The Lady in Gold (37 page)

Luise listened carefully to the account of this penniless dishwashing prince. She got Johannes a job driving a sawdust truck for the family timber company, and invited him to dinner.

Nelly came in from Seattle, flushed with the excitement of medical school. Her mother's dinner guest kissed her hand with formal flourish. He was absurdly handsome, and immediately smitten with shy Nelly.

Before Nelly married Johannes, she confessed to a priest that after her father died, she had decided there was no God. How could the horror she had lived be part of a divine plan? “I don't believe in God,” she said. “What can I do?” Never mind, the priest said thoughtfully. “There must be a God. You'll make a good wife.” So Nelly, persecuted as a Jew and reinvented as a Catholic, became a princess of one of the oldest dynasties in Europe.

Maria had followed the Altmann clan to Los Angeles. She and Fritz had three boys and a girl. She sold some of Bernhard's knitwear to a few
stores and discovered that she loved to work. She opened a dress shop on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. Fritz became the West Coast salesman for Bernhard, and sang opera with his old friend, the composer
Erich Zeisl. They joined the vast Los Angeles community of exiles from fascism:
Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alma Mahler,
Arnold Schoenberg.
Michael Curtiz was there, and
Billy Wilder, whose parents had died in Auschwitz.

A depot of stolen art at Ellingen in Germany, ca.
1945
. Allied forces sorted through millions of stolen artworks and returned many to their governments of origin—which often did not get them to their rightful owners. (
Illustration Credit 57.3
)

The only Bloch-Bauer work left in Vienna was the portrait of Adele, in the Belvedere Palace, the museum with the colorful history, bomb-scarred roof, and clandestine bunker.

As Austria emerged from the war, Americans trucked Europe's orphan paintings from salt mines, castles, and convents in Austria and Germany. In many cases, the owners of the art could not pull their own paintings out of the stacks of assembled artworks. Often, the Allies turned the art over to their governments. In Austria, this practice left Jewish survivors at the mercy of government officials who had collaborated with the Reich.

The art historians who meticulously catalogued the art to be stolen after the
Anschluss gave few clues about the fate of lost and missing works.
Austrian officials remained silent about a huge cache of stolen art at the fourteenth-century former monastery at Mauerbach, outside Vienna. The art historians who could have provided answers remained silent, taking pains to cover their pasts.

Bruno Grimschitz, the dapper Nazi bureaucrat who ran the Belvedere under Hitler, wrote an elaborate history of the museum just after the war. But he ended it in the 1800s, revealing how the Viennese obsession with its glorious past could be used as a psychological refuge from the ugly history so close at hand.

Grimschitz concealed his role in the possession of the gold portrait of Adele as carefully as Belvedere directors sealed their Nazi bunker. When
Erich Führer was arrested by French military police in western Austria in May 1945, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's Klimt painting
Houses in Unterach on Lake Attersee
was hanging on his wall. Führer had kept it for himself.

Führer was sentenced to three years of hard labor, though he managed to serve only two. He held on to Adele's books, insisting they were a “gift” from Ferdinand, and they trickled into the black market. Years later, a fine green leather
Wiener Werkstatte art book, designed by
Josef Hoffmann, turned up for sale bearing the ex libris of SS captain Erich Führer, “
who liquidated the assets of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, including the painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt,” the bookseller noted.

Adele had been an icon of sophisticated, cosmopolitan turn-of-the-century Vienna, of the illustrious doomed empire, and of the duplicity and lies behind Nazi theories of racial superiority.

Now she began to acquire a new symbolism: of Austria's postwar refusal to make amends for its eager
collaboration with Adolf Hitler.

It was difficult for the Bloch-Bauers to recover the remnants of their lives after the war.

Repentance was scarce. Austria was awash in self-pity. Vienna was a ruin. Allied bombings had reduced centuries of architecture to rubble. The city was divided into four zones controlled by the French, British, American, and Soviet armies. Amputees limped through the streets.
A hundred thousand women in Vienna hid the trauma of rape. People sold valuables, or their bodies, to buy food.

More than 65,000 Austrian Jews had been murdered.
An estimated 5,500 had survived in Austria. Exiles faced a thicket of unwelcoming laws. Some 130,000 Austrian Jews had fled, and many of the survivors had emigrated. They were required to give up their foreign citizenship if they wanted to recover their Austrian nationality, a slow process that could take years. For some forms of compensation, citizenship or residency was required.

The 1946 Annulment Act declared Nazi-era legal transactions “null and void,” but in practice, it was very difficult to get back occupied family homes and apartments that had been “Aryanized” during the war. Families that tried to reclaim art collections were told the most valuable pieces were “patrimony,” and were asked to “donate” the works in exchange for exit permits to take lesser artworks out of the country.

Jewish survivors who returned in this bleak postwar period were tired and saddened. Friends and family had been murdered; strangers were living in their houses, using their silverware, selling their heirlooms on the black market. Austrian officials were often very unwelcoming.

Few Jews came home.

Austrians held on to their valuable art. Cultural institutions were led by veterans of the Nazi era. Officials who had played roles in the art theft during the war were now in the position to deny exiles their paintings, or the permits to take them to their new homes abroad.

At the concentration camp where Fritz was imprisoned, American soldiers had forced the well-dressed elite of the town of Dachau, holding handkerchiefs over their noses, to walk through the fetid barracks and look
at the smoking crematoriums they had lived alongside for years. But that was Germany.

The Belvedere Palace, ravaged by Allied bombings, December
1944
. Many of the roof statues were lost in the bombardment, so orphaned statues were salvaged from damaged buildings and reassembled on the Belvedere parapet after the war. (
Illustration Credit 59.1
)

Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration.

The
Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria.
A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany, like France or Poland. Thus was born the fictional alibi of Austria as the “first victim” of the Nazis. It was obvious Austrians themselves didn't truly believe this. Austrian men who had deserted the German army to join the Allies were not embraced as returning heroes who fought the Nazi “occupation”; instead, they were scorned as traitors. Austrians stubbornly remained in houses stolen from Jews, clinging to their furniture, books, and paintings.
Of some thirty-five thousand Jewish businesses, only a few thousand would ever be returned to their owners.

Nazi officials burned records and changed birth dates, even last names. A cloud of secrecy settled over Vienna, the city on the Danube once known for its love of beauty and pleasure. Austrians learned not to ask too many questions.

In this morally contaminated milieu, Austrian museum officials warily greeted U.S. Army
major George Bryant, a friend of the Bloch-Bauer family who had walked into the Albertina Museum. Bryant needed an export permit for 175 Klimt drawings, many of Adele, and agreed to “donate” some of the drawings to the Albertina in exchange for exit papers for the rest. Otto Benesch, the director of the Albertina, slowly leafed through the elegant drawings, choosing sixteen of the finest. A young art historian with him,
Alice Strobl, was aghast. “
Why didn't you keep all of them?” she asked. It didn't occur to her that extorting “donations” from Jewish survivors was as morally corrupt as any Nazi-era robbery.

The postwar theft had begun.

Maria's brother Robert had contacted her old admirer,
Gustav Rinesch. Rinesch was happily married to a woman from the Russian zone of partitioned Vienna whose former husband had vented his fury at Hitler's defeat by beating her. Rinesch was the first man who gave her food without trying to sleep with her.

Rinesch had begun making inquiries to culture officials in Vienna on behalf of the Bloch-Bauers about the property they left behind. The new postwar director of the
Austrian Gallery,
Karl Garzarolli, was apprehen-sive about the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. Garzarolli had reviewed the paperwork, and he realized there was trouble. The terms of Adele's bequest had been violated. The horse-trading by the Nazi lawyer
Erich Führer was a mess. Ferdinand had donated Klimt's
Schloss Kammer am Attersee
to the Austrian Gallery in 1936, but the Belvedere had traded it away to
Gustav Ucicky, as part of the complicated deal with Führer for the acquisition of the gold portrait of Adele. The will didn't allow paintings to be sold off. No one had tried to get Ferdinand to sign over the paintings. Now he was dead.

“
In the documents in the possession of the Austrian Gallery, no mention is made of these facts,” Garzarolli wrote his predecessor, Grimschitz, on March 8, 1948.

At no time did Garzarolli or any other Austrian officials suggest that conscience compelled them to consider giving back the Klimts. The paintings had been seized in furtherance of a great crime; returning them might have been a small act of atonement.

Instead, on April 2, 1948, Garzarolli wrote
Otto Demus at the Federal Monument Office and instructed him to “
delay for tactical reasons” Rinesch's requests for restitution to the Bloch-Bauers. He alerted the Austrian state attorney's office to prepare for a possible lawsuit.

Feeling far from confident, Austrian Gallery officials told Rinesch that Adele's 1923 will gave the gallery title to the Klimts. Rinesch tried to be pragmatic. The Austrians seemed willing to give up some less valuable paintings, along with a quarter of the antiques that had been extorted from the family—along with a hefty “exit tax”—in exchange for allowing Therese to leave Nazi Vienna. But first the Bloch-Bauers had to renounce any claim to Ferdinand and Adele's Klimts.

Rinesch thought the Bloch-Bauers should take what was being offered. He made a list of the paintings in Ferdinand's collection, and requested permits to take other works out of Austria, so long as the family relinquished claims to the Klimts. “I rely on your sense of justice,” Rinesch wrote Austrian officials.