Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  The art and furniture owned by Gretl and Käthe were a different matter. The sisters were free to take them so long as they received the permission of the Central Office for Monuments Protection, which administered Austria’s cultural protection laws. This office was an inconsequential, ill-funded organization through most of the 1930s, largely ignored by those wishing to take art out of Austria. Following the Anschluss, it rapidly grew in size and significance because refugees had to secure its approval before leaving. Whereas it had been accustomed to one hundred applications a year, in 1938 it received 10,500.

  The Gallias’ Waldmüllers were most vulnerable—not just because Waldmüller was generally accepted as one of Austria’s great artists but because he was among Hitler’s favorites, leading him to become the Austrian artist most pillaged by the Nazis. Gretl and Käthe had to decide whether to reveal the existence of their portraits in July 1938, when they submitted inventories in accordance with the Ordinance for the Registration of Jewish Property. While Käthe’s list of paintings does not survive, Gretl’s list is in Austria’s National Archives. Like many other refugees, Gretl did what she could to diminish her valuations. Rather than have her pictures appraised by an expert, she took them to a general valuer. Although her portrait was signed and dated by Waldmüller, Gretl claimed it was a copy of one of his pictures, and the valuer accepted this attribution, significantly reducing her departure tax. While Waldmüller’s standard portraits were worth 5,000 reichsmarks, Gretl’s painting was valued at 66 marks.

  Otto Kallir, the owner of Vienna’s leading modern art gallery, was one refugee who manipulated the process again when he required the permission of the Monuments Office. Exploiting his exceptional connections in Vienna’s art establishment, Kallir had his collection vetted by Bruno Grimschitz, the deputy director of the Österreichische Galerie, who had just been made a member of the Nazi Party in recognition of his support for it when the party was still illegal. Kallir expected favorable treatment from Grimschitz because of their long association and received it even though Grimschitz was set on securing further advancement under the Nazis. While Grimschitz denied permission for Kallir to take a few Biedermeier pictures—“These we must sacrifice to the Gods,” Grimschitz declared—he allowed Kallir to take much more valuable, old works. He also allowed him to take all of his twentieth-century pictures in accordance with the Monuments Office’s usual policy that these pictures did not yet form part of Austria’s cultural heritage.

  Gretl did not enjoy such connections. While Grimschitz was a close friend of her uncle Paul Hamburger before the Anschluss, Gretl felt in no position to exploit this friendship when she sought the Monuments Office’s permission in August. She probably also knew that Grimschitz had become an eager agent of the Nazi state, at the forefront of pillaging art from Jewish collections. Instead, her collection was vetted through the ordinary process by the office’s second-in-command, Josef Zykan, who identified the painting as a Waldmüller and denied permission for its export.

  The only remaining basis on which Gretl might be able to take the painting was by claiming it as a family portrait, which meant it would have depicted a Jew. Such paintings enjoyed a partial exemption from the Monuments Office’s controls on the basis that the sitter’s Jewishness tainted the art. The only pictures that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer thought the Nazis might release to him after he fled were four family portraits, including Klimt’s two paintings of Adele. The only one that Ferdinand regained was an Oskar Kokoschka painting that the Nazis returned to him in Switzerland in 1944—an extraordinary instance of art restitution in the midst of war.

  Just as Gretl sent Annelore to the Hahngasse with cream disguised as toothpaste when Käthe was imprisoned there, so Gretl sent her to the Monuments Office to attempt another subterfuge. As was often the case, when Anne later wrote about what happened, her account was casual, conveying nothing of the risks involved and giving no hint that she might have felt any fear. It was as if when Anne wrote her story, she could not see the magnitude of what she had done or experienced. She simply wrote: “I was told to take the paintings to the office where the clearance could be obtained. I brought them, claiming that they were my relatives.”

  This claim was risible. While the identities of Waldmüller’s sitters were unknown when Hermine and Moriz bought them, the portraits could not be family because there were so few Jews in Vienna when Waldmüller painted the pictures in 1837 and none of them were Gallias or Hamburgers. As a diligent official, Josef Zykan might have been expected to recognize Gretl’s subterfuge or at least require her to substantiate it. Instead, the painting became one of fifty cases in which the office overturned its initial refusal of permission. Zykan authorized Gretl to take the portrait on the basis that its subject was “from the family of the owner.”

  Käthe’s application was handled by another of the office’s senior staff, Otto Demus, who immigrated to Great Britain the following year for a mix of personal and political reasons. While Demus recorded that Käthe had eleven oil paintings, he did not mention her companion portrait by Waldmüller, suggesting that he did not realize she owned one. As this portrait was unsigned, Demus may not have recognized it was by Waldmüller. Because he did not inspect Gretl’s pictures, he had no reason to expect it was the pair to her signed painting. Yet a letter written by Gretl a few years later indicates that the office initially refused export permission for both portraits. Anne similarly recalled that she regained them both. After she explained that they depicted family, Zykan declared, “The old Jews could go.”

  Klimt was the other artist collected by Moriz and Hermine whose work was celebrated in Austria after the Anschluss. The first book on Klimt in over twenty years was published in Vienna in 1942. The city’s new gauleiter, Baldur von Schirach, initiated the biggest-ever Klimt exhibition, staged at the Secession in 1943. Yet even Klimt’s largest pictures did not command the same prices as much smaller works by Waldmüller. Many Nazis also abhorred Klimt because of his modernity and dependence on Jewish patronage. The Secession responded by trying to hide these links—retitling Klimt’s first painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer as A Lady with a Gold Background and his second portrait of Adele as Lady Standing.

  This mixed regard for Klimt was patent when refugees wanted to leave with his work. While the Gestapo and the Internal Revenue Office often seized his paintings and drawings, they looked on his work as just another form of property that could be realized to pay the taxes that the Nazis imposed on Jews. The Monuments Office never displayed much interest in Klimt and, even though Austria’s cultural heritage protection laws applied to artists who had been dead for twenty years—and Klimt had died in January 1918—the office seems to have ignored his work altogether in 1938, perhaps still viewing him as a contemporary artist outside its domain. In keeping with this approach, Otto Demus allowed Käthe to take the portrait of Hermine. She did not need to make anything of Hermine’s Jewish origins or identify the painting as a family portrait. The export of the Klimt was as simple as the wastepaper baskets and doormats that Gretl and Käthe took, too.

  The Hoffmann collection was similarly straightforward. The Monuments Office ignored the furniture, treating it as ordinary household goods rather than as works of art. While the office paid more attention to the sisters’ silver, it approved its export. Despite the Nazis’ admiration for Hoffmann, which led them to appoint him a Special Commissioner for Viennese Arts and Crafts and commission him to remodel Vienna’s German embassy into a Haus der Wehrmacht for army officers, the Monuments Office regarded Hoffmann’s work as contemporary and hence not within its domain.

  The Nazis took a different approach to jewelry, prohibiting refugees from taking their collections with them. While Gretl’s collection was nowhere near as spectacular as that owned by Käthe, it was still very valuable. The list of the thirty best pieces that Gretl submitted in accordance with the Ordinance for the Registration of Jewish Property started with a diamond and platinum ring, followed by a gold handbag decor
ated with three diamonds and four rubies, a long pearl chain, a pair of gold earrings studded with pearls and seven small diamonds, and a gold, diamond, and pearl ring. Despite revealing her ownership of these pieces, Gretl hoped to escape with them. She assumed the Nazis would not miss her jewelry if they could not find it.

  First she needed a safe place in Vienna in case the Gestapo raided her apartment. She had to find someone she trusted who was not in jeopardy under the Nürnberg Laws. She had few choices because most of Gretl’s Aryan friends abandoned her after the Anschluss. Carl Moll, who became an ardent Nazi, was among them. While Moll has become notorious for pillaging the collection of his stepdaughter, Alma Mahler, after she fled Vienna with her third husband, the Jewish writer Franz Werfel, his treatment of the Gallias was also shocking. Even though Moriz and Hermine had been his biggest patrons and he was the godfather and “Uncle Carl” of Erni, Gretl, and Käthe, Moll severed all contact with the Gallias.

  Three sisters—Assanta, Marlene, and Gilda Moll, who were unrelated to Carl—behaved very differently. They had met Gretl at Bad Hall, a spa near Linz, when Gretl took Annelore there in 1925 to recuperate from whooping cough, and continued to see Gretl in Vienna, where they soon became honorary aunts of Annelore. Far from the Anschluss putting an end to this friendship, it brought the Gallias and Molls closer together. When Gretl asked their help, the Molls agreed immediately, but thought it too risky for Gretl to come to their house because their caretaker was a Nazi who might report her visit. Gretl probably thought it would be similarly hazardous for the Molls to visit her apartment. They agreed it was safest to transfer the jewelry in public rather than private. They met on the street.

  It was then even more of a challenge for Gretl to get her collection out of the country. One of the best conduits for small items was the diplomatic bags of foreign embassies. Just before Sigmund Freud left Austria in June 1938, one of his great admirers, Maria Bonaparte, the wife of Prince George of Greece, had Freud’s collection of gold coins taken across the border in the bag of the Greek embassy. Gretl turned to a member of the Bulgarian embassy, which occupied the ground floor of the Wohllebengasse and so was one of her tenants. When he agreed to take Gretl’s collection to the Gallias’ most trusted friend in Switzerland, Dr. Emil Widmer, the risks were high. While Maria Bonaparte could ensure that the Greek diplomats delivered Freud’s gold, Gretl had no power over the Bulgarian official. If he made off with her collection, she had no redress because she was acting illegally. Gretl was lucky. Apart from one small diamond flower, he delivered her entire collection to Dr. Widmer.

  The conventional image of the refugee would have Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore jumping on and off moving trains, sailing in creaky boats, crossing borders at night. Yet there have always been refugees like the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who departed Soviet Russia in November 1917 wearing spats and a derby, traveled to the Crimea Sea in a first-class sleeping compartment, then learned to fox-trot while sailing to Marseilles on a Cunard liner. Until November 1938, many refugees, including Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore, also fled first class because the Nazis allowed them to spend as much as they liked on their passage but otherwise stopped them from taking their money with them.

  The standard means of departure was by train. The practice was for refugees to go to the station alone, since it was too dangerous for family or friends to accompany them. Erni and Mizzi duly stayed away. Having already put themselves in jeopardy by safeguarding Gretl’s jewelry, the three Moll sisters did so again by going to Vienna’s Westbahnhof to bid farewell to Gretl and Annelore on November 12. As Anne recalled, she was heartbroken that Käthe was not with them. Her story implies that Gretl and she begged Käthe to accompany them but Käthe refused because her lawyer thought he was on the verge of persuading the Gestapo to return her jewelry and allow her to take it out of the country.

  Gretl was also set on leaving with more of her property, spurred by her fear of being unable to support Annelore and herself in Australia, having never worked before. She had a small collection of 100-franc coins from Monaco—typical pieces of investment gold—that she probably acquired in return for selling some of her other property as she prepared to flee, just as Freud acquired his collection. As Gretl explained to me when I was a boy, those were the coins she covered with fabric and sewed onto her traveling coat in place of the original buttons.

  The risks again were high. Freud’s eldest son, Martin, recalled that before he left Austria in May 1938, he was told that a Jew had been taken from a train and shot because stamps had been found in his pocketbook. Martin duly gave his remaining money to a friend in Vienna rather than attempt to escape with it. Other refugees chose to test the Nazis’ controls. Women, who often took charge of packing, were particularly ready to do so. Fanny Kallir, the wife of the art dealer Otto Kallir, was one of them. When the Kallirs fled to Switzerland with their two children in June 1938, Fanny hid a small collection of gold coins in a basket under her daughter’s hair ribbons without telling Otto. Although Gretl and Annelore were searched before they crossed the border, the guards failed to notice anything unusual about Gretl’s buttons.

  Their destination was St. Gallen in Switzerland, because Dr. Widmer lived there. When they arrived on November 13, Uncle Emil, as Annelore called him, was at the station to greet them. That afternoon, Annelore wrote letters thanking the three people who had done the most for her in Vienna—Father Elzear, Anni Wiesbauer, and her cello teacher, Lucie Weiss. She also began a new diary with typical economy, describing her escape in a single two-line sentence. Just as she did not express delight or relief at putting Vienna behind her, she expressed neither excitement nor fear at what was to come.

  As Gretl and she had no idea if they would return to Europe, they had every reason to treat their journey as an unintended holiday, an occasion to see more of the world. Gretl had been to Switzerland; Annelore had not. Accustomed to pursuing the best of culture and nature when they traveled, they did so on this trip. They began by inspecting St. Gallen’s rococo cathedral and viewing the surrounding countryside of Alpenzell with Dr. Widmer. Then Annelore went by herself to St. Gallen’s New Museum before going with Gretl to the railway station to meet Käthe’s train. When she failed to alight, Gretl started to panic, only to discover Käthe in the last carriage still organizing her many bags.

  The timing of the final negotiations between the Gestapo and Käthe’s lawyer, Stephan Lehner, over her jewelry could hardly have been less auspicious. On November 12, when Käthe was still in Vienna, a meeting about the “Jewish question” chaired by Göring in Berlin announced new anti-Semitic measures. The most bizarre cast Jews as responsible for Kristallnacht. It attributed all the Nazis’ murder, plunder, and destruction to the killing in Paris of a German diplomat by a Jewish boy whose family was among thousands of Polish-born Jews in Germany whom the Nazis had forced from their homes at gunpoint and tried to deport by train, only for the Polish government to refuse them entry. As part of requiring Jews to atone for Kristallnacht, the new Judenkontribution was a fine of 1 billion reichsmarks—the equivalent of $5.3 billion today—to be paid by all Jews in four installments.

  Stephan Lehner was one of many lawyers who profited from the Anschluss. He was soon involved in the Aryanization of the property of wealthy Jews, including Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, who lived at Wohllebengasse 16. He also began acting for the Gestapo. But he represented Käthe well. Having negotiated her release from the Hahngasse, he was equally successful that November, when he secured permission for her to take her jewelry to Switzerland, so long as she bought it back at an inflated valuation fixed by an assessor employed by the Gestapo. While the nominal cost was high, the price did not matter because of Käthe’s attachment to her jewelry and because she could not take her money with her when she left Austria.

  The risks taken by Käthe in staying behind were acute. Her last three days in Vienna were at least as frightening as her arrest eight months before. To avoid being seized again, she spent these days h
iding in Lehner’s car. Because she had no way of contacting Gretl and Annelore in St. Gallen, Lehner probably let them know which train she planned to take. But when Gretl and Annelore went to the station, they still did not know whether Käthe had succeeded in escaping. Annelore’s diary contains the one hint of their fears, the only expression of their relief. “Alles in Ordnung,” she wrote after being reunited with Käthe. “Everything is all right.”

  The countries that gave transit visas to refugees fleeing Hitler in 1938 gave them very little time before requiring them to move on. When Käthe reached St. Gallen, the Swiss visas of Gretl and Annelore were good for just five more days. Annelore spent part of the first building on her knowledge of lace in St. Gallen’s Industrial Museum. She spent part of the next listening to a radio broadcast of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, the last opera she heard in Europe. Then Gretl, Käthe, and she went sightseeing for the weekend to Lucerne, Küssnacht, and Zurich. That Sunday Annelore attended mass with Käthe, another mark of how Käthe shared Annelore’s new faith more than Gretl. The following Monday they had to leave.

  Almost no one flew in 1938. The cost was too high. But many refugees had no choice if they were to get to England because they could not get visas to travel across continental Europe by land. For almost all these refugees, this first experience of small, low-flying aircraft with unpressurized cabins was a cause of excitement and fear. Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore, who flew from Zurich, were among them. In her diary, Annelore made most of the beginning of this flight when the weather was magnificent and they had views of the Alps. Fifty years later, all she remembered was how the weather deteriorated and she became sick and scared, while Gretl feared they would be arrested if they were forced to land because they did not have French visas. When they arrived, the stamps in their passports—“Landed on Condition of Direct Transit through United Kingdom to Australia”—underlined that Britain also did not want them. But its officials were much friendlier than their German and Swiss counterparts. “Nette Zoll,” Annelore noted. “Nice customs.”