The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  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.

  The Heirs of History

  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.

  Arnold Schoenberg in a quintet in Austria, 1900. The composer was also a painter. (Illustration Credit 61.2)

  Randol was a passionate advocate of Holocaust reparations. His grandfather Schoenberg had fled Berlin in 1933. In October 1938, Randol liked to remind people, the composer presciently warned of an approaching apocalypse. “Is there room in the world for almost 7,000,000 people?” Arnold Schoenberg wrote from Los Angeles. “Are they condemned to doom? Will they become extinct? Famished? Butchered?” As Randol pointed out, few had listened.

  Like Austria’s Children of Tantalus, Randol’s most potent inheritance was history. If Austrians saw their murky past in shades of gray, Randol, like most Americans, saw the Nazi era in black-and-white. He believed there were still battles left to fight. Restitution law was one of his passions. He found it outrageous that Austria had largely evaded the return of stolen Jewish property. Maria’s case had a strong narrative—a huge asset in the courtroom. It was also a narrative Randol believed in. He offered to take Maria’s case on a contingency basis.

  Randol’s boss agreed that the Bloch-Bauer Klimt affair was compelling. But even if you spend years and years getting a U.S. court to recognize the claim, he asked, who will force Austria to honor the judgment? U.S. marshals? Randol was determined. If he had to, he would pursue the case on his own. Thus began an unlikely pairing: Randol and Maria, the untried young attorney and the aging Vienna belle, versus Austria.

  The Library of Theft

  Hubertus Czernin now had his own book publishing company, Czernin Verlag, above the Braunerhof Café. As carriage horses trotted over the cobblestones between the Imperial Palace and the Spanish Riding School, Hubertus sat in the café, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an air of bohemian elegance, and plotting the books for his Library of Theft, a history of Nazi art theft in Vienna.

  Hubertus sat beneath the portrait of his literary hero, the Viennese playwright Thomas Bernhard, who had sipped coffee at the Braunerhof with Paul Wittgenstein, a nephew of the philosopher. Like Hubertus, Bernhard devoted his career to exposing Austria’s refusal to come to terms with its past. In his 1979 Eve of Retirement, Bernhard mocked a real-life Nazi judge who became a postwar politician. Bernhard’s fictionalized judge dons an SS uniform on Himmler’s birthday and has sex with his sister, declaring that “in a thousand years the Germans will hate the Jews, in a million years.” In The German Lunch Table, a modern-day elderly housewife returns from the market and complains to her husband that “no matter what kind of noodle package you choose, out crawl nothing but Nazis.” “Nazis in the soup,” she keeps saying. “Always Nazis instead of noodles.”

  Bernhard inspired great prestige abroad—and furious opposition at home. Asked to write a play for the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss in 1988, Bernhard initially refused, saying Austria should instead mount plaques reading “Judenfrei,” or “free of Jews,” on buildings stolen from Jews.

  Bernhard called the play he eventually agreed to write Heldenplatz, Heroes’ Square, after the plaza where Vienna welcomed Hitler. Word of the script leaked out. Former chancellor Bruno Kreisky called for the premiere to be canceled. President Kurt Waldheim—then the subject of a government investigation of whether he was a war criminal—said the play would be an insult to Austria. On November 4, 1988, as protesters milled outside, the play opened with a scene depicting the Schusters, a Jewish couple who returned to postwar Vienna. Frau Schuster is preparing for lunch in an apartment overlooking Heldenplatz. Her husband, an Oxford-trained mathematician, has persuaded her to move back to Austria. But she’s a nervous wreck. She keeps imagining she can still hear the crowds chanting “Sieg Heil!” to Hitler. Frau Schuster collapses, dead. Her husband then jumps from the window.

  The Burgtheater exploded with cheers, boos, catcalls, and chants of “Sieg Heil!” Bernhard had put the divided family of Austria onstage.

  Bernhard was ostracized as a Nestbeschmutzer, or “nest soiler,” someone who dared to dig up the dirt of the past. His fragile health collapsed. He died three months later in an assisted suicide, leaving a will that forbade the publication of his work in Austria. His martyrdom was not in vain. Like Freud and Klimt, Bernhard had publicly lifted the veil on the tortured Austrian psyche, inspiring other truth seekers to come forward—but serving as a cautionary tale of the potential cost.

  Like Bernhard, Hubertus got hate mail. But, with a happy marriage and three young daughters, Hubertus lacked Bernhard’s caustic anger, though he shared his fragile constitution. Hubertus had been diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis, a rare, dangerously unpredictable disease.

  Hubertus embraced his mission with mortal urgency. The Austrian files were a hidden trove of historical demons. It turned out that Vienna’s eye-catching icon, the Prater Ferris Wheel, had belonged to a Jewish man who died in Auschwitz. The last surviving child of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had died at Theresienstadt. Even old tax records narrated the final desperate minutes of a lost world.

  Perhaps stolen paintings weren’t the worst tragedy of World War II. But to Hubertus Czernin, the art was a publicly visible symbol of Austria’s failure to indemnify its murdered and wronged Jewish citizens. Lost lives could never be recovered. But paintings could be returned. Hubertus could do little about his compatriots’ lack of repentance. But he could combat the historical amnesia that fueled it.

  The Search for Provenance

  As he scoured Vienna’s dusty archives in search of the documents needed to prove the Bloch-Bauer case, Hubertus turned to Belvedere director Gerbert Frodl.

  Frodl had a provenance as complicated as any Austrian painting. He had been born in 1940 to Walter Frodl, a curator for Hitler’s final obsession, the Führermuseum in Linz. Belvedere staff claimed to have seen a wartime photograph of Walter Frodl raising his hand in the Nazi salute from the back of a truck loaded with Aryanized treasures stolen from the crates of fleeing A
ustrian Jews. In 1965, Walter Frodl became president of the Federal Monument Office. He was repeatedly accused of impeding attempts to recover art. But by the time he died in 1994, he had managed to sanitize his résumé of its Nazi past so well that reputable art historians co-authored books with him.

  What about the reports that his father looted art? Vienna journalist Barbara Petsch asked Gerbert Frodl. “I don’t believe he would do something dishonorable, certainly not something involved with art theft,” Frodl was quoted as replying.

  Curiously, Frodl had published a Belvedere book in 1995 that said the Belvedere acquired the gold portrait of Adele in 1936 and the second portrait of Adele in 1928—well before the Anschluss—“through a bequest from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.” It said the landscapes were acquired through separate “bequests.” These were strange inaccuracies, since Frodl presumably had access to all the original documentation. Frodl told a reporter that in the past, if a painting was listed as a “donation,” few questions were asked. “We knew a lot, but it wasn’t really conscious knowledge,” he said.

  The Bloch-Bauer donation, Frodl insisted, was based on Adele’s will. The museum was holding the paintings in accordance with Adele’s wishes.

  In Los Angeles, Randol was making overtures to Viennese officials, but he wasn’t getting far. Someone pointed Randol toward Hubertus Czernin.

  Hubertus was now seriously ill. Austria’s dashing investigative reporter couldn’t even struggle up the stone stairs of the Federal Monument Office to ask for archives. He worked with difficulty, in great pain.