Otto Papesch

Otto Papesch was my father. I was four years old when he died. I asked myself for years what kind of a human being he was. I have attempted to paint a picture of that handsome, charismatic, cultivated, professional chemical engineer, enthusiastic sportsman, photographer and family man by basing myself on the vast correspondence that still exists, his diary of 1917, stories about him from my mother and grandparents and the innumerable photos he took over the years. This has been an attempt to describe his prominent characteristics but also shed light on his dilemmas and the contradictions in his personality and thereby to describe the important events of his short life. Would his destiny have been different had he been born a year later?

Maria Christine Moeller (known as Christine) is a multilingual librarian information network specialist who has been interested in her family history from when she was very young. In retirement she had the time to go through the mountains of documents that had been left to her over the years. Through them she was able to discover who her father was. This led to her writing about the course of his life and how the times dictated what his destiny was to be. Christine’s own life has been a journey through many countries and continents. She was in five different schools in three different languages before finishing high school. She then went on to do university studies in the United States, France, Switzerland and Austria before entering the services of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations in Rome. There she met her husband and they moved to Australia where their two boys were born and where she continued to pursue a career of consultancies in such organisations as the C.S.I.R.O., the Australian Bicentennial Authority, the NSW Bicentennial Council and the NSW Maritime Services Board. She also spent 30 years with the Australia’s Special Broadcasting Organisation creating English subtitles for foreign films and documentaries from three of the five languages she speaks. She currently lives in Sydney near one of her sons and divides her time travelling to see her other son in Helsinki and family in Vienna where she was born.