The Lady in Gold (28 page)

When Hitler arrived, Elisabeth, refined and trusting, remained in Vienna to care for her dying child.

The Lederer name might never have been joined with the Bachofen-Echt barons if
August Lederer had not been so successful. When Elisabeth met Baron Wolfgang Bachofen-Echt, he was an heir to one of Austria's biggest beer breweries, the Nusdorf. The Bachofens had only become barons in 1906, and their title was abolished after World War I. But they still used it.

The Bachofen-Echt brothers were drinking buddies of Elisabeth's brother, Erich, and Gustav Rinesch, Maria Bloch-Bauer's old admirer. Handsome Wolfgang was in no rush to marry. He and his brothers were playboys. Even in a beer-loving country, the family had managed to drain the finances of the family brewery.

Elisabeth Lederer was conspicuously eligible. She was from a wealthy family with a stately town home and a lovely
schloss,
or great house, on the outskirts of Vienna. She was also beautiful.

Elisabeth had a Jewish surname. But that could be remedied by marriage. By then intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was hardly rare among the urban elite. There were advantages to marrying Jewish girls. In a patriarchal Austria in which the eldest son, or even a nephew, was still often given control of the inheritance, Jewish fathers willed substantial sums to their daughters.

The high-minded Klimt protégée was no match for the well-practiced charms of rugged Wolfgang.
Elisabeth left the Israelite community to convert to Wolfgang's Protestant Helvetian Church and marry him on July 17, 1921.

“
Wolfgang did not marry the beautiful Lisl for the Lederer money,” his friend Gustav Rinesch wrote, adding, “Of course, the money was no hindrance.”

August dutifully bailed out the brewery and installed the couple in a well-appointed building on lovely Jacquingasse, facing the Belvedere gardens.

They finally had a child in 1934. But little August Anton had serious health problems from birth. When Hitler marched into Vienna, the child was very ill.

From the moment they arrived, Elisabeth had an “
insane fear” of the Nazis, Rinesch wrote. Her husband found himself saddled with a prominent Jewish wife.

It could hardly have been reassuring that Wolfgang's brother Eberhard immediately applied to become an SS officer. To prove his loyalty, Eberhard noted on his application that he had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1933, when it was illegal, and that he had become a brownshirt in 1934.

As Elisabeth struggled with these chilling realities, her crippled little boy died on July 5, a few days before the seventeenth anniversary of her ill-conceived marriage to Wolfgang. Elisabeth collapsed. At the cemetery, “
the stricken mother refused any attempts to console her, and didn't want to leave the grave of her child,” Rinesch recalled. Wolfgang was more decisive.
On August 17, he unilaterally divorced Elisabeth in a Nazi court.

Wolfgang may have kept a secret from Elisabeth: he too had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1933. Rinesch said Wolfgang was terribly anguished by Elisabeth's plight.

If so, it was too late for regrets.

Wolfgang now received the title to his wife's shares in the beer brewery and the building on Jacquingasse, though Elisabeth was allowed to remain there, at least for now. Elisabeth had lost everything.

For a time, Elisabeth was simply in shock. She sat behind the long silk drapes at her elegant home at Jacquingasse, looking over the Belvedere gardens and pondering her fate as a racial outcast in a country that no longer existed, the sensitive, doe-eyed girl in her Klimt portrait a fragile relic of a gentler era.

As the purple lilacs bloomed in the terrifying Vienna spring of April 1939, Elisabeth sat down and began a memoir of her idyllic, privileged childhood with Gustav Klimt. The personal reflection must have provided an island of peace, but that may not have been her main motive. Elisabeth was desperately afraid.

Now Klimt's roguish reputation would come in handy.

“
My memories of Gustav Klimt go back to my earliest childhood, at the time when the consciousness of the ego and thoughts were being formed,” Elisabeth began, in the Freudian lexicon of her childhood.

When she was just learning to speak, she wrote, she would crow with delight when she heard the deep baritone that announced Klimt's arrival. The bearlike Klimt lifted her to his shoulders and spun her around until she was dizzy with joy.

When Elisabeth was older, she wandered through Klimt's studio, playing with his cats, Peter and Murl, while Klimt painted a portrait of her mother. Klimt let Elisabeth play with one of his little kittens. How she cried when Klimt found the kitten a home!

She called him “Uncle.”

At elementary school, Elisabeth's teacher was impressed when she told him that Gustav Klimt had already taught her to read. Klimt told her stories by
Confucius and
Lao-tzu, and introduced her to Japanese and Chinese art.

Klimt defended Elisabeth when she wrote her own fantasy stories instead of class assignments. “I won't let her become a little monkey, she should keep her creativity!” Klimt declared in an argument with Serena, before storming out of the house.

“I was certainly not to become a little bourgeois. He saw to that,” Elisabeth wrote.

One day Klimt took her to the Gauguin exhibition at the old Miethke Gallery, where Klimt had exhibited his erotic drawings that were denounced as pornography. Gauguin's Tahiti paintings were “a whole new world,” Elisabeth wrote. “And while the people around us criticized the Impressionists, even as a very young girl, I had the feeling I ‘stood above the mob,'
as [Klimt] himself put it, and a conscious identification with him was developing inside of me.”

Klimt took her to an exhibition of Cézanne, one of his great influences. An art historian told Klimt that “the little one should maybe wait outside, for she would be bored.” “You! She knows more about Cézanne than you do!” Klimt retorted dismissively.

When Elisabeth showed Klimt a tiny ceramic dancer she made from a piece of clay, “he decided immediately that I should take up sculpting.” She gave her parents the ceramic dancer for Christmas.

Her father's brother smirked maliciously: “Well, well, bohemian.” The uncle turned to Elisabeth's father. “I would really suppress these inclinations,” he said. “I think we have demonstrated quite enough patience.” Serena rushed out of the room, furious. Elisabeth asked her mother to explain these tensions, but “I was rebuffed,” Elisabeth wrote. “She said I was too young to understand.”

The sculptor
Heinrich Zita was Elisabeth's art instructor. When she unveiled her first relief in 1908, sculptor
Rudolf Weyr came to look at it with Klimt. Weyr “shook Klimt's hand, grabbed his shoulders, seemed very moved and said passionately, his words still ringing in my ears, ‘You can really see the family resemblance.' ”

Soon, “Papa categorically told Mama that he forbade her to go to Uncle's studio, and that within the family there was already too much talk about me,” Elisabeth wrote.

They went anyway. One day Elisabeth fell asleep there on a divan, and “when I woke up, [Klimt] was there, with a married lady that was part of the circle of the friends of my parents. His behavior didn't leave any doubt of his feelings for this known beautiful woman.” Elisabeth burst into tears.

Klimt took her in his arms. “Who do you really love?” Elisabeth asked Klimt. “Your mother, you silly girl,” Klimt replied.

At school Elisabeth defended Klimt against a “malicious remark” by a daughter of the
Baron Gutmann et Gelse, who “told me openly that the whole world knew whose daughter I was. Her parents were convinced of it, she said.”

This suspicion caused tension even in her own family, Elisabeth wrote. When she got older, her paternal grandmother died, leaving Elisabeth a substantial sum. But her father renounced the inheritance. “That's how my suspicion gradually became a legitimate conviction”—that Klimt was in fact her father, she wrote.

When she was fifteen, Klimt convinced her mother to allow her to
draw from nude models at the Kunstgewerbeschule, just off the Stubenbastei. Professors objected to exposing a girl to nude models, but they deferred to Klimt. Her professors watched her work, and one day one remarked to the others, “completely openly, ‘You can see the influence of the father.' ”

Here her association with Klimt was not a scandal but a status symbol. “Some scholars asked timidly, and with true admiration, about Klimt. And sometimes I had to tell about his opinions on other artists. When Uncle came to visit me there one day, there was a real commotion, as if God himself had fallen down from heaven.”

When Klimt finally painted Elisabeth's portrait, she was treated to “months of yelling and cursing.”

“It was a joy to listen to him. He threw down his pencil many times and said, ‘You should never paint people who are too close to you.' ” Klimt argued with Serena, “and he yelled in his deep beautiful baritone, ‘I draw my girl as I like, and that's final!' ”

Klimt painted Elisabeth for three years, “the most beautiful and instructive hours of my life.” Finally, her mother took the painting and loaded it in her car. Klimt came to see the painting hanging in the Lederer home. “It's still not her,” he mused.

“When I look back now, every word seems meaningful to me,” Elisabeth wrote.

Elisabeth handed over this deeply personal affidavit, the most detailed existing account of Klimt's private life, to the Reich authorities on racial genealogy. It would have gone far to unravel the mystery of the artist's
psyche—had it not been delivered under duress, to Nazi authorities, in an attempt to protect her from deportation to a concentration camp.

The portrait of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt by Gustav Klimt,
1914
–16. (
Illustration Credit 40.1
)

She included photographs given to her by
Gustav Ucicky, an acknowledged son of Klimt, to establish a sibling resemblance. She was aided by the fact that Ucicky, too, was seeking legal recognition as Klimt's son.

Elisabeth's mother, Serena, signed a sworn affidavit testifying that Klimt, not her husband August, was the true father of her daughter.

The next step was examination, not by a physician, but by architect
Paul Schultze-Naumburg. He was a proponent of eugenics, the pseudoscience that purported to study the genetic basis of race, and had given the world the expression “lowbrow,” for the supposedly lower foreheads of southern Europeans and Slavs that were said to denote lesser intelligence.

Elisabeth's handwriting was examined. Her sculptures were scrutinized.
According to a perhaps apocryphal account by
Gustav Rinesch, the final
proof of paternity rested on a physical anomaly of Klimt, who he said was born missing a rib, a condition purportedly shared by Ucicky and Elisabeth. In March 1940, Schultze-Naumburg announced that Elisabeth's art evinced no “
Jewish characteristics.”

“If the fully Jewish Lederer was the father it would be absolutely incomprehensible how it was possible that, in her artistic works, there is no expression of a purely Jewish nature,” he pronounced. The only explanation was “non-Jewish descent,” he wrote, signing his name above a stamp of a swastika.

The utopian generation of turn-of-the-century Vienna was being reclassified by the bureaucrats of the new dystopia.

Elisabeth had been fleeced.

Her jewelry was taken and sold in 1940 at the Dorotheum, the grand European auction house, which was now little more than a Nazi pawnshop. Her former husband now owned her home.

Her mother had fled to Budapest after authorities seized her passport. Serena had failed to get back her precious Klimts. “
Why must it be the paintings?” Serena wrote, in a January 1940 appeal from the Schwarzenberg Sanatorium in Budapest, where she lay ill.

Eberhard Bachofen-Echt, one of Elisabeth's former brothers-in-law, had been accepted into the SS in February 1939, and he proudly donned his crisply tailored uniform with its tall leather boots and military cap. He volunteered for the German invasion of Poland.

In March 1940, Elisabeth finally obtained her “certificate of origin.” Based on the evidence, it said, “the examinee's descent from Gustav Klimt is not improbable.”
Elisabeth was declared a
Mischling,
a mongrel, of the first degree.