The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

When the Russians marched into Vienna, Moll’s son-in-law—a Nazi named Richard Eberstaller—shot his wife, then Moll, and then himself in a suicide pact. Or at least this was the chronology Austrian officials had insisted upon years ago, when they ruled that since Moll died a few minutes sooner, Eberstaller had been his legitimate heir. Since Eberstaller had willed his art to the Belvedere, the Schindlers came to the Belvedere as an inheritance from Eberstaller.

  Austria insisted the Belvedere bought the Munch painting in “good faith”—a viable shield in Europe, though not in U.S. courts. Even in Europe, this protection was being eroded by the morality plays of restitution.

  The case seemed unpromising—until Randol’s victory.

  “I think the climate is extraordinary!” Marina said fervently. “I believe it is an opening, for many things. I believe I will get my painting back!”

  A Friend from Old Vienna

  The next morning, a gray sky glowered overhead. Randol announced he was heading off for a private lunch with Ron Lauder, who was apparently in Vienna. Randol offered no explanation.

  “Why don’t you look up Maria’s friend Hans Mühlbacher?” Randol suggested. “He’s her last childhood friend left alive in Vienna.”

  Ah yes, the legendary Hans, who had played his violin at the Stubenbastei the day of the Anschluss.

  The clouds over the Schellinggasse were so low they seemed to touch the stone angels on the rooftops. Hans lived across the street from the grand old Coburg Palace, where well-endowed goddesses lounged on the roof in Grecian robes, creating the impression they were lingering in pajamas after a rough night.

  The Bloch-Bauers’ Stubenbastei apartment could be seen from Hans’s doorstep. His building had a seashell staircase that climbed upward in a spiral. A heavy wooden door opened and Hans appeared, in a hand-tailored brown tweed suit with a rather twee pocket handkerchief.

  Hans took both my hands. “How is my Maria?” he asked, in a tone that was a sigh of both joy and lament. He led me into a warm apartment that was like a museum of cozy Viennese Gemütlichkeit. The foyer was filled with mounted antlers, like a Tyrolean hunting lodge. There were blue-painted wardrobes with East European floral folk art designs. The herringbone geometry of the parquet floor contrasted with a tall chest carved with arabesques that might have been abducted from a sultan’s seraglio. Above it was a painting of people around a bountiful kitchen table that looked like the work of a Flemish master, and a more run-of-the-mill portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph in his imperial uniform, radiating the confidence of the glorious empire. Gold silk curtains fell from long windows, and empire-style chairs were covered with crimson and gold silk upholstery. Sconces held leaded crystal shaped like grape arbors. I sat in a moss-green Hungarian chair with carved clamshells, and Hans settled into a Biedermeier settee.

  How beautiful life was in Vienna, Hans was saying. It was another world! Friendships lasted a lifetime. Hans smiled with nostalgia.

  Then came the Anschluss. His father died, very suddenly, a month later. His Jewish-born mother had to vacate the family chalet. His sister’s Catholic fiancé jilted her. His cousin became an ardent Nazi.

  “I was drafted, after Maria left,” Hans continued. “I had to do it, to save the lives of my mother and sister. I wrote a memoir about this time,” Hans said, pulling a book from the shelf.

  The memoir didn’t give much away. Hans spent the summer of 1940 occupying Villemeux-sur-Eure, France, with “many pretty girls we stared at and admired, without success,” Hans wrote. Hans could not be promoted because his mother was Jewish, “but I could, despite my lower rank, lead an interesting life in the still-quiet West, with all the comforts of the higher-ranked military staff.”

  Hans was stationed in Poland in 1941, in Rzeszow, a pretty Galician town where Jews were corralled into a ghetto. “Some of the soldiers were sorry there were Nuremberg racial laws, for the Jewish women were much better dressed than the rest of the people,” Hans wrote. “Walking through the ghetto made me very depressed. I have never seen so much poverty.”

  Back in St. Wolfgang, his hometown, his mother’s friends were deported, one by one. His mother and his sister, Lisl, once escaped deportation through intervention of his cousin, then a decorated Nazi.

  At nearby Ebensee, the SS worked Jewish laborers to death building tunnels for armaments.

  Hans flipped through the book and pointed to a photograph of himself, handsome and well-built, in his German army uniform.

  No one should have had to make the choices he did.

  Just then, a strong-faced matron in her sixties came into the room with sherry and apple strudel. She was Brigitte Wagner, and she seemed to be Hans’s girlfriend. “Brigitte’s husband saved my life,” Hans said.

  Brigitte regarded me warily.

  “Dr. Wagner was the most famous German scientist in war technology,” Brigitte said, in a guttural accent, entirely unlike the musical Viennese of Maria and Hans. “My husband invented missiles. He employed Hansl, so he was protected.”

  Her husband, Herbert Wagner, designed missiles. In 1943, Hans was kicked out of the German army for being a Jew, and Wagner hired him. Brigitte married Dr. Wagner after the war.

  Hans flipped through his memoir and found a picture of Dr. Wagner at the height of Nazi Germany. The photo showed a heavily shadowed face and deep-set dark eyes, like a Hollywood version of a Nazi Dr. No.

  Hans didn’t work for just any Nazi scientist. Wagner had played a key role in the Nazi war machine, a serious charge at the Nuremberg trials. He was an SS officer. He surrendered to Americans hunting Nazi scientists in Bavaria. He and his two assistants were the first Nazi scientists to be secretly airlifted to the United States after the war.

  “After the war, my husband was taken into prison,” Brigitte was saying. “He was forced to work for the Americans. He worked on guided missiles for them.”

  It was a secret that Americans were working with former Nazis. Some of the scientists had performed abominable experiments on Jewish victims at concentration camps. U.S. officials said they worried Nazi scientists would fall into the hands of the Russians in the Cold War arms race. They recruited Werner von Braun, another member of the SS, to help jump-start NASA, though he had overseen slave labor operations where thousands of Jews died. Dr. Wagner’s FBI handlers helpfully repeated his contention that he only joined the SS for professional reasons and never went to the meetings.

  “They needed my husband’s invention to bomb Japan, late in the war,” Brigitte was saying.

  The clock ticked. The room was oppressively warm, the sherry sweet as syrup, the Apfelstrudel leaden. The wallpaper, a busy geometry of gold silk jacquard bouquets, made me claustrophobic. I must have had a bad poker face, because Brigitte was glaring at me. “You have no right to judge!” she said fiercely. “You can only judge when you yourself have survived such a conflict! It was life and death! Nobody knows what they would do in a similar situation!

  “His mother made a big mistake,” she said vehemently, pointing to Hans. “Many Jews did. She simply did not believe what was coming. She should have gone in time. But she didn’t. She missed the boat. Many of those people were taken to concentration camps. If it wasn’t for Hans, she would never have survived. An entire family Hans knew committed suicide.”

  “During the war my husband took Hansl to work at Henschel Aircraft,” Brigitte said. “Otherwise, he would have been dead.”

  Hans nodded.

  “Dr. Wagner was my military protector,” Hans said soberly. “Professor Wagner invented the guided missile. I was involved with the missile. The biggest was supposed to bomb New York.”

  Henschel had a slave labor factory at Dachau. Hans would have been forced to greet his colleagues with “Heil Hitler!” “Everyone did.” Brigitte shrugged dismissively. “It was the polite salutation. Even schoolchildren had to greet ‘Heil Hitler!’ Everybody did so. Just as all the children joined Hitler Youth. Everybody.”

  Hans began to speak, but Brigitte to
ok over. “Things are not as simple as it might look to you in America,” she said. “I believe, and Hansl agrees, that the majority of the Nazis, in the beginning at least, were very good, normal people. Many SS officers began as idealists. Black is not always black and white is not always white.

  “There was, in Vienna, a very high percentage of Jews,” Brigitte continued. “After World War I, the population was completely demoralized. Impoverished. Unemployed. The frustration was enormous.

  “Because all the Jews of Eastern Europe came to Austria, especially Vienna, the aversion was very high. The Jews had a very close network of industry, of lawyers, of banking business. In the end it was very difficult for a non-Jew to make business in any of these fields. In my impression, it had nothing to do with religion. It had to do with commercial success.”

  “It” was a Vienna euphemism for the internments, the concentration camps, the Holocaust. It. Just as everyone said “National Socialist” instead of “Nazi.”

  After World War II, Brigitte said, “No one spoke of it, ever.

  “The families were all involved in it, and to avoid questions, this has never been touched,” she said. “People avoid details. Whenever you get into details, children will ask, ‘What were you doing? What was Grandfather doing?’ And there are unpleasant things to answer.

  “If a society commits a crime, it’s in the interests of society to close the files,” Brigitte said vehemently. “It’s in mutual interest to keep silent. It’s like a family. In the end, they will stick together.

  “Young people now know nothing about what happened in World War II,” she said. They were finding out. Hans’s storybook hometown, St. Wolfgang, was embroiled in a ferocious row over a proposal to rename its lakefront promenade, which honored a local Nazi who had turned in a Jewish woman.

  Hans had spent a lot of the war in Vienna with his girlfriend, Maria Graf, a ballet dancer at the State Opera. He watched her dance there for Nazis. The State Opera had now been purged of talented Jews like Hans.

  Then Allied bombs came crashing into the opera house. Hitler committed suicide. The British arrested Brigitte’s father, the scientist Viktor Raschka. Dr. Wagner fled Vienna as the Red Army marched in, preceded by its reputation.

  The SS ordered Hans and the other scientists to head to Nordhausen, home of the infamous Mittelbau V-2 rocket factory, where more than twenty thousand Jews had died. Instead Hans, terrified of the Red Army, fled into his building’s cavernous basement.

  Subterranean Vienna was a mecca. People who had seen air raid shelters collapse felt safer in ancient catacombs lined with skulls. Hans spent months in the dark rubble with Nazi collaborators trying to elude arrest and women trying to avoid rape. Maria Graf brought him food. If the Russians came to search, Hans ran through holes battered into the walls of the burned-out basements that linked entire blocks into a vast labyrinth. Months later, Hans emerged, moved back into Maria’s apartment, and married her. He was never arrested.

  His mother and sister survived.

  “Maria and Hans were very lucky to get this apartment during the war, in 1943,” Brigitte was saying. “My husband’s company rented this apartment for Hans. A German diplomat had been living here.”

  Who lived here before the diplomat?

  Brigitte shrugged.

  Hans showed me a joint Deutsches Museum–Smithsonian Institution tribute to Dr. Wagner. It said Wagner had moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks and worked for Raytheon and Northrup, then researched guidance and control systems for reconnaissance drones for Fairchild aircraft. And that he engineered the stability system for Bay Area Rapid Transit, specifically the rail under the bay between San Francisco and Berkeley, the publication said.

  Hans pointed to an illustration of a missile. “I was an engineer on this,” he said. “This was designed to hit America. But America won the war.”

  Brigitte looked at me meaningfully. Not black or white.

  On my way out, I stopped under a painting of pretty young nuns peering through the front gates of a convent, like Maria in The Sound of Music.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  “Don’t you see the soldiers outside?” Brigitte asked pointedly.

  Now I saw the spears above the door. What do the soldiers want?

  “To rape them,” Brigitte said sternly.

  “It’s a scary world,” Brigitte said, in her deep German accent.

  Patrimony

  The next morning was frigid. Snow was piled in drifts as Randol walked briskly into the Belvedere. Gerbert Frodl seemed preoccupied. Randol listened as Frodl told him it injured his feelings when Maria called him a liar for denying that he had told her Austria might consider giving her the landscapes in exchange for the portraits of Adele. “I was a bit hurt, that she keeps saying I lied,” Frodl said. “I didn’t lie.”

  But he did lie, Randol thought.

  But Randol remained silent. He was trying not to play the conqueror. Until the paintings were out of Austria, anything could happen. It’s not like I waltzed in here like Napoleon, Randol kept reminding himself.

  “Well, a lot of people said a lot of things,” Randol demurred.

  He didn’t want to fight anymore. He just wanted the paintings.

  Randol followed the administrator through the maze of underground passageways. He lost track of the twists and turns. He would never be able to retrace his steps and find it on his own. As they wound through the labyrinth, Randol’s insatiable curiosity got the best of him. Why was this massive bunker built? For art? For arms? There had to be a reason.

  Even fairy-tale palaces had dungeons.

  Finally they came to a large room, about twice the size of a Vienna café. Randol was surrounded by some of the most valuable art in the world. The administrator pointed to a gurney.

  Randol lifted up the first painting. It wasn’t Adele. It was Mathilde Zemlinsky Schoenberg, his grandfather Schoenberg’s first wife. She was holding a baby. The painting was by the brilliant early modernist Richard Gerstl, an artist who was passionately in love with the married Mathilde. Her composer husband ordered Mathilde to stop the affair. A few weeks later Gerstl finished his last portrait of himself, his mouth opened in mirthless laughter. Then Gerstl took off his clothes and hung himself in front of a mirror. Mathilde promptly followed Gerstl into the grave. The baby in the painting, Georg, would spend the last days of the war in an apartment lent to him by a fleeing Nazi leader, Benno Mattel, the son-in-law of Anton Webern, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg. When the bombs fell, Georg, by then an adult, hid in a cave in the Vienna Woods filled with women and children, running out to beg Russian soldiers not to throw grenades into the cavern.

  In this perilous era, even the most personal painting became an accidental document of something much greater.

  Randol idly wondered if the Belvedere had put the Gerstl painting of Mathilde here on purpose. He pushed it aside.

  What he saw next amazed him.

  It was Adele. Randol stared at her face for a long moment. He stared at the room filled with paintings, each with its own stories, many still untold.

  ——

  If anyone didn’t know who Adele was before, they did now.

  Randol’s attempt to get Adele out of Austria was the talk of the town as Austrian high society headed to that night’s premiere of the Raúl Ruiz film about Gustav Klimt at the Konzerthaus. The American actor John Malkovich, who played Klimt, swept in wearing a luminous silk blazer emblazoned with a Klimtesque pattern of squares.

  The Konzerthaus, built on the site of the Kunstschau exhibition grounds, where Adele’s portrait had first been unveiled in Vienna, was a dazzling temple. Gold angels blew trumpets and gilded muses reclined under a golden ceiling patterned in an Italianate floral design whose radiance rivaled that of Heaven itself.

  Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, the city councillor for cultural affairs, was onstage with the actress playing Serena Lederer. “The era has been so widely celebrated,” he said.
Klimt was the “pride of Austria,” he went on. “Freud is not in the film, but his spirit is.” It seemed strange to hear him extol these illustrious characters without mentioning why the whole party ended so suddenly. Though why advertise, on this happy evening, that Freud had barely made it out of Vienna alive, and four of his sisters died in concentration camps? Or that Serena Lederer lost everything and publicly disavowed her own husband to claim Klimt as the “Aryan” father of her daughter? That her sister died in a death camp, and her cherished Klimt collection was torched by Nazis?

  When the lights came up, the writer and director of the film, Raúl Ruiz, began to explain his cinematic vision of this “mythical city, and its connection to the real Vienna.

  “We have Ferdinand to the left and Hitler to the right,” Randol whispered mockingly. “Will all the illegitimate children of Klimt please stand up?”

  Randol made his way toward a group of Austrian officials, who seemed surprised and uncomfortable to see him. “I didn’t tell anyone you were here tonight,” one producer, a young Austrian named Suzanne Biro, told him apologetically. “I was afraid to.

  “Austria is split in two,” Biro explained. “One part is with Maria Altmann, and is ashamed, and happy that it is over. And a lot of people are not so ashamed—to the contrary. They are angry about the return of the paintings. I was ashamed. I think it is sad about the loss, of course. But it should have happened sixty years ago.”

  Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, a tall, dark man in a black suit, listened as Randol told an interviewer that “I thought there was no chance of it happening. Art cases always lose.”

  Mailath-Pokorny turned to a reporter. “There was a similar case in the city recently, with the estate of Johann Strauss,” he began.

  The family of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II, was fleeced by the Nazis too. His third wife, Adele, was Jewish, a distant relation of Nelly. His stepdaughter and heir, Alice Meisner-Strauss, was forced to hand over the composer’s Aryanized papers. The composer’s great-grandfather had been born Jewish. But the Gestapo took great pains to destroy records of this inconvenient ethnic stain when Hitler adopted Strauss as a Germanic icon. After the war, Austria fought to hang on to the Strauss legacy, worth millions.