“Is that what’s truly in your heart, Herr Frodl?” I asked.
He nodded and smiled.
“Well, what’s in my heart, Herr Frodl, is the hope that Austria will do the right thing and return my aunt’s portrait to her rightful heirs.”
“Sometimes people are confused about what is the right thing,” he said, still smiling.
“I’m not confused,” I said. I smiled, too.
“My dear Frau Altmann.” Frodl put a hand on the table, very close to mine. “I will be frank with you. At the Belvedere, we have plenty of Klimt landscapes. We can spare a few of those. But Adele is special to us here in Vienna. I think on reflection you’ll realize that the portrait belongs here in her rightful home.”
“Her rightful home is with her heirs.”
“I’m telling you as a friend, Frau Altmann, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is part of Austria’s legacy, and it belongs here with us.”
“Adele belongs to me, and I’ll make sure the whole world knows it if I must,” I said. I stood, more suddenly than I’d intended.
Frodl’s face changed. It got hard and ugly. He stood, too. I could see then that he was a horrible little man.
“If you try to take our Adele out of Austria,” he said, “we will stop you, and you will fail.”
I marched into the Belvedere that very afternoon, across pebbled walkways I’d once tripped along with Aunt Adele, across a ballroom dance floor, and into the gallery where her portrait hung. Hubertus and Eva were with me, and a photographer trailed behind them.
It had been fifty years since I’d seen her, and as I crossed the gleaming floor she seemed to welcome me with every bit of her yearning. The sun was coming through the windows that overlooked the Belvedere gardens, lighting up her face and her golden dress.
“I’d like your photographer to take a picture of me with my aunt,” I told Hubertus.
He spoke to the photographer and I smiled for the camera, but before it flashed, a museum guard rushed over.
“Nein, verboten,” he said. “Photographs are forbidden.”
I straightened my spine.
“This painting belongs to my family,” I said in German. A few visitors turned and glanced from my face to my aunt’s. “This is a portrait of my aunt, my very flesh and blood. She’s a Bloch-Bauer, and so am I.”
Everything in the room stopped. The camera flashed. Someone even clapped.
The first step for my claim was to file a formal request for restitution with the Austrian Art Council. To do that, Randy had to untangle years of lost records and history and prove, as best we could, that the portrait had belonged to my uncle and that it had been taken from him wrongfully.
“The agreement you signed in 1948 isn’t binding,” Randy explained. “Attorneys for the Rothschilds and other Jewish families are all filing motions with the Austrian council, asking for those agreements and sales made under duress to be recanted.”
Randy spent a long time accumulating everything from provenance records to legal findings. His office, hung with fancy diplomas from Princeton and the University of Southern California, filled with unruly piles of books and papers. His wife told me that some nights he worked until dawn and only went home to shower and put on a fresh suit.
After half a year, all we were waiting for was a copy of my aunt’s will.
It was Randy’s opinion that a copy of Adele’s will should have been in the museum’s archives, and the fact that it was missing suggested that perhaps the exact wording would work in our favor.
“Our friend Czernin seems to have friends in all kinds of shadowy places,” Randy said. “He’ll manage to get his hands on that will for us.”
“There’s only one problem,” I said timidly. “Adele did want her portrait to go to the Belvedere. I’m sorry, but that’s something she put in her will. Even my mother said it was true.”
Randy’s face went from flushed to bright red. The pile of papers on his desk threatened to topple over.
“Did she want her portrait to go to the Nazis?” he asked. “Was the Austria your aunt loved the same country that stole the work from your uncle’s palace? I don’t think so, Maria—I think that if Adele had survived, she would have been with your uncle in Switzerland and she would have wanted to get her portrait back.”
Of course he was right. I’d agonized over my aunt’s and uncle’s seemingly divergent wishes, but the truth was crystal clear. Randy had to put it in a way that made perfect sense.
“You’ve never seen the will, have you?” he pressed.
“No.”
“It’s a simple matter of right and wrong. If I can prove the paintings were stolen from your uncle, then I can prove that keeping the portrait in Austria is wrong because it legally belongs to you. They built a wall of lies, and we’re going to knock it down one brick at a time.”
On the day of the Anschluss, my aunt’s face in the portrait had seemed cold and silent. But that night in California, when I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea, I saw fear; I saw someone who seemed to know what was going to happen when Hitler came to Vienna.
“What did you know?” I asked her. “What did you know, and how?”
Of course she was silent. But her eyes were screaming. Someplace, in another world, I could hear her calling to me. Long after I turned out the lights and closed my eyes, her face hung in my mind like a head without a body, or a woman without a home.
The archive room in the Belvedere basement is small and stuffy, but Hubertus Czernin is experienced at riffling through dusty old files for weeks on end. As a cub reporter, he proved that Austria’s president Kurt Waldheim had been a Nazi. He’s determined to right this Nazi wrong, too.
Pushing up his round glasses, Czernin leans on the counter and chats easily with the archive librarian.
“I hear you’ve done an incredible job organizing years of old files,” he says. “It must have been a mess back there.”
The librarian knows Czernin. She describes sifting through thousands of documents that hadn’t been handled since the war, cataloging what she could and cross-referencing every document by year.
“The Bloch-Bauer files are kept in Frodl’s office,” the librarian says. “I can’t access them. No one can.”
Czernin lazily drums his long fingers on the tabletop.
“Do you really have boxes back there filled with miscellany from the war years?” he asks.
Soon Czernin is in a rear repository, sorting through boxes dated 1936–1945. After eight days, he finds what he needs.
At the Standard Press offices, Czernin hands his editor a fresh copy of an old letter with the Third Reich seal. The letter is brief and obsequious. The type is fading. The date on the letter is 30 September 1941. And it is signed by Erich Führer.
“Führer was Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s Nazi-assigned lawyer,” Czernin says. “He traded the Adele Bloch-Bauer I to the Belvedere in exchange for a landscape called Schloss Kammer on Attersee.”
Czernin cross-checks his notes before going on.
“By 1943 that landscape belonged to Gustav Ucicky—Klimt’s illegitimate son. Erich Führer must have sold it to him.”
The newspaper editor reads the letter carefully.
“So this proves that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer never gifted the portrait to the museum?” he asks. “It proves the painting was taken from him against his wishes, am I right?”
Czernin nods.
“And look here—that bastard signed the letter Heil Hitler,” he says.
MARIA
1999
“Czernin got a copy of Adele’s will, the real thing, from 1923,” Randy said in a rush as he hurried through my front door. “Let me read you what it says here.”
I took the paper from him, and read aloud.
“My two portraits and four landscapes by Gustav Klimt, I kindly request my husband bequeath to the Belvedere National Gallery after his death.”
I looked at Randy over the top of my reading glasses.
“My God,” I said. “She never bequeathed the painting to the museum. It’s right here—she requests my uncle—ich bitte—to bequeath it for her. And we know he never wanted the Austrians to have it after the war.”
“Exactly,” Randy said. “And that’s not all—in 1923 Austria, a married woman didn’t own anything. The law clearly stated that everything legally belonged to the husband then. Even if Adele had specifically given her portrait to the museum, it was never her right to do that. The bequest was always at Ferdinand’s discretion. And we know what your uncle wanted.”
We put a copy of my uncle’s will and his last letter from Zurich into a fat legal binder with dozens of other documents, and prepared to send it off to Austria. It was amazing how excited I felt when I signed the letter that went along with my petition.
“So that’s everything?” I asked.
“That’s it,” Randy said.
When a fax from Hubertus Czernin arrived at the last possible moment, we thought we had everything we needed to win our case.
“ ‘Heil Hitler,’ ” Randy said as he put the final, damning letter signed by Erich Führer into the file. “I think that says it all.”
MARIA
2000
The law was on my side, and the facts were lined up. But still, the art council denied my claim with a brief, impersonal statement: “The Adele Bloch-Bauer I remains integral to Austria’s cultural heritage and will remain in Austria. If you disagree with the decision of the Austrian Art Council, you are free to contest the decision in Austrian court.”
Randy was so disappointed, I wanted to cry.
“If we want to go further, we’re going to have to sue them in Austrian court,” he said.
“Then we’ll sue,” I said. But suing in Austria required the plaintiff—me—to put in escrow a good portion of the money we expected to win.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Randy said. “But it’s a fact. They want more than a million dollars up front, even before we make the claim.”
“And if we lose?”
“Then we could lose the money, too.”
It was an impossible situation, and I was angry.
“I’m afraid I have more bad news,” Randy said. “My law firm said they’ve reached the end of the road on this case.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means if we want to keep going, I’m going to have to quit my job.”
I couldn’t let Randy ruin his life. I couldn’t let the Austrians break his heart and leave his family broke, the way they’d left mine.
“No,” I said. “You can’t do that. I’m not going to let you do that, Randy.”
Randy slammed his hand on the table, and I jumped.
“Those goddamn Nazi bastards,” he said.
“I’m angry, too,” I said. “Do you have any idea what we had to do to survive?”
I saw Landau’s face, Fritz’s face, Frodl’s face, my uncle when he’d waved good-bye to me across the crowded dance floor for the last time.
“They’ve turned my aunt and uncle’s legacy into a collection of cheap souvenirs,” I said. “They’ve made a lie out of my aunt’s life, and I haven’t stopped them.”
I grabbed up the plates and cups with my aunt’s face on them, and dropped them on the table. As I did, a coffee mug slipped out of my hands and shattered on the floor. I couldn’t decide whether to pick up the broken pieces or smash all the others on the floor, too.
“Maria, you have just given me an idea,” Randy said. I was surprised to see he was grinning.
When Randy told me we were going to sue the Austrian government in the United States Supreme Court, I thought it was a joke.
“We can’t afford to sue in Austria,” Randy said. “But I don’t think the American courts are going to believe the pack of lies the Austrians are telling.”
He dug into a fat canvas bag and pulled out some tacky souvenir plates and coffee mugs. Next to them he stacked a pair of ceramic candlesticks, a night-light, necktie, baby bib, and a gold scarf. Everything was decorated with Adele’s face.
“Where in the world did you find all this?” I asked.
“Everywhere! I bought some on the Internet, and I asked Hubertus to send me a few from the Belvedere’s gift shop.”
Cheap souvenirs and expensive reproductions of Adele’s portrait were being sold all over Austria, he told me. Each item reaped a profit. And that profit, it seemed, should have been ours.
“Austria isn’t allowed to profit off images or properties that rightfully belong to an American citizen,” Randy said. “The Austrian minister of culture might not think that we made a strong argument for the return of your painting, but I think the U.S. government will think otherwise.”
He handed me a typed page that explained the American Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
“This law shields foreign governments from most lawsuits in the U.S.,” he said. “But there’s an exception to the law—it’s called the expropriation exception. It was practically written for us—for a case like this one, when a foreign government is profiting off something stolen from an American citizen.”
He rummaged around the bottom of the bag, and added a packet of coasters and some pens to the pile on the table.
“We can’t go directly to the Supreme Court,” Randy explained. “We start with a local court, and work our way there. We’ll file a claim against Austria right here in California.”
“It sounds like a long shot,” I said.
“David killed Goliath,” Randy said.
Judith killed Holofernes, too, I thought. I felt a strange and distant revulsion. Whatever it took, I would fight to have our dignity restored and the painting returned.
In the shadow of the Hofburg Palace, where Lipizzan horses still dance for tourists, tens of thousands of visitors troop through the royal gardens and up the grand staircase in the Belvedere galleries to see the new show.
Klimt’s Women opens one month after Maria Altmann files her claim against the Republic of Austria in a California courthouse. The faces of long-gone women look out from the sumptuous canvases stolen from haunted palaces and broken lives: Adele Bloch-Bauer, Amalie Zuckerkandl, Mada Primavesi, Friederike Maria Beer, and more than fifty others.
“The Belvedere curators and the Austrian National Gallery are no better than a gangster’s moll, parading around after a bloody robbery, with jewelry that she insists the victims gave her as a present,” writes a British culture critic.
“If they mean to shame us into surrendering the fight, they are wrong,” Hubertus Czernin writes. “This has only shown us the cruel beauty of their injustice. Art may belong to the ages, but it does not belong to its thieves.”
MARIA
2004
Randy staked everything on me. He quit his job, rallied a group of wealthy Americans to support my case, and put us both on television for interviews. Month after month, year after year, Austria sent their lawyers to face off against us in American courts.
“You say you’re American one day, and the next day you say you’re Austrian,” one of their lawyers said to me on the steps of the Santa Monica courthouse. “I think you should make up your mind.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” I told him. “I will have my aunt’s portrait returned to me.”
“You embarrass yourself, Mrs. Altmann. You’re an embarrassment to the people of Austria. We no longer recognize you as a citizen.”
“I have heard worse,” I told him. “I have survived far worse than your scorn.”
When the time came, I watched Randy carry two enormous briefcases up to the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. He was carrying my ghosts and my spirits. They were calling to him, too, now, urging him on.
“You’ve brought us this far, and I know you won’t fail,” I said to him.
I watched from the courthouse gallery as Randy argued our case. I thought of my cousin Eva crouched in a dark potato cellar when Nazi soldiers came to the farm where she’
d hidden during the war; of my uncle Ferdinand, who’d died alone in Zurich; of my aunt Adele, who’d once been the queen of Vienna.
I remembered falling across the barbed wire with Fritz, and the way the farmer had vanished into the night.
We were always alone unless we stood up for one another.
“Now we wait,” Randy said when it was over. He was drenched in sweat, as if he’d run a marathon. The Supreme Court steps were behind him, like the rings of heaven or hell. “There’s nothing left to do. You go home, I’ll go home. And we’ll wait.”
I knew how to wait, I told him. I had waited a long time for Fritz.
Walter Frodl, director of the Belvedere National Gallery, calls a meeting in his conference room on a wintry morning.
“Maria Altmann has won the right to sue the government for our Adele,” he tells his gathered staff.
The room buzzes; the curators’ faces are a mix of horror and confusion. The day is a whirl of news reporters, cameramen, and bright lights. Austrians who’ve never given the portrait a second thought flood the Belvedere, some still carrying the news story in their hands.
As closing time nears and dusk is falling, Hubertus Czernin slowly makes his way out of the museum elevator with his wife and daughters. He is out of breath when he lowers himself onto a bench in front of the portrait of Adele.
“You won, Daddy?” his youngest girl asks. “Is that why we’re here, because you won?”
Hubertus touches his daughter’s soft, blond hair. The doctor’s reports have been grave, and he knows he cannot fight his illness much longer.
“We’ve almost won, my darling. We’re very close. When we win, the painting will leave Austria for good.”
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