The Lady in Gold (39 page)

Hubertus was ardently in love with his famous young wife, the petite blonde
Baroness Valerie von Baratta-Dragona.
Every morning, the newlywed Hubertus sat over his strong Viennese coffee and wrote his sleeping bride a love letter. He left it on their dresser, skipped down the palace's dizzying spiral of stairs, and rode off on his bicycle to report for the muckraking weekly
Profil.

Aristocrats like Hubertus were not meant to be shoe-leather reporters. They were to be playboys, art collectors, at most diplomats. They were supposed to holiday in lederhosen in lakeside fairy-tale towns like Alt Aussee, where Hubertus's mother had a chalet.

Hubertus had spent his childhood in the
Vienna Boys Choir and attended the tony Theresianum academy, where he seemed indistinguishable from the well-born young men who flaunted titles that had been legally abolished after the empire ended in 1918.

But Hubertus had a restless curiosity.
In the early 1970s, he saw a television documentary that suggested Austria had played a more willing role in the
Holocaust than he had been led to believe. In fact, the largest cache of stolen art in Europe had been found in the caves outside Alt Aussee, where he summered.

He discovered the Theresianum had been one of the Third Reich's elite
academies, a school of hand-picked cadets recruited as child soldiers in the last days of the war. He heard there were photographs somewhere, of Nazi leaders like
Arthur Seyss-Inquart addressing the cadets. Hubertus suspected some of his teachers had been Nazis. He aimed his soft-spoken insolence at one old autocrat and was expelled.

Hubertus found a more appreciative audience in journalism. He was in the spotlight in 1985 for his biting coverage of the official welcoming reception for former SS major
Walter Reder, returning from forty years in jail in Italy for involvement in the wartime killing of 1,830 Italian villagers. Italy was appalled when the Austrian defense minister shook Reder's hand.

Czernin heard a rumor in 1986 that presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim had covered up his war record. Czernin's editor at
Profil
insisted he pursue it. Hubertus began to sort through Austria's yellowed archives, and found answers to questions alluded to, whispered about, but never fully addressed, even in his own family.

Here, in the fading files, was the story of Austria's complicity in the
Holocaust.

Waldheim had published an autobiography the year before, saying he had been drafted into the German army in 1941, wounded on the eastern front that December, and spent the rest of the war getting his law degree. He portrayed himself as an ardent opponent of National Socialism who had passed out anti-Nazi leaflets as a teenager.

In reality, Waldheim had joined the cavalry of the Sturmabteilung, or SA storm troopers, a week after the unit distinguished itself in the orgy of synagogue burning on
Kristallnacht. Waldheim spent his army years serving as a translator in the Balkans under
General Alexander Löhr, who oversaw deportations to places like the Jasenovac death camp, where
Erno Gutmann had been murdered.
His unit accompanied Nazi forces in Croatia, where Nazi puppet leader
Ante Pavelic awarded Waldheim a medal.

A secret 1948
War Crimes Commission file recommended Waldheim be prosecuted for war crimes: “murder and putting hostages to death.”

Hubertus's revelations dropped like a bomb. Waldheim denied “even his photos,” Hubertus would say. Then Waldheim admitted his participation in the war, but said he hadn't known about the murder of civilians. Then he said he was aware, but was never a participant, and was powerless to stop it. When Waldheim finally sputtered that “
I only did my duty,” he exposed Austria's terrible historical conundrum. If Austria was “the first
victim” of the Nazis, how could serving in an occupation army led by Hitler be construed as a patriotic obligation? Wouldn't it be considered collaboration? Or treason?

Austria elected Waldheim president anyway a few months later, in 1986. The United States put him on a list of suspected war criminals and denied him entry.

The proceedings were carefully watched by the U.S. ambassador to Austria,
Ronald Lauder. Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, was a collector of Austrian art. He was just fourteen when he was awed by the portrait of Adele at the Belvedere, and he never forgot it.

Lauder did not attend Waldheim's inauguration. Austria blamed him for the blackballing of Waldheim, and soon Lauder was packing his bags, after just eighteen months in Vienna.

Hubertus moved on to other issues of Nazi-era provenance. In January 1998, New York district attorney
Robert Morgenthau filed a subpoena for an
Egon Schiele painting,
Portrait of Wally,
and another Schiele painting,
Dead City,
that had once belonged to comedian
Fritz Grünbaum. They were on loan from Vienna's Leopold Museum and were hanging at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Heirs of the prewar owners believed the paintings had been stolen after the Nazi takeover.

The paintings became a spectacle.

Rudolph Leopold, who had acquired Schiele's
Portrait of Wally
from the Belvedere in 1954, said he had no idea the paintings might be Nazi loot. This was a key point in Europe, where purchasers could say they bought the painting “in good faith.” In the United States, it was not so simple. Buyers were under increasing pressure to prove they had diligently researched the paintings' wartime provenance. More and more, courts considered the paintings stolen property, and favored the true owners.

The fracas put the art world on notice. Culture Minister
Elisabeth Gehrer said the government would examine the provenance of art works in museums. Hubertus decided to take a look for himself.

In the snowy winter of 1998 Hubertus spent hours at the Café Braunerhof, a literati hangout a few steps from the fictional apartment of Harry Lime, the black marketeer in
The Third Man,
the Hollywood classic of postwar Vienna intrigue. Hubertus pored over documentation from archives that officials at first would only allow to be copied by hand.

Hubertus published his first article that February, and it was damning. Locked up in secret files was proof that Austria had knowingly stolen vast art collections from the Rothschilds, the Lederers, and other Jewish families.
One of the world's most recognizable paintings, the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, did not appear to have been “donated” at all. Apparently it had been stolen from her husband, a prominent industrialist—whose name Hubertus had never heard.

After the war, Austria had concealed the evidence and refused to return stolen art, Hubertus wrote—calling it the “
double crime.”

The revelations were devastating.
Herbert Haupt, an archivist at Vienna's Art History Museum, declared that Austrian museums had engaged in a “
veritable race for looted art.”

Investigative journalists found not only that there was more loot, but that Austrian museum officials were in a position to know exactly where to find the damning evidence.

“
Nobody wanted to open the box. But everyone knew where it was. People knew there was a scandalous past in it,” said journalist
Thomas Trenkler, who uncovered the sordid details of the theft of the Rothschild collection.

A new art restitution law was introduced to the Parliament. State-held art that had been obtained under duress or in exchange for export permits, or acquired in spite of the fact that it should have been restored to its rightful owners, was to be returned.

Now this Pandora's box would be pried open.

Maria was in her eighties. She and Fritz had reinvented their lives in America, raising four children in a modest West Side Los Angeles ranch house.

Groomed for idle luxury, Maria discovered she loved work.
Fritz never lost either his dream of singing opera or his roving eye. He resigned himself to being his brother Bernhard's West Coast distributor, donning his top hat to sing at social events. He and Maria led a contented, uneventful life that ended when he died in 1994, after a stroke and then a fall. Maria wanted to play her only high-quality recording of Fritz at the funeral, singing “The Lord's Prayer.” But the rabbi told her it was inappropriate for a Jewish service.

The great dramas of life seemed well behind her. A framed reproduction of Adele's portrait in her living room was a rare reminder of the stately, romantic Bloch-Bauers of Vienna.

In February 1998 she got a phone call from an old family friend in Vienna. An article had appeared in the newspaper suggesting that the Bloch-Bauer Klimt collection had been stolen by the Austrians. Of course, Maria thought. They had stolen everything else.

A few weeks later, Maria was called to her sister Luise's hospital bedside in Vancouver after Luise, ninety, suffered a fall. “
I'm going to die,” Luise had announced to her family, like an old warrior who knows she has seen her last battle. Maria told Luise that a journalist in Vienna had written a story suggesting that Ferdinand's art collection had been stolen, along with those of the Rothschilds and the Lederers. Should they try to get the Klimts back? Luise listened intently. “
That,” Luise replied thoughtfully, “would require an excellent lawyer.”

A month later Luise was dead.

Randol Schoenberg was on the Internet at work in September 1998 when the phone rang. It was Maria Altmann, the best friend of his late grandmother Zeisl. Maria was looking for his mother,
Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg.

At that moment, Randol was handling securities litigation at the Los Angeles office of a New York law firm,
Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson. He was thirty-one years old. His work was lucrative, secure.

“My mother's in Vienna,” he told Maria distractedly.

“
I wanted to talk to her about a new law they have in Austria, about
art stolen by the Nazis,” Maria said, in the melodic Viennese Randol grew up on. “You know, my uncle had a Klimt collection.”

At that moment, Randol was reading the new Austrian art restitution legislation on the Web. It would soon come before Austrian Parliament for approval.

Randol had strong ties to Vienna, Maria, and music. As a boy of eleven, he had stood before the gold portrait of Adele on his first trip to Vienna. “
Do you see this picture?” his mother had said. “This is Adele Bloch-Bauer, the aunt of your grandmother's friend, Maria.”

Randol's grandmother
Gertrude Zeisl was the wife of
Erich Zeisl, a promising young composer who had once played in a Vienna jazz band with
Fritz Altmann. Erich Zeisl was thirty-three when he fled Vienna during the
Anschluss, first to a spa town, Baden, where he correctly calculated that the Nazis would be less aggressive to avoid upsetting the tourists.
Then he and his wife escaped to Paris.
When the Nazis approached Paris, Erich Zeisl found a Zeisl in the New York City phone book, a plumber who agreed to sponsor the couple.
Zeisl's father and stepmother stayed and were deported to their deaths.

Randol's paternal grandfather,
Arnold Schoenberg, was the brilliant experimental Austrian composer who fled the
rise of Hitler and was on the
Reich's list of “degenerate artists.” Randol never forgot that he was alive because his grandparents had fled. He felt a keen identification with the extended family of Vienna, and the intertwined world to which he was a relation.

His grandfathers never adapted to exile.
Zeisl said two things he hated most were Hitler and the Los Angeles sun, which gave him a rash.
As a teacher, Schoenberg inspired avant-garde composer
John Cage, but he was turned down for a Guggenheim grant in 1945. He lived just three more years.

Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg, who fled the rise of Hitler and died in exile in Los Angeles, 2000. (
Illustration Credit 61.1
)

Randol looked uncannily like elder Schoenberg. Though he never knew his famous grandfather, he possessed his stubbornness and impatience. His privileged youth as a judge's son educated at the exclusive Harvard prep
school in Los Angeles bore little resemblance to the self-made journey of his composer grandfather, the son of a shoemaker. Yet Randol was driven by the same insatiable curiosity. At Princeton, Randol wrote his undergraduate thesis on mathematic combinatorial set theory, while completing a second concentration in European cultural history. He went on to the
University of Southern California law school.