Many roads link the Library of Congress to the world.
In the case of Gloria Elisabeth Kaiser, it started on a sunny beach in Salvador, Bahia, where she was enjoying Brazil as a tourist in Itapoa during the winter of '86. While taking an early morning walk with a friend, their conversation in German caught the ear of a language professor from the local university. With the typically friendly gesture of a Bahiana, Celeste Galeao approached Ms. Kaiser and started talking to her in German.
That casual encounter led to the establishment of Ms. Kaiser's Austrian-Brazilian Cultural Initiative.
Gloria Kaiser has had a longtime interest in Brazil, as two of her four books cover that country. The catalyst, however, that linked Kaiser to LC was a visit by Margrit B. Krewson, German/Dutch area specialist in the European Division, to the Austrian Ministry of Education and Art in 1991. It was there that Ms. Krewson met Ms. Kaiser, who was doing innovative work that combined fiction and historical research on Brazil.
Ms. Krewson suggested that Ms. Kaiser intern in the Library's European and Hispanic divisions to examine their collections and obtain a deeper understanding of Austria's cultural impact on Brazil.
While interning at the Library in the fall of 1993, Gloria Kaiser worked on a number of projects that furthered the cultural ties between Brazil and Austria. For example, she found materials at the Library that were not available anywhere else and that clarified and corrected a number of misconceptions about Austrian author Stefan Zweig, who lived and died in Brazil during the early 1940s.
She also found materials on Zweig in the papers of Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean Nobel laureate for literature. (Microfilm copies of Mistral's papers are housed in the Manuscript Division.)
Moreover, Ms. Kaiser learned that the political persecution of both Zweig and the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado had caused them to significantly change their writing styles. According to Ms. Krewson, Gloria Kaiser had spent a decade searching the major libraries in Europe and Brazil to locate an original Portuguese edition of Amado's controversial novel Cacau (1933). This book, banned in Brazil, is a harsh critique of the inhumane living conditions of plantation workers in Brazil.
Amado was subsequently forced to flee to Europe. Ms. Kaiser found in the Library's collections a 1936 Portuguese edition, replete with woodcut illustrations. She called discovery of this work at LC the "high point" of her research in Washington.
While working on a fictionalized biography of Dona Leopoldina, the tragic 19th century Austrian empress of Brazil, Ms. Kaiser became interested in describing the empress's love of her adopted country. At Leopoldina's invitation, for example, a brilliant young Viennese painter, Thomas Ender, produced some of his most beautiful watercolors while traveling through Brazil on the eve of its independence. His short but intense experience in the tropics had a tremendous impact on his later work.
This interest led Ms. Kaiser to explore the possibility of commemorating Thomas Ender's 200th birthday at the Library. The Austrian Ministry of Culture and Art, the Embassy of Austria and the Austrian Cultural Institute of New York agreed that the Library would be an excellent place to celebrate Ender's birthday.
At the Library Ms. Kaiser met Jose M. Neistein, director of the Brazilian American Cultural Institute and a longtime contributor to the Hispanic Division's Handbook of Latin American Studies. Dr. Neistein, an Austrian-educated Brazilian with a personal and professional interest in the culture of both countries, was delighted to contribute to the celebration.
Barbara von Barghahn, of Austrian descent and a professor at George Washington University, having done extensive work on Brazilian colonial art, was also an ideal participant in the Nov. 3, 1993, panel. Through conversations with Reynaldo Aguirre of the Hispanic Division, Ms. Kaiser decided that a celebration of this nature should not only include a panel discussion but also a display of reproductions of Ender's perceptive images of Brazil and its peoples.
A trilingual (Portuguese, German and English) brochure on Ender's Brazilian watercolors will be published in Austria this spring and will be made available in the Hispanic Division, as well as in Brazil and Austria.
At the Biblioteca Nacional of Brazil, Ms. Kaiser and this writer helped plan an exhibition similar to the one at the Library of Congress. With the assistance of LC's office in Rio de Janeiro, the Biblioteca Nacional will be kept up to date on developments in Washington, and materials used during the Library's symposium on Thomas Ender will form the basis for events at the Biblioteca Nacional later this year.
Ms. Kaiser's work on Ender at the Library and in Rio de Janeiro are only one focus of her interest in linking Austria, Brazil and the United States through libraries. She is continuing research on German-speaking immigrants to Brazil and sponsoring a 1,000-volume People's Library in Salvador, Bahia. This colonial capital, a major center for African-Brazilian culture, was also chosen by Ms. Kaiser to be the headquarters for the Austrian Brazilian Cultural Initiative.
What started as a casual walk on the beach of Itapoa and eventually brought Gloria Kaiser to the Library of Congress will continue to unite Brazil, Austria and the United States. Ms. Kaiser expressed this in her excellent Portuguese when, during her last day at the Library in 1993, she said, "Para mim a Biblioteca do Congresso e o espirito do mundo." ("To me the Library of Congress is the spirit of the world.")
