The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  It was never Fritz.

  Unrequited Love

  Maria Bloch-Bauer was a sheltered young debutante the summer of 1937, when her mother, Therese, concerned she was falling for the wrong man, packed her off to the resort town of Bad Ischl in the Austrian Alps. Ischl was hardly painful exile. Cradled between snowcapped mountains and blue lakes dotted with castles, Ischl had been a haunt of the exuberant young Mozart. Now it was a favorite of Viennese high society. It was the summer home of Katharina Schratt, the mistress of the late emperor. It was a stone’s throw from Mozart’s birthplace, Salzburg, a grand musical city where Arturo Toscanini conducted like a man possessed. Ischl was tiny, but it had theater, cafés, pastry shops, and a promenade where young people strolled and socialized. In short, it was the perfect place to get Maria away from her ill-conceived longing for Fritz.

  Maria, twenty-one, was deeply lovesick. She had been mooning around the Bloch-Bauer apartment on Vienna’s Stubenbastei for weeks. Ordinarily, Maria was a merry young woman, with an impish smile and enormous upturned eyes that delighted her aging father, Gustav. But now Maria wore a perpetual look of melancholy as she crossed the Ringstrasse and wandered under the golden statue of the notoriously amorous Waltz King, Johann Strauss, watching young lovers stroll beneath the chestnut blossoms.

  Maria had no shortage of admirers. The problem was Maria’s stubborn admiration for a man whom her mother did not find suitable.

  Therese Bloch-Bauer was a stolidly conventional Vienna society matron. Her conservative inclinations had always contrasted with those of her unorthodox sister, Adele, God rest her soul. It was easy for Adele to smoke, tell people she was an atheist, and cultivate socialists. It was easy for Adele to spend inordinate amounts of time with Gustav Klimt, whose explicitly erotic drawings seemed to Therese a rather unfortunate use of his talents. And all his illegitimate children! But Adele, whatever her bohemian inclinations, had submitted to the first advantageous marriage that presented itself. Adele could do as she pleased.

  Maria was not a steely, strong-willed aesthete like her late aunt Adele. Maria was a dreamer who quoted the love poetry of Goethe but showed no serious interest in the presentable young men introduced to her. When Therese was young, her dance card was full, her suitors so attentive that they presented her with corsages that matched the color of her gowns. Maria didn’t even seem interested in this year’s formal dance season, though she had made a gorgeous impression at the Opera Ball, in her white satin dress.

  Now Maria was pining for Fritz Altmann. The only thing worse, to Therese, would be if Fritz actually decided to reciprocate Maria’s unschooled infatuation.

  Adele might not have set the best example for Maria’s chic older sister, Luise. Luise had greatly admired her aunt Adele, with her gold cigarette holder, her opinions, and her many interesting male friends. Luise had been sixteen when Adele died. Even at that age Luise was a cool customer, playing her admirers off against one another with the skill of a poker shark, and holding her own with her older brothers’ sophisticated crowd of actors and singers. Therese had guided Luise to the altar at nineteen, three years after Adele’s death, with an excellent match to Viktor Gutmann, a Jewish baron whose family had been ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph.

  Never mind that in her official wedding photo, Luise posed like a 1930s movie siren, staring into the camera under heavily lidded eyes so seductively people would later wonder whether she had made it to the altar a maiden. Now Luise was the Baroness Gutmann et Gelse.

  Therese’s son Leopold had married equally well. His wife, the former Antoinette Pick, was the daughter of Otto Pick, a prominent art collector and industrialist; she was also the niece of a distinguished physician who knew Sigmund Freud personally.

  In Maria’s eyes, it was the social origins of the Altmann family that were most to blame for Therese’s lack of enthusiasm for Fritz. The Altmanns were Ostjuden from Galicia, Poland’s poorest region. They were members of the Eastern Jewish immigrant wave that had flooded into Vienna, bringing poverty and Orthodox customs that were out of step with wealthy, assimilated Bavarians like the Bloch-Bauers. The Ostjuden had borne the brunt of the cruel pogroms that swept through Russia and Poland, and many had arrived with little more than the clothes they wore.

  Fritz had grown up in the former Jewish ghetto of Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s “Matzoh Island.” His mother, Karoline, started the family textile business and insisted on running it herself for years, working such long hours that Fritz joked he had been born under a knitting machine. His father, Karl Chaskel Altmann, was a devoutly religious Galician who spoke Yiddish, spent hours studying the Talmud, and went to synagogue daily in an eastern caftan. The Bloch-Bauers had not converted to Catholicism, but they celebrated Christmas and Easter. Aside from weddings and funerals, the Bloch-Bauers attended the elegant Stadt Temple only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, sitting alongside the Rothschilds in smoking jackets and top hats.

  If Fritz was a playboy, he owed this entitlement to his brother, Bernhard. A casual passerby would never have taken Fritz and Bernhard for brothers if they saw them strolling under the arches of the Imperial Hofburg in front of the Spanish Riding School, where the white Lipizzaner stallions pranced to waltz music.

  Bernhard, twenty years older than Fritz, toiled like the devil in the family knitting business. Bernhard lived like a devil, too, keeping his Jewish family in a villa in the fashionable suburb of Hietzing and a Catholic mistress with three children across town. As everyone knew but his wife.

  Fritz had little real understanding of the prejudice his family had fled in Galicia. But as a child in Poland, Bernhard had experienced the raw anti-Semitism that turned ignorant mobs against Jewish families. Bernhard was less complaisant, and far less trusting, than his assimilated Vienna Jewish friends. At fifty, Bernhard was a hard-knuckled, self-made businessman with an intimidating stare. Bernhard had many friends in Vienna—and many enemies.

  Therese raised her eyebrows at the mere mention of Bernhard’s name.

  But her husband, Gustav, admired and respected him. The steely-eyed Bernhard had turned his mother’s cottage industry into an international wool manufacturer, with plants from the Soviet Union to England. By some accounts, he was the largest knitwear producer in Austria. Gustav told Maria that Bernhard was like the folk hero Rumpelstiltskin—he could spin straw into gold. Bernhard had acquired cultural inclinations along the way. He was helping to finance restoration of the Roman ruins of Tiberius’s old winter camp at Carnuntum, not far from Ferdinand’s sugar factory. He had amassed an art collection of more than a hundred artworks, by Degas and Canaletto. He even had a small Klimt—not one of the grand paintings of society women, but an unknown young woman with plaintive eyes.

  Maria was in no rush to be steered into a marriage arranged by her mother. After all, Hedy Kiesler, the Jewish protégée of theater impresario Max Reinhardt, had caused such a stir at the Opera Ball in her sapphire-blue sequined dress, and made a supposedly brilliant match with Friedrich Mandl, the arms dealer. But Mandl turned out to be a cruel tyrant. He locked Hedy in his castle and obsessively tried to buy every copy of a titillating Czech film, Ecstasy, in which Hedy swam naked and gave herself to a muscular Adonis in the woods. Mandl forced Hedy to socialize with Mussolini and Hitler.

  At the end of the summer she would disguise herself as a servant to flee her husband, then make her way to Hollywood to star in a thriller, Algiers, as Hedy Lamarr.

  Maria would wait. Maria would marry for love.

  Marie Viktoria

  Maria was born Marie Viktoria Bloch-Bauer on February 18, 1916. Her middle name represented her parents’ hopes that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would survive World War I. The family followed the news of every battle, hoping for the triumph of the Habsburgs, who had ushered in an era of tolerance for the Jews. Their dreams would be dashed. The Habsburgs lost. Overnight, it seemed, Austria went from a great nation to a defeated backwater. The royalty was finished. The immense Austro-Hungarian
Empire was now the small Österreich, or Eastern Reich.

  Therese, forty-two, initially misinterpreted her last pregnancy as “the change of life.” Therese thought she was done with the endless needs of small children. She had raised three sons to adolescence and had an adorable eight-year-old daughter, Luise, who was vivacious and quick-witted. Therese enjoyed having Gustav to herself. She was a fixture of Vienna society, a regular at the ladies’ teas and lunches Adele had disdained.

  Therese never developed a taste for the new art. She and Gustav collected “fantasy watches,” tiny monuments to the ability to know the precise hour, created when many Austrians still relied on church clocks and sundials. Vienna was in thrall to this “scientific jewelry,” pocket watches that dated back to the 1400s, coinciding with the revolutionary appearance of a mass-produced Gutenberg Bible. Each was as intricate as a Fabergé egg. A one-inch tulip watch created by Jean Rousseau in 1625 celebrated the arrival of the first tulip from Constantinople to Vienna, setting off Europe’s tulip mania. There was a little telescope, jewel-encrusted lutes, a tiny gold gun. Art historians were particularly taken by a white enamel skull with glittering diamond eyes and gold teeth, made in the 1600s by a Prague goldsmith. Its cranium opened to reveal a watch that seemed to tick out the precious moments of life itself, before Death reclaimed its mortal bearer.

  Society columns extolled Therese and Gustav’s watch collection. The Viennese had “a craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration,” and many parlors “were not living rooms, but pawnshops and curiosity shops,” observed the cultural critic Egon Friedell. When a museum director hustled over to Stubenbastei to write a monograph about the Bloch-Bauer watches, Therese was thrilled.

  To Therese, a new baby meant the end of idyllic collecting trips with Gustav to Venice and Trieste. To Gustav, his unexpected daughter was an unadulterated delight. From the time she was a tiny girl, his “Mariechen” adopted her father’s conspiratorial smile. Gustav loved to bundle Maria up in her fluffy white winter coat and hussar hat and parade her down the Stubenbastei.

  When Maria was not with her father, she was often handed off to her nanny, Fräulein Emma Raschke, a petite blonde Lutheran from a poor Germanic region of Poland. Next to her father, Fräulein Emma was the person Maria most adored. It was Fräulein Emma who dressed Maria in her embroidered flannel nightgown and tucked her into bed. Fräulein Emma told Maria bedtime stories, introducing her to the lurid world of the Brothers Grimm. There was “Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Pied Piper,” whose magic flute led the children away when city fathers refused to pay him for driving out the rats. The fairy tales were collections of the myths, folklore, and magical tales the Brothers Grimm had collected all over Middle and Eastern Europe. In the early 1800s, during his quest for stories, Jacob Grimm had lived a short walk from the Bloch-Bauer apartment on Stubenbastei. Therese viewed their stories as backward peasant tales: tasteless. Maria craved their frightening thrill. At night, when Fräulein Emma tucked her in, it was easy to persuade her to tell just one more. All right, Emma would tell Maria, I’ll tell you the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” Maria nestled under her blankets delightedly.

  Little Maria at her family’s Alpine vacation chalet at Ischl, ca. 1924. Maria loved animals, and cried when she read the children’s classic Bambi. (Illustration Credit 22.1)

  This was her favorite.

  “There once was a mother goat who had seven little kids,” Emma told Maria. “One day, as the mother goat went into the forest to find food, she told the little goats, ‘You must not open the door, because the Big Bad Wolf is out there, and he will devour you.’ Soon the little goats heard a gruff voice, saying, ‘Children, open the door and I will feed you.’ They could tell it was the wolf. So the wolf ate chalk to soften his voice, but the little goats saw his black feet under the door. The wolf asked the miller to spread flour on his feet. The miller knew what the wolf was up to, and refused. But the wolf threatened to eat the miller, so he did as he was told,” Fräulein Emma told Maria.

  “Deceived, the little goats opened the door, and it was the wolf. The little goats ran and hid, but the wolf found them and ate them up. When the mother came home, she called for her children. Finally, the youngest kid jumped out from the clock case and led the mother to the wolf.

  Maria and Luise Bloch-Bauer summer at the Czech castle of their uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who was still mourning his late wife, Adele, ca. 1925. (Illustration Credit 22.2)

  “The mother goat found the wolf sleeping. She cut open the wolf’s belly, and her kids jumped out, unhurt. The goats found some river stones, stuffed them in the wolf’s belly, and sewed him up. The wolf woke up, leaned over the well for a drink, and fell in and drowned.” Maria would drift off to sleep, imagining herself as the little goat who rescues her family.

  Years later, Bruno Bettelheim, then a Vienna student, would write his classic book, The Uses of Enchantment, about how fairy tales help children cope with their fears. Freud believed fairy tales were a window into the unconscious. He thought that “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids” had inspired a patient’s dream in which the wolf represented the patient’s anxiety over his father.

  But when Maria blithely repeated this story, Therese raised her eyebrows at Fräulein Emma. Did Maria really need to hear these Greuelmärchen, gory fairy tales? Couldn’t Fräulein Emma read her the new children’s book by Felix Salten, Bambi?

  “Finally, he’s written something we can all read,” Therese added archly, in a disapproving allusion to the scandalously explicit best seller Salten had reportedly authored anonymously in 1906, with the indelicate title Josephine Mutzenbacher: A Viennese Whore’s Life Story, as Told by Herself.

  In the eyes of her indulgent father, Maria could do no wrong. When she began school, she confessed she had been reprimanded for giggling or whispering in class. “The old swine do you injustice again!” Gustav would thunder, with mock outrage. One day Maria came home and innocently repeated a new word some older schoolboys taught her. It was the name of a popular condom brand. Her father burst out laughing.

  Therese was horrified. She enrolled Maria at the Schwarzwaldschule, or Black Forest School, founded by Adele’s socialist friends, a private girls’ school so highbrow that Schoenberg and Kokoschka had taught there.

  Maria and Luise

  If Ferdinand and Adele had raised girls, they might have encouraged them to take up a career.

  Adele’s best friends were career women in an age when women did not take up professions. Berta Zuckerkandl was now a prominent journalist and cultural critic. Dr. Gertrud Bien was a respected physician.

  Therese, however, brought up her girls in a sheltered manner, designed to lead to marriage within their cultured circle. Their aunt Adele had spent her life trying to be remarkable. Maria and Luise were encouraged to be ordinary, unusual only within their carefully circumscribed conventions.

  Maria was a child of eight when her glamorous older sister turned sixteen. Luise was an unusually poised teenager, with a willowy figure and a biting wit. An insomniac, Luise stayed up into the wee hours and woke Maria to tell her thrilling details of the love affairs of actors and aristocrats. Maria was in awe of stylish Luise, whose first evening gowns were made by the fashion house of Klimt’s old companion, Emilie Flöge. Luise was mature enough to disarm guests with her bons mots at the salons of her aunt Adele and uncle Ferdinand.

  Maria was too shy to do much more than stand by the curtains watching Adele hold forth in a long gown, her cigarette holder draped from her long, elegant fingers.

  At Ferdinand’s Brezany Castle, outside of Prague, Maria was the youngest guest. She would wander through the drafty rooms filled with Baroque antiques of dark woods, heavily carved with swans and lions, and the formal and uncomfortable furniture of the Biedermeier period. Meals were served at precise hours, and servants helped everyone dress for dinner. Luise and her brothers went off to h
unt with Ferdinand. Maria loved Bambi, and she had cried when she read the passage where the fawn’s mother was shot by hunters. When she saw the group return jubilantly one day with a dead stag, targeted for his magnificent rack of antlers, Maria burst into tears.

  Ferdinand’s gardens were a well-tended park, with statues and topiaries. The girls begged Ferdinand to dig a pool at Brezany, but it was futile. It didn’t appeal to his classical tastes, and Ferdinand had no interest in donning a swimming costume.

  Though the girls were discouraged from any real vocation, they were expected to be conversant in the world of culture. Luise read widely, devouring Goethe and Schiller. She had a genius for languages, and dreamed of writing plays. She was studying to be a teacher, but Therese viewed finding a good husband to be Luise’s primary vocation.

  This posed little challenge. By eighteen, Luise was a scene stealer. She spun around the dance floor at Vienna balls, dressed with style and ease, and was a skillful flirt. By day, she flitted around the house, singing her favorite opera, Die Fledermaus: “Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.” By night, Luise accompanied lonely “Uncle Ferry” to the theater or opera, and the socially prominent widower loved to make an entrance with his stunning niece on his arm.

  Therese was the anchor of Bloch-Bauer gatherings, invitations to which were coveted in Vienna. Unlike Adele’s, these gatherings were designed less for the exchange of ideas than for the family’s social advancement.

  Guests ate at a long, deeply carved formal dining table. A Dutch tapestry covered one wall, and guests dined under the gaze of the tapestry harlequin, who watched with vicarious pleasure as a busty maiden tried to squirm out of the embrace of a rogue nobleman. Some of Adele’s old friends still came to dine, like Alma Mahler and Amalie Zuckerkandl, whose father, Sigmund Schlesinger, had written an unfinished play with Mark Twain. At one Bloch-Bauer lunch, Luise caught the eye of a handsome blond aristocrat and moved her seating card next to his. Therese had other plans. She seated the blond next to Luise’s best friend, Renee Rein, a socially connected young woman who was a confidante of the aging Katharina Schratt. Therese put Luise’s card back in its place, next to that of one of Vienna’s most eligible bachelors: Baron Viktor Gutmann, heir to a vast timber operation in Yugoslavia. The Gutmann barons were philanthropic: one had paid for the studies of the Hungarian carpenter’s son who fathered Vienna playwright Arthur Schnitzler.