A fairytale story in a fairytale setting is the story behind this film. Two Hungarian-speaking Jewish refugees from National Socialism, one from Budapest living in New York, the other from a small town on the Austrian border with Hungary living in Bombay, meet at a tea dance in glamorous St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps, shortly after the end of the war, in autumn 1947. The house where they will reside after their marriage and where the groom’s family has lived in exile for almost ten years, is named after Glamis Castle, the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. It is one of four grand mansions at Breach Candy named after four British royal residences. In 2013, Glamis Villa was sold to an Indian industrial tycoon for more than 20 million Euros.
But there is another magical spark behind this film! It was Josef Schimmel who introduced Walter Langhammer to Kekoo Gandhy, initiating a whole new era of art promotion in Bombay. The film also connects immigrant art circles with the milieu of successful Jewish businessmen in exile and the commercial expat community in early post-independence Bombay.
In 1948 Josef Schimmel (1902–1988) was General Manager of Kores (India) Ltd., an Austrian company producing carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Kores had sent the engineer Josef Schimmel to Shanghai as technical manager in 1936. In May 1938 Schimmel was transferred to Bombay to open a Kores factory there. In the meantime the National Socialists had occupied Austria and Schimmel’s parents, Klara (née Mayer, 1869–1957) and Adolf Schimmel (1863–1950), were forced to leave their hometown of Bruck/Leitha for Vienna in October 1938. They lived there in a small apartment with no income, dependent on contributions from the Jewish community and the sale of their jewellery and furniture. Due to Josef Schimmel’s high salary and his position in Bombay, his parents were granted visas for British India and the husband of one of his cousins was given a position at Kores (India) Ltd. The cousin, Kamilla (née Wewerka, 1895–?), and husband Julius Thenen (1896–1988) were able to safely leave Nazi-occupied Austria and became part of Josef's close social circle in Bombay.
In the meantime, Josef and his parents led a very upscale British colonial lifestyle at Glamis Villa. It had belonged to Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, until the late 1930s, and was converted into a luxury home around 1938.
Presumably, the Schimmels lived on the ground floor of the three-storey villa, which had a total area of around 11,000 square feet (1022 square metres), ten bedrooms, three living rooms, plus kitchens and garages. Joe Schimmel was a member of a riding club, had his own stallion, and vacationed at Indian hill stations – just as the British did. In Matheran, at Porcupine Point, he met Kekoo Gandhy during the Christmas holidays in the early 1940s. Joe’s good friend, the Austrian painter Walter Langhammer, had designed a special frame for his paintings and was looking for a frame workshop in Bombay. After meeting Langhammer and members of the art circle, the spark had spilled over to Kekoo Gandhy.
Walter Langhammer may have shot the first sequence of the wedding film, as he is the only member of the wedding group who does not appear in it. Both, Käthe and Walter Langhammer were enthusiastic about photography. After the war, movie cameras became affordable for the better off, allowing them to document their lives. The Langhammers shared this passion with their friends, the Leyden brothers, Rudi and Albrecht von Leyden, the sales representative for Allied Photographers in Bombay.
The film is divided into eleven sections compiled from various sources. It keeps switching from black and white to colour film.
The first section (colour, 30 seconds) begins with the arrival of the rabbi and his assistants from the Keneseth Eliyahoo Fort Synagogue and some guests. A short sequence gives a first glimpse of the bride, Eva Ormos (translated to Hungarian, née Ornstein; 1921–2008), who emigrated to New York with her Jewish father and two sisters in 1939; her brother was abducted by the National Socialists and disappeared. Eva worked as a beautician in New York and her sister Margarethe was employed at a dance theatre, where she met her future husband, Jack Guggenheim. Working for the MGM film company in Europe Jack and his wife settled in Zurich. When their first daughter was born in 1947, they invited Eva to visit and later sent her to St. Moritz in the mountains to cure her sinusitis.
The second section (black and white, two minutes) introduces us to Jewish wedding traditions: the chuppah, a canopy with four corners and a covered roof is a symbol of the couple’s new home and during the ceremony the four posts of the chuppah are held by Jewish friends to symbolise their support for the life the couple will build together. The menorah, the candelabra, is lit and the groom wears a tallit or prayer shawl.
Dr. Hermann David Laemmle (1900–1996), a medical practitioner and exiled ear, nose and throat specialist from Augsburg, was the groom’s best man. Julius Thenen gave the bride away in the absence of her own family. “After their holidays [in St. Moritz] they both returned to their various homes. He kept writing letters to her ‘Come and marry me!’ She did not accept straight away, she came out in March 1948 on a plane, he put her up for two weeks in the Taj hotel and gave her money. She bought him a golden watch with personal engraving," recalled her only daughter, Carol Ross (1948–2018) in an interview with the author."
In the third film section (black and white, 30 seconds) the wedding gifts are displayed on the dining room table at Glamis Villa, including crystal glassware, a record player and a painting by Langhammer, Bombay from the Malabar Hills.
In the fourth section (coloured, approx. one minute) the couple and their family hold a garden reception on the Glamis Villa lawn. This is followed by a sequence (coloured, one minute) documenting the departure of the couple and their guests, leaving behind the groom’s elderly parents on the veranda. It ends with the couple getting into their car in Breach Candy and the next section (coloured, seven seconds) shows them getting out of their car in front of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, after a nine-kilometre drive via scenic Marine Drive through south Bombay.
The following two sections (black and white, 105 seconds) give us a glimpse of the wedding lunch at the Taj Mahal, held in a private room. Next to the groom sits Mrs. Langhammer and next to the bride is Dr. Laemmle. After lunch Walter Langhammer gave a speech that caused a lot of laughter.
The next sections (starting at 7:26) are all in colour and are shot back at magnificent Glamis Villa: for more than a minute we see the site of the garden reception, now empty of guests, with the groom’s mother, as head of the household, taking charge of the cleaning up process, with the help of the Indian servants. The couple pose casually for the camera, which also captures their dog. The next scene shows the Schimmels in the villa's living room. Joe Schimmel is sitting on a chair next to a bookcase that is decorated with Indian artefacts. The final, very brief, section shows Langhammer’s painting for a second before the film ends with a black screen.
The film – with all its colonial patterns – is a unique and rare source in many ways: it shows the socio-economic environment of prosperous Jewish refugees in India in the first year of Indian independence; a Jewish wedding conducted in India; historical close-ups of one of the most expensive houses in present-day Mumbai and the social milieu of the networks that co-created Bombay’s particular cosmopolitan environment in the 1940s and 1950s, which spawned various art history initiatives.