He wrote to the President of the German Football Association, saying how proud he still was of having trained Nuremberg Football Club 20 years earlier.
Jenö Konrad died on 15 July 1978 in New York.
This letter to the GFA president, which was published in Nuremberg Football Club’s newspaper, was a lucky break for me. In the mid-1990s, during my research work on the topic “The Club during the Period of National Socialism and a Trainer on the Run”. it pointed me in the right direction.
Up until this point, almost nothing was known about Jenö Konrad. At that time, more than 25 years ago, there was no internet and no Google. After placing an advertisement in the “Aufbau” newspaper for exiles in New York, I received a fax message from Evelyn Konrad, Jenö Konrad’s daughter, with whom I am still in regular contact today.
She told me a lot about her father. Now I knew who Jenö Konrad was. He was not only a brilliant footballer and successful coach, but also a man of many interests: he owned two cinemas, loved literature and the theatre, spoke six languages fluently and was able to sense nascent anti-Semitism.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself. What has in all these 26 years emerged from the research on Jenö Konrad seems almost a dream. This is thanks to Nuremberg Football Club, especially Katharina Fritsch, who will now sketch the continuation of the story up to today’s laying of the stumbling stones.