The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  “It really pained him. He didn’t know for certain,” she said. “Then a magazine published a list of high-ranking Nazis, and his grandfather was one of them. He said, ‘Sophie, you’re in the archives a lot, can you pick up his file?’ Almost everybody had Nazis in their family here. It’s your father and grandfather. People you love, and want to protect. All those people had a past.”

  The provenance cases shed light on other mysteries familiar to the Viennese. Ruth Pleyer, a researcher on the Bloch-Bauer case, played as a child at a neighbor’s house that was filled with books that none of them read, and paintings they knew nothing about. Eventually Pleyer learned the entire house had been Aryanized. The family lived there like extras on a film set. “You grew up not knowing,” Pleyer said. “Now people are finding out.” In Vienna’s complex recent past, “everyone in Vienna is related to persecutors, or the persecuted,” Pleyer said. “In some cases, they are related to both.”

  This mixed inheritance was the uneasy birthright of Stanislaus Bachofen-Echt, a hip young heir with the fine good looks and antiquated air of a Romantic poet. His apartment on Graf Starhemberg Gasse was a museum of alabaster vases and dynastic oil paintings. On his mantel was the coat of arms of the Bachofen-Echts, who were made barons in 1906. Like many Viennese, they continued to use the title after titles were abolished in 1919.

  Just back from India, Stanislaus poured jasmine tea and explained how this Viennese desire to be on the inside track might have been among the reasons his father, Werner, joined Austria’s illegal Nazi Party in 1933. “He realized he could do good business,” Stanislaus said, among the well-connected fraternity in this small party.

  His father’s brother, Eberhard, was “a real Nazi,” and joined the SS. “My family always said Eberhard joined the SS because he looked handsome in the uniform,” Stanislaus said, looking skeptical.

  His father’s other brother, Wolfgang, joined the Austrian Nazi Party with them in 1933, but his flirtation was more complicated. Wolfgang was the husband of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt.

  Like the rest of his generation, Stanislaus was left to puzzle through this era, and his family’s role in it.

  Stanislaus had heard the family legend of the marriage since he was a child. During the downturn in the family fortunes, the Bachofen-Echt brothers had convened a card game at the Hotel Sacher to decide which of them would propose to the conspicuously eligible Elisabeth Lederer. The punch line was that no one knew whether Wolfgang had won or lost.

  The stories Stanislaus was told cast the Bachofen-Echt brothers in a typically benign light: Wolfgang divorced Elisabeth and took control of her property to protect her interests from seizure. Wolfgang took Elisabeth to join her mother in Budapest. Elisabeth was allowed to stay with Wolfgang in the Nusdorf great house of Eberhard. Eberhard sent SS officers to guard Elisabeth at Jacquingasse.

  “During the war, two SS people were stationed in front of the Jacquingasse palais so she wouldn’t be arrested. Uncle Eberhard arranged this,” Stanislaus said. “I don’t know how badly Wolfgang behaved, but I know Uncle Eberhard helped, stationing SS outside the palais. At least that was the story.”

  On the other hand, “my grandfather said when he saw Eberhard, he would hide, because Eberhard was dangerous,” Stanislaus said.

  “Eberhard was arrested after the war. I never found out why. As far as I know, he was not involved in the killings,” Stanislaus said. “There is a place in the State Archive to find out. Someday I will.”

  A yellowing U.S. military form in the archive said Eberhard was released in 1946 with a disability: “Psychosis.”

  The apartment was crowded with enormous portraits of illustrious ancestors in heavy gilt frames, and photographs, many of the late Hubertus Czernin.

  “That’s my cousin Hubertus,” Stanislaus said. “His mother and my mother were sisters. Our grandfather, Franz Joseph Mayer-Gunthof, was part Jewish, and he was active in another fascist organization, the Heimwehr. He got a Nazi medal during the war for factory production. But then he had to give it back, because they found out he was Jewish.” Stanislaus laughed.

  It took a moment to adjust to the news that Czernin was closely related to Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt. Hubertus had mentioned some Bachofen-Echts in the family, calling them “pure SS” and saying Elisabeth’s marriage to a Bachofen-Echt was “like a bad joke.”

  “Our other cousins were the Jewish Schey barons who built the Schey Palace on the Ringstrasse,” Stanislaus was saying. “Our Schey cousins stayed for a long time after the Anschluss. Finally my grandfather Mayer-Gunthof went to them and said, ‘You have to leave! Now!’ They couldn’t believe they had to go.”

  “Hubertus’s father was a Nazi too,” Stanislaus said matter-of-factly. Hubertus had mentioned that his father had been a Nazi sympathizer, but said he was jailed at the end of the war for belonging to the resistance. “I’m positive of it,” Stanislaus continued. “Hubertus was completely aware of it. Did you ever ask him?”

  A few days later Hubertus’s older brother, Franz Joseph, slid into a red leather booth at the Café Braunerhof in faded black jeans, horn-rimmed glasses, and a tattered green tweed blazer. He looked a bit like Elvis Costello. Franz Josef was a poet.

  Like Hubertus, he didn’t mind staring history in the face. “We had some Nazis in the family,” Franz Josef said, under the now-familiar gaze of Thomas Bernhard, the theatrical conscience of Austria. “Some family members had Jewish ancestors, and they would have liked to have been Nazis, but they weren’t allowed to be Nazis because they were Jewish,” Franz Josef said.

  “And our father? They said in 1935 he left the Nazis. But I don’t think so. This was a myth. He worked in a German bank that occupied Belgium during the war, a bank that was involved in Aryanization. I believe they were involved in art Aryanization.”

  Growing up, he explained, “the story was, he didn’t become a Nazi, or was for a short time, and then left the party. But then I found out my father was a Nazi Party member in good standing, on a research database. A study came out, on the Aryanization of Jewish banks. My father was working for a bank that did that, and his name came up as someone involved. Hubertus was curious.”

  Franz Josef took a sip of his espresso. “Most people were not heroes,” he said. “My father was very kind. It doesn’t take anything away.”

  “My mother’s father, Franz Josef Mayer-Gunthof, a leader of the Heimwehr, was half Jewish,” he said. “He was sent to Mauthausen for two years. But not for being Jewish. It was because he made an anti-Nazi joke in his salon. A woman told the Gestapo. He was sentenced to death for treason. Then, at the end of the war, he was sent to Vienna, and freed.

  “My father told me that at the end he was in the resistance. A lot of people said that. He said he spent the last weeks of the war jailed by the Nazis, and when the jail was bombed, he escaped. Who knows?” Franz Josef shrugged.

  “In any case, I believe in collective guilt,” Franz Josef said. “There must have been a sort of consensus, so they all have some guilt. If someone actually kills, they have more guilt. There are different levels. But it’s a shared guilt. Someone might not have been a murderer, but they mingled with murderers. People say an SS officer was lucky he never killed someone. What difference does it make? He was part of it.

  “I was almost sixteen when our father died; Hubertus was only eleven. Hubertus started to realize, on his own, how many lies were under the layers of secrecy. Hubertus discovered the whole psychology of Austrian amnesia.”

  At the height of the Waldheim affair, some of their relatives stopped speaking to Hubertus. “They said, ‘One doesn’t do that to one’s president. One lets the past rest in peace,’ ” Franz Josef said.

  “Adele was a symbol of Austria too. When Austria lost Adele, a lot of people were sad and shocked. ‘Our paintings! Leaving Austria!’ They were saying goodbye to Adele. And to another illusion.

  “Paintings are not as important as a president,” Franz Josef said. “But Hubertus saw in
Adele the same layers of half-truths, lies, and amnesia he grew up with, even in his own family.”

  There turned out to be plenty of information implicating their banker father, Count Felix Czernin. Documents of the American Office of Military Government for Germany called Count Czernin a “German espionage agent.” The files said Czernin—“alias Burger, Agent No. A-306”—joined the German Nazi Party in 1939. He was said to be deeply involved in the Aryanization of Jewish property, and to have reported on his progress to a top Aryanizer for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

  In 1945, in the dregs of the war, Felix was reportedly arrested for treason somewhere, but managed to escape. Another Czernin count was an adjutant to Odilo Globocnik, the “Butcher of Lublin,” and did something to deserve Himmler’s SS death’s head ring.

  There were also whispers in the family about another relative, the late Igor Caruso. Caruso, an Italian aristocrat, came to Vienna to work at the pediatric clinic of the Steinhof Hospital in 1942, when it was an infamous Nazi euthanasia center. Caruso had said he was horrified when he discovered this and quit to work for Prince Alfred Auersperg, a neurologist and SS man. Caruso died in 1981. But new Nazi-era archives were emerging on his boss, the unpunished Heinrich Gross, who still had a flat at the hospital as late as 1996. The last preserved brains of euthanized children were finally buried in 2002, after scores of children’s remains were “discovered” in the clinic’s cellar and laboratories. The press would report that Igor Caruso had personally evaluated fourteen children who were later euthanized. One magazine headline would call Caruso “a perpetrator who called himself a victim.”

  For Hubertus, the search for his country’s conscience began at home.

  The once-impenetrable Belvedere had itself become a center of intrigue. Its director, Gerbert Frodl, was now linked to Austria’s failed effort to keep the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. Behind his back, Belvedere staff sniped that the museum archives contained a photograph of Frodl’s father giving the “Heil” salute from the back of an open truck filled with stolen art. Frodl was born in 1940 and so was only a toddler when his father became one of Hitler’s art collectors. It was a dark inheritance indeed.

  The Belvedere’s secrets were spilling out. Staff whispered that the museum’s bunker had been a last resort for Hitler, its construction ordered by the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. One curator said it had been a vast underground military center that was walled off after the war to outfit a small portion with the necessary climatic conditions to store paintings. “This wasn’t for art,” another museum official said. “It was in case Berlin fell. It would be one of the possible structures of command for a government-in-exile.”

  It sounded far-fetched. But Hitler built a number of secret underground headquarters. Perhaps Nazi governor Schirach had hoped a special contingency bunker would restore his lost favor with Hitler.

  Officials at the Belvedere and the Federal Monument Office maintained for years they had no idea why the bunker was built. Yet Hans Aurenhammer, a highly respected postwar Belvedere director, wrote in detail of the Belvedere during wartime in his 1971 history, Das Belvedere in Wien. His book shows Hitler presiding over a 1940 reception in the Belvedere’s Marble Hall, in one of the many period photographs that are now locked out of sight somewhere.

  In those days, Aurenhammer wrote ruefully, the Belvedere was rechristened the Castle of the First Reichsmarschall by the National Socialist daily, the Völkischer Beobachter. By 1943, Aurenhammer wrote, “Vienna was no longer far from the combat zone. Under the pond of the Upper Belvedere a large bunker was built that Hitler was to move into in case of the transfer of the headquarters to Vienna. Of course, this did not happen.”

  The fortified refuge was completed in 1944. The Central Air Raid Police Command Post of the Vienna district moved in. There was a monitoring tower on the roof. In the park, there were floodlights and a flak battery with heavy antiaircraft guns. “The protest of the Gallery’s management against this exceptional threat to the Belvedere was in vain,” Aurenhammer wrote.

  It was too late. The Belvedere was a military target. Allied bombs thundered down. Prince Eugene’s roof, modeled on the billowing tents of the Turks he had conquered, caved in.

  Long after the war, the Austrian architect Hans Hollein wrote about the “Führer Headquarters” in the bowels of the Belvedere, comparing the museum to a volcano with an incendiary “subterranean secret.”

  Were Austria’s paintings hidden in an old refuge for the Führer? Frodl had no comment. He swept past reporters and strode briskly out of the Belvedere gates, then down toward the Theresianum, where, in another era, Nazis trained child cadets to shoot.

  Three years after the initial query, a new administration provided a brief explanation for the “subterranean secret.”

  “Please note what the Belvedere has to say about the bunker,” spokeswoman Lena Maurer wrote in a November 2009 e-mail. “The collections of the Belvedere were sent out in 1942/43. In June 1943, the construction of the bunker for the protection of Adolf Hitler began, between the palace and the pond. From October 1944 onwards it was used by the Central Air Raid Police Command Post for the Vienna district. On November 18, 1944, bombs of the Allied forces hit the palace and destroyed part of the western wing. On February 21, 1945, massive air raids led to severe damages to the main building.

  “Please do not hesitate to contact me in case you need any other information.”

  Cultural Property

  What was left of Adele Bloch-Bauer in the Austria that clung to her as indispensable cultural property?

  There was little trace at the drafty old palais on the Elisabethstrasse. The cubicle partitions of the Austrian train headquarters had cut her elegant salon to pieces. Plaster moldings and ornamentation had been ripped out in what struck Randol’s Vienna partner, Stefan Gulner, as a Freudian desire to ravage the palais: to strip this Jewish mansion to its bones. An underground parking garage marred a view of the pretty Schillerplatz. Rusty bullet holes pocked the metal door into the attic, a relic, perhaps, of Red Army troops searching for fugitive Nazis and Wehrmacht soldiers. When the mansion was marked for restitution, Ron Lauder was advised not to buy it. It had lost too much integrity.

  The gutted old place posed another question. What would have become of an aging Adele had she stayed? Would she have been driven to exile, despair, and death, like other Jewish models of Klimt?

  Whatever her conceivable fate, there was nothing left of her here.

  But in this country of the “beautiful corpse,” the relationship to the dead, like the past, was intimate. So I set out to visit Adele Bloch-Bauer’s grave on the chilly gray morning of All Saints’ Day. A miserable drizzle was falling on Vienna’s peaked mansard roofs when I reached Vienna’s Central Cemetery, a who’s who where the graves of “Handsome Karl” Lueger, Karl Renner, and Kurt Waldheim mingled with those of Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, and Johann Strauss, father and son. Here angels beckoned from elaborate family mausoleums, their ceilings painted, like the Sistine Chapel, with mortals reaching for the divine.

  Adele was not in the celebrity directory. At the administration office, a stout matron wearing a cap of short gray hair and a severe expression frowned at the name of Adele Bloch-Bauer. “Jüdische? Jüdische? Nein! Not here,” she announced loudly, shaking her head. “It is a Jewish grave. She’s in Döbling.” I insisted. She sighed with exasperation. A younger, bespectacled gentleman went to a computer and came back with a printout for an Adele Bauer at the Döbling cemetery across town. The matron plopped the paper down triumphantly. “The model of Klimt?” I asked.

  “She’s not here,” the young man insisted.

  Was it possible the subject of the most expensive painting in the world had passed unnoticed? Perhaps in Vienna, so frozen in time, yet with such a complicated relationship with its past. I said I would walk to the crematorium and have a look. The matron threw up her hands. I walked toward the white Art Deco gates of the cemetery for the cremated. Che
stnuts and potatoes roasted on open fires in the parking lot, giving off their tantalizing garlic-and-salt aroma. The complex was a maze, as thickly wooded as the Black Forest. There was a narrow dirt path along a mock castle wall. Above, a black raven cried loudly as it flew from treetop to treetop.

  I was about to turn back when I came upon the stark black-gray granite plaque lettered in gold: adele bloch-bauer. Beneath it were dry brown stems of long-dead flowers, mercifully upstaged by a lush green wild fern, as if nature itself had stepped in to celebrate this forgotten grave. The ledge held a rusted votive. Here, unadorned and obscure, lay the remains of Adele.

  Someone in Vienna honored Adele’s memory.

  The cemetery in Hietzing, the district where Klimt had his last studio, was a stroll through the century. Bronze angels and roses decorated the grave of Katharina Schratt, Emperor Franz Josef’s mistress, near the remains of Karl Renner, the fickle opportunist. Klimt’s good friend Egon Schiele rested with his wife nearby. The remains of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt and her handicapped son lay not far from those of Gustav Ucicky, her alleged half brother, close by where her brother Erich Lederer was likely turning in his grave.

  Between two weeping birch trees there was a small arched brown marble headstone, with Art Nouveau lettering: gustav klimt. At its center was the face of Adele, from the gold portrait, no larger than a playing card, laminated against rain and snow. Adele seemed to stare up from Klimt’s grave with pleading eyes, like a holy card of Mary Magdalene, between two burning candles. An older man appeared in a worn suede jacket, with a ruddy, unlined face, and began clipping the tiny hedge with blue berries that cradled the grave. I asked him about Adele’s picture. “It’s not from me!” he retorted vehemently.