| Born: | 03-30-1919 |
| Faculty: | Law School |
| Category: | Expelled student |
Hanni ZUCKER (married: KRAUS), born on March 30th, 1919 in Vienna/Austria (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt") for Strakonice/Czechoslovakia, citizenship 1938: Czechoslovakia), daughter of Herbert Zucker (1883–1960, manufacturer) and Emma Zucker, née Hirsch (1899–1984), lived in Vienna's 1st district, Johannesgasse 22. In 1937 she had passed her school-leaving examination (Matura) at the private girls' secondary school "Luithlen" in Vienna 1, Tuchlauben, then began to study law at the University of Vienna in the fall term of 1937/38 and was last enrolled in the spring term of 1938 at the Law School in the 1st year of her studies.
In 1938, after the takeover of power of National-Socialism she was forced to quit her studies for racist reasons and to leave the University of Vienna.
The entire family was able to flee Austria in time, shortly before the "Anschluss", on March 3rd, 1938, to Switzerland, where they lived in Zurich. The Zucker family was active in the Fez production in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the father wss able to continue the business from Switzerland for the time being. At the beginning of 1939 the family moved to Paris/France and was naturalized there. In November 1939 Hanni Zucker emigrated from Genoa/Italy with the SS Saturnia further to the USA, where she arrived on November 17th, 1939 in New York City, NY, together with her family.
Shortly thereafter, she met the Viennese bookseller Hans Peter Kraus (1907–1988), who, after deportation to the concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald, was also able to emigrate to the U.S. via Sweden in October 1939, and they married in 1940. Because the trade in rare books soon flourished, she also became his business partner and the couple founded the antiquarian bookstore H. P. Kraus, Inc. (her husband has been able to open a small bookstore shortly after arriving in New York after selling a copy of a rare letter written by Christopher Columbus in 1494) and in 1945 they moved the business to a townhouse at 16 East 46th Street and they also soon had five children together.
After the end of the Second World War, her husband also litigates in Vienna in December 1945 against the expropriation ("Aryanization") of his Viennese store in 1938 by his former employee Alfred Wolf. The total stock of the Viennese store had amounted to about 100,000 books and he recovers at least a small part of his originally 2,000-volume reference library as well as four framed maps from his former map collection.
In May 2014, the University Library of the Medical University of Vienna restituted twelve of the sixteen books in its collection that came from this Viennese antiquarian bookshop in the course of provenance research.
Hanni and Hans Peter Kraus became the largest antiquarian booksellers in the U.S., buying up entire libraries and collections (e.g., 20,000 volumes of the library of Prince Liechtenstein in 1949), carefully recording and cataloging the individual books, and reselling them, sometimes at a great profit. In 1952, they acquire a copy of the extremely rare incunabulum "Konstanzer Missal", of which only two copies were known worldwide at the time. They specialized in medieval illuminated manuscripts, incunabula and rare books of the 16th and 17th centuries. Their regularly published printed sales catalogs with accurate bibliographic descriptions of books and manuscripts became important reference works. In 1947, they opened Kraus Periodicals Inc, a second company in New York specializing in the sale of scholarly journals, and in 1956, Kraus Reprint Corporation, a third company specializing in the reprinting of scholarly journals and reference works. Hans Peter Kraus and Hanni Kraus thus became among the most successful and important dealers in rare books of the second half of the 20th century.
In 1970, they donated 162 manuscripts on the history and culture of Spanish America in the period 1492–1819, including a letter by Amerigo Vespucci, to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. In 1980, they also donated the Drake Collection, which had been assembled over twelve years and has been available to the public there ever since.
After her husband's death, Hanni Kraus established a fund in his memory at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library/Yale University. She continued to run the business with daughter Mary Ann and son-in-law Roland Folter until her death, after which it was liquidated and the stock sold.
Hanni Kraus, née Zucker, died at the age of 83 on January 14th, 2003 in New York, NY/USA.
Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") IUR 1937–1938; POSCH/INGRISCH/DRESSEL 2008, 504; Hans Peter KRAUS, A rare book saga. The autobiography of H. P. Kraus, New York 1978; The Independent Booksellers' Network, In Memoriam Hanni Kraus (2003); Hanni Kraus, in: The Sunday Times (2003); Hyfler/Rosner, Hanni Kraus, bookseller: Times of London obit (2003)Beatrix MÜLLER-KAMPEL, Interview mit Dorrit Claire Cohn (geb. Zucker Hale), in: Beatrix MÜLLER-KAMPEL, ed., Lebenswege und Lektüre. Österreichische NS-Vertriebene in den USA und Kanada, Tübingen 2000 [2014²], 257-270; Medical University of Vienna, Library/Provenance Research: Antiquariat Hans Peter Kraus (2014); Walter MENTZEL, Hans Peter Kraus, in: Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung, Vienna 2019 (online); www.genteam.at; www.ancestry.de; www.familysearch.com; www.myheritage.com.
Maria Schreitter
