The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  On the cold morning of January 28, 1939, an eminent group of Austrian art curators gathered at Ferdinand’s elegant Elisabethstrasse palace to divide up Ferdinand and Adele’s art.

  Like many Aryanizations, this one had a flimsy legal pretext: a trumped-up tax charge against Ferdinand’s sugar factory. But it hardly mattered. The Bloch-Bauers were now exiles. They were free to scatter Ferdinand’s collection like a smashed piñata.

  It might appear unseemly for academic art lovers to lend their expertise to the bizarre mix of “law,” eugenics, and thievery called “Aryanization.” Yet these learned men eagerly fought for the chance to come to Elisabethstrasse to choose art for Hitler’s monument to Germanic culture, the “Führermuseum” in Linz, Austria, that would be the jewel in the crown of the thousand-year Reich. Art was not just an interest for Hitler, it was an obsession, and these men wished to ingratiate themselves with his new regime.

  Art curators had always had a symbiotic relationship with monied elites. The new elites just happened to be Nazis. These men didn’t think of themselves as thieves. They thought of themselves as a distinguished gathering, though their discriminating aesthetic sensibilities would be used to bolster Nazi conceits.

  They were men with precisely the kind of imperious self-regard that Klimt had detested. Not only were they accommodating Hitler, they were endorsing the Führer’s rejection of the world’s brilliant modern art—a betrayal of their profession. Worse, some of the treasures they pulled out of Viennese collections would be sold for a more nefarious aim: to finance Hitler’s assault on Europe.

  Since the day of the Anschluss, the confiscation of Vienna’s vast Jewish art collections had become an irresistible opportunity for career advancement and financial gain.

  “Thousands of Jews were fleeing the city voluntarily or by force,” wrote a young art historian, Walter Frodl, who had joined the Nazi Party as a student in 1933. “Before finishing the necessary paperwork they had to apply for an export permit for their artworks. The few functionaries at the office had to work day and night.” Frodl “spent weeks that summer and fall in Vienna, driving through the boroughs by cab. I found this whole job rather disgusting. It was not just about visiting big houses and collections, but every apartment had to be inspected, even if the ‘artwork’ was just a cheap carpet, a piece of embroidery or a photograph of the grandparents.”

  Now a meticulous team of art appraisers would sift through the collections of Ferdinand and Adele. The man sent to evaluate Ferdinand’s porcelain was one of his old “friends,” Richard Ernst, who had helped persuade Ferdinand to pay the bills for the Kokoschka exhibition in 1937.

  Ernst had insinuated himself into the Elisabethstrasse mansion in 1925 to write an admiring illustrated monograph about Ferdinand’s porcelain. Now he could get his hands on the porcelain itself.

  Leopold Rupprecht represented the Vienna Art History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches, at the meeting, though he would soon start working for Hitler’s Führermuseum. The federal monument office, which oversaw art confiscations, sent Josef Zykan and Waltraud Oberwalder, who would list works they coveted as Austrian “patrimony,” to be banned for export so their owners could not take them out of the country.

  Vienna art institutions had turned out to be more corrupt than Klimt had ever imagined.

  The dream of a new Austrian Gallery at the Belvedere was extinguished.

  Adele’s old friend, Belvedere director Franz Martin Haberditzl, was tainted by his association with “degenerate artists” and his Jewish ties. His wife’s Jewish heritage meant his daughter was also in danger. Haberditzl was abruptly dismissed and banned from contact with museum staff. His Jewish deputy, Heinrich Schwarz, “relieved of his duties for racial reasons,” fled the country.

  In this fearful climate, Haberditzl’s second deputy, Bruno Grimschitz, won a promotion to a post he might never have attained on merit. Grimschitz, who now flaunted the fact that he had been a Nazi Party member even when it was illegal, was named the new director of the Austrian Gallery.

  Grimschitz stood in the Belvedere gardens wearing a black suit with a bow tie, a white pocket handkerchief, and a very pleased smile. He closed the Moderne Galerie, which had been re-created by Haberditzl and his visionary patrons. Later, he would claim he had wanted to protect the art from being seized as degenerate and auctioned off. For now, Grimschitz would display art that was in keeping with Hitler’s definition of Germanic völkisch identity.

  The Austrian Gallery’s new mission was quite different from the original one.

  Kajetan Mühlmann, a Nazi aesthete who inspected Aryanized property to “collect” art for Hitler, had been given an apartment at the Belvedere. “He has no conscience; he does not care about art, he is a liar and a vile person,” an Allied interrogator would one day say of Mühlmann.

  For now, one of his first tasks was to pick through Bernhard Altmann’s art collection, more than a hundred works by Klimt, Degas, Canaletto, and Waldmüller that had been turned over by Maria’s minder, Felix Landau.

  The fact that Jews were publicly deemed antithetical to the new Germanic cultural identity undermined any personal qualms about stealing their art. Museum officials came back to Ferdinand’s palais on February 22, and the Gestapo’s Herr Maloch stood by as officials began what Karl Wagner, the director of the Stadtische Sammlungen, called a “negotiation between agencies.”

  Museum officials tried to identify paintings that they could use to jockey for position with Hitler. As the men walked through Ferdinand’s drafty mansion, they spotted paintings that would be perfect for the “Führer’s reserve,” or Führervorbehalt: Hitler’s personal art stash—a collection of all the beautiful things Hitler coveted but had been denied as a poor artist in Vienna.

  Hitler’s conservative taste in art was well-known. Two Rudolf von Alt paintings were selected from Ferdinand’s collection for Hitler’s ongoing “Alt Aktion”—a Nazi grab of von Alt’s work. Next came Ferdinand’s dynastic Waldmüller of Count Esterhazy as a boy. Rodin’s bronze Allegory of Liberty was picked for the Führermuseum. A tapestry was chosen, and two more Waldmüllers.

  Elisabethstrasse was a gold mine.

  Some of the best paintings in Ferdinand’s collection would be given away to cement relationships. Hermann Göring, whose wife supposedly wore Adele’s diamond necklace, would be flattered with four Bloch-Bauer Waldmüllers for Christmas: Children with a Vat of Grapes, Young Girl with a Dog, Old Woman with Children, and After the Fire.

  Ferdinand’s porcelain would be passed out to museums like party favors, and the remaining pieces would go to public auction.

  The men mostly ignored the Klimts. They eyed Klimt’s 1903 Birch Trees indifferently. They barely glanced at the portrait of the older Adele with stained teeth, and didn’t even jump at the golden portrait of Adele.

  The Führer wanted paintings that celebrated German values, not portraits of decadent Jewish society women—who were now officially referred to by the ugly term Judensau, or Jewish sow.

  Klimt was not even on the list of artists whose work was too important to leave the country. Excited by their loot, the curators left the mansion without the Bloch-Bauer Klimt collection.

  Hitler, once excluded from the Vienna art world, now controlled it absolutely, and everyone felt his influence, from dispossessed collectors to the most prominent Vienna artists. As Vienna’s Jewish collections were plundered, plans were made to dispose of the degenerate art seized from museums with a public auction.

  Oskar Kokoschka had four hundred of his works confiscated. From exile in England, he railed to Alma Mahler about Hitler, “momentarily Lord of the World, who has begun, out of resentment, to hunt artists, because he himself failed to make it.”

  Carl Moll, Alma Mahler’s stepfather, the Secessionist painter whom Kokoschka had once called “my best friend in Austria,” now embraced Nazism. He chastised Kokoschka for his intransigence. “I would like to do something to help you, but your politics make it impossibl
e,” Moll wrote from Vienna. “America is the only place for you now.

  “There are 75 million people,” Moll wrote, referring to the population of the Third Reich, “and the fact that some people get trampled, what does it mean? Has this not always happened?”

  And by the way, Moll added, “Uncle Ferdinand has left Vienna without saying goodbye.”

  The Last of the Bloch-Bauers

  In August 1939, Hitler was massing troops on the Polish border.

  Thea’s mother, Ada, had put the Dutch flag of her gay husband on her door. He and his boyfriend had smuggled out as much of her money and jewelry as they could. Now Ada was nervously awaiting her exit papers, as people like her were being arrested all over Vienna.

  She couldn’t take money or jewelry, so she went on a frenzied clothes-shopping spree, buying up silk dresses, fine lingerie, smart new shoes. The more nervous she became, the more she shopped. In the midst of it, she got an urgent call from Holland: Don’t wait any longer, her husband said. Meet me at the Swiss border. War is imminent, and you will be trapped.

  Ada and Gustav Rinesch rented two Packard sedans for Ada’s trunks of clothes. They stopped in the Alps, at Alt Aussee, to see Ada’s mentally handicapped daughter, Susi. Ada gave money to the farmer who cared for Susi and promised to send more, though soon the farmer would write to tell her there was no need. Doctors had “euthanized” Susi, a “useless feeder,” in the Nazi program of “mercy killings” of disabled children.

  They reached the Swiss border at midnight. Ada’s faithful Dutch husband stood there in the rain. German border guards pulled open Ada’s trunks. They threw her silk dresses and lingerie on the ground and walked on them with muddy boots. Ada sat on a trunk and sobbed. The German guards laughed. They let Ada cross.

  Hitler declared war on Poland the next day.

  Rinesch had packed off the last straggler of the Bloch-Bauers, the glamorous family he had once hoped to marry into. “So the whole Bloch-Bauer family—respected old Austrian and Viennese citizens, connoisseurs and art collectors—had been turned into ‘Jewish swine,’ and kicked out of the German Reich,” Rinesch wrote. “People hated them because they were educated, rich, and supported culture, art, history and science,” Rinesch wrote. “The lovely Bloch-Bauers, whose destinies, tragedies and travails touched me and moved me, and could fill several romance novels.”

  With that, Rinesch reported to the German army. He was assigned to be a translator at Stalag 17, the notorious prison camp that would be immortalized in a Hollywood film by Billy Wilder.

  Homecoming

  Gustav Ucicky was a prominent Nazi propaganda filmmaker, who dined out on his status as an illegitimate son of Gustav Klimt. Now he was scouring Vienna for paintings by his father that were being stolen from Viennese Jews.

  Ucicky bought the ethereal portrait of Anton Felsovanyi’s beautiful mother. Gertrud had left it with a baroness friend when she fled. The baroness was now the mistress of an SS leader and Gertrud Felsovanyi’s art and jewelry was trickling into the black market. Ucicky bought the sensual, undulating women of Water Snakes, stolen from Jenny Steiner, a sister of Serena Lederer who had fled Vienna.

  Not all Klimt’s children could afford art. The Gustav born to Mizzi Zimmermann was a World War I veteran who now enlisted in the German army for a second round as cannon fodder. Mizzi sold all her Klimt drawings to support her son, whom she was unable to launch out of working-class obscurity.

  But Ucicky was an established film director. He had money and access. He was obsessed with the art of a father he had seldom seen. He was vain about his looks. He dressed theatrically in black, letting tendrils of his wavy hair fall over his large, wide-set eyes. He was friendly, curious, intelligent, and deeply insecure about his childhood of squalor with his mother, Maria Ucicka, a poor Czech laundress.

  Ucicky might have followed the path of his Viennese colleague Billy Wilder and become a world-class director. He began brilliantly enough. At seventeen, in 1916, Ucicky wandered into Vienna’s first major film studio, Sascha Films, owned by the notoriously corpulent Count Alexander Joseph “Sascha” Kolowrat-Krakowsky. Ucicky was hired as a camera assistant. Soon he was working with a promising young director, Michael Curtiz.

  In 1927, Ucicky was asked to direct Café Electric, starring Willi Forst, a famous stage actor then appearing in Vienna in a musical, Broadway. Café Electric followed a young dance-hall girl, Erni, from her initiation into bohemian café society to her descent into a demimonde of seduction and heartbreak. Forst suggested his Broadway co-star, a sultry young German named Marlene Dietrich, for the part.

  Dietrich had her own ideas about the role, and she was anything but compliant. Perhaps Ucicky was unnerved by the raw sexuality with which Dietrich infused Erni. He didn’t want her for the role. But Forst threatened to quit if Dietrich wasn’t in the picture. Ucicky was stuck with Dietrich.

  Ucicky’s boss, Count Sascha, became obsessed with Dietrich, and wanted her for his next films. But the count’s health was poor. He was forced to watch Café Electric from his hospital bed. Dietrich was critically praised for her portrayal of a sloe-eyed masochistic femme fatale, a blue angel sinking into hedonism.

  National Socialism was opening a lot of doors to opportunistic young men like Ucicky. He began to drift into Nazi circles. Marlene Dietrich, by then renowned for The Blue Angel, snubbed him. She began to polish her English, seeing hatred where her countrymen saw pride and the promise of jobs. By 1930 Dietrich had gone to America.

  In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, and Ucicky became a “sponsoring member of the SS.” Perhaps he had found the family and fellowship he craved. More likely it was a career move. Young Ucicky was made a director at the national film institute, which was now controlled by Joseph Goebbels. He began to sport a swastika on his lapel.

  Wilder was Jewish. He began packing his bags.

  Where his peers saw darkness, Ucicky saw opportunity. He directed a mendacious little Nazi propaganda film, Refugees, about a German village imperiled by menacing dark-skinned Slavs eager to ravish blonde German women. A German officer modeled on Adolf Hitler comes to the rescue.

  Nazi films about rapacious Slavs or malignant Jews were a deadly serious effort to motivate German soldiers who would be ordered to kill ethnic “enemies.” One typical propaganda film of the time portrayed Germans locked in concentration camps and brutalized by murderous Poles.

  In 1934, Ucicky’s Refugees was awarded the first State Film prize, created by Goebbels for films that glorified National Socialism. His next film, Morgenrot (Dawn), about a German submarine commander, was screened by Hitler three days after he took office as chancellor.

  Ucicky had made his choice.

  One night in 1935, Ucicky was sipping wine at the apartment of a screenwriter when Billy Wilder sauntered in. Eying Ucicky, Wilder re-marked, “For me, the air stinks with a Nazi in the room.” Wilder walked out, went into exile, and fulfilled his promise as a cinematic genius.

  Ucicky returned to Hitler’s Vienna as a key player at the quirky old film studio of Count Sascha—now an efficient Nazi outfit renamed Vienna Film. Ucicky was a darling of the Führer. In 1939, Ucicky mingled with Hitler and Goebbels at festivities for Richard Strauss’s opera Friedenstag, which were also a celebration of the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  Strauss was an uneasy camp follower. His daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish, and her family was in danger. In 1935, Strauss had refused to remove the name of librettist Stefan Zweig from the German playbill of one of his operas. “Do you suppose Mozart was consciously ‘Aryan’ when he composed?” Strauss grumbled in a letter to Zweig that was intercepted by the Gestapo.

  Ucicky had no pesky qualms. He waved over opera singer Hans Hotter to offer him a film role, and invited him to meet Hitler. Ucicky recruited one of Vienna’s greatest actresses, Paula Wessely, who had once brought Maria Altmann to tears as a victim of unrequited love in Schnitzler’s Liebelei. He persuaded Wessely to star in Homecoming, a prop
aganda film about “a handful of German people whose forefathers emigrated East,” to Poland.

  Wessely played Marie, the schoolteacher jeopardized by the brutal Polish police who torch her German school. The Poles herd German men, women, and children into prison cells. As they prepare to shoot them, “German tanks arrive, proving that the Führer always acts in time,” the Nazi playbill for the film said.

  Ucicky’s film presciently foreshadowed tactics the Germans would use in Poland. As Ucicky built his luxury villa, his films paved the way for the murderous German offensive on the East. Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek would someday call Ucicky’s Homecoming “the worst propaganda feature of the Nazis.”

  Newly rich with Nazi wealth, Ucicky began to hunt for his father’s stolen paintings, with the help of Vienna’s top Nazi, Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter, or Reich governor, of Vienna.

  Ucicky got one Klimt from the Dorotheum auction house, then a clearinghouse for Aryanized valuables stolen from Jewish families. This painting had belonged to Bernhard Altmann. It was a small portrait of a young woman, her face fraught with vulnerability. Ucicky apparently suspected that the beleaguered woman in the painting was his poor laundress mother.

  Now Ucicky wanted to see the rest of the Bloch-Bauer Klimt collection.

  Führer

  The fate of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts was left to Erich Führer, a hatchet-faced, arrogant hack of a lawyer with a pedigree to match his serendipitous name. Führer, an early illegal Nazi Party member, had helped defend the plotters of the failed 1934 Nazi coup that fatally wounded the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Führer ended up in jail with the plotters—one of whom was Felix Landau—for six months. Führer’s reward was a post as vice president of the Austrian bar association, now gutted of its Jewish lawyers.