The Lady in Gold (40 page)

Arnold Schoenberg in a quintet in Austria,
1900
. The composer was also a painter. (
Illustration Credit 61.2
)

Randol was a passionate advocate of Holocaust reparations. His grandfather Schoenberg had fled Berlin in 1933. In October 1938, Randol liked to remind people, the composer presciently warned of an approaching apocalypse. “
Is there room in the world for almost 7,000,000 people?” Arnold Schoenberg wrote from Los Angeles. “Are they condemned to doom? Will they become extinct? Famished? Butchered?” As Randol pointed out, few had listened.

Like Austria's Children of Tantalus, Randol's most potent inheritance was history. If Austrians saw their murky past in shades of gray, Randol, like most Americans, saw the Nazi era in black-and-white. He believed there were still battles left to fight. Restitution law was one of his passions. He found it outrageous that Austria had largely evaded the return of stolen Jewish property. Maria's case had a strong narrative—a huge asset in the courtroom. It was also a narrative Randol believed in. He offered to take Maria's case on a contingency basis.

Randol's boss agreed that the Bloch-Bauer Klimt affair was compelling. But even if you spend years and years getting a U.S. court to recognize the claim, he asked, who will force Austria to honor the judgment? U.S. marshals? Randol was determined. If he had to, he would pursue the case on his own. Thus began an unlikely pairing: Randol and Maria, the untried young attorney and the aging Vienna belle, versus Austria.

Hubertus Czernin now had his own book publishing company,
Czernin Verlag, above the Braunerhof Café. As carriage horses trotted over the cobblestones between the Imperial Palace and the Spanish Riding School, Hubertus sat in the café, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an air of
bohemian elegance, and plotting the books for his
Library of Theft,
a history of Nazi art theft in Vienna.

Hubertus sat beneath the portrait of his literary hero, the Viennese playwright
Thomas Bernhard, who had sipped coffee at the Braunerhof with
Paul Wittgenstein, a nephew of the philosopher. Like Hubertus, Bernhard devoted his career to exposing Austria's refusal to come to terms with its past. In his 1979
Eve of Retirement,
Bernhard mocked a real-life Nazi judge who became a postwar politician. Bernhard's fictionalized judge dons an SS uniform on Himmler's birthday and has sex with his sister, declaring that “in a thousand years the Germans will hate the Jews, in a million years.” In
The German Lunch Table,
a modern-day elderly housewife returns from the market and complains to her husband that “no matter what kind of noodle package you choose, out crawl nothing but
Nazis.” “
Nazis in the soup,” she keeps saying. “Always Nazis instead of noodles.”

Bernhard inspired great prestige abroad—and furious opposition at home. Asked to write a play for the fiftieth anniversary of the
Anschluss in 1988, Bernhard initially refused, saying Austria should instead mount plaques reading “
Judenfrei,
” or “free of Jews,” on buildings stolen from Jews.

Bernhard called the play he eventually agreed to write
Heldenplatz,
Heroes' Square, after the plaza where Vienna welcomed Hitler. Word of the script leaked out.
Former chancellor
Bruno Kreisky called for the premiere to be canceled.
President
Kurt Waldheim—then the subject of a government investigation of whether he was a war criminal—said the play would be an insult to Austria. On November 4, 1988, as protesters milled outside, the play opened with a scene depicting the Schusters, a Jewish couple who returned to postwar Vienna. Frau Schuster is preparing for lunch in an apartment overlooking Heldenplatz. Her husband, an Oxford-trained mathematician, has persuaded her to move back to Austria. But she's a nervous wreck. She keeps imagining she can still hear the crowds chanting “Sieg Heil!” to Hitler. Frau Schuster collapses, dead. Her husband then jumps from the window.

The Burgtheater exploded with cheers, boos, catcalls, and chants of “Sieg Heil!” Bernhard had put the divided family of Austria onstage.

Bernhard was ostracized as a
Nestbeschmutzer,
or “nest soiler,” someone who dared to dig up the dirt of the past.
His fragile health collapsed. He died three months later in an assisted suicide, leaving a will that forbade the publication of his work in Austria. His martyrdom was not in vain. Like Freud and Klimt, Bernhard had publicly lifted the veil on the tortured
Austrian psyche, inspiring other truth seekers to come forward—but serving as a cautionary tale of the potential cost.

Like Bernhard, Hubertus got hate mail. But, with a happy marriage and three young daughters, Hubertus lacked Bernhard's caustic anger, though he shared his fragile constitution.
Hubertus had been diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis, a rare, dangerously unpredictable disease.

Hubertus embraced his mission with mortal urgency. The Austrian files were a hidden trove of historical demons.
It turned out that Vienna's eye-catching icon, the Prater Ferris Wheel, had belonged to a Jewish man who died in Auschwitz. The last surviving child of
Theodor Herzl, the father of
Zionism, had died at Theresienstadt. Even old tax records narrated the final desperate minutes of a lost world.

Perhaps stolen paintings weren't the worst tragedy of
World War II. But to Hubertus Czernin, the art was a publicly visible symbol of Austria's failure to indemnify its murdered and wronged Jewish citizens. Lost lives could never be recovered. But paintings could be returned. Hubertus could do little about his compatriots' lack of repentance. But he could combat the historical amnesia that fueled it.

As he scoured Vienna's dusty archives in search of the documents needed to prove the Bloch-Bauer case, Hubertus turned to Belvedere director
Gerbert Frodl.

Frodl had a provenance as complicated as any Austrian painting. He had been born in 1940 to
Walter Frodl, a curator for Hitler's final obsession, the Führermuseum in Linz.
Belvedere staff claimed to have seen a wartime photograph of Walter Frodl raising his hand in the Nazi salute from the back of a truck loaded with Aryanized treasures stolen from the crates of fleeing Austrian Jews. In 1965, Walter Frodl became president of the Federal Monument Office. He was repeatedly accused of impeding attempts to recover art. But by the time he died in 1994, he had managed to sanitize his résumé of its Nazi past so well that reputable art historians co-authored books with him.

What about the reports that his father looted art? Vienna journalist
Barbara Petsch asked Gerbert Frodl. “
I don't believe he would do something dishonorable, certainly not something involved with art theft,” Frodl was quoted as replying.

Curiously, Frodl had published a Belvedere book in 1995 that said the Belvedere acquired the gold portrait of Adele in 1936 and the second portrait of Adele in 1928—well before the
Anschluss—“
through a bequest from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.” It said the landscapes were acquired through separate “bequests.” These were strange inaccuracies, since Frodl presumably had access to all the original documentation. Frodl told a reporter that in the past, if a painting was listed as a “donation,” few questions were asked. “
We knew a lot, but it wasn't really conscious knowledge,” he said.

The Bloch-Bauer donation, Frodl insisted, was based on Adele's will. The museum was holding the paintings in accordance with Adele's wishes.

In Los Angeles, Randol was making overtures to Viennese officials, but he wasn't getting far. Someone pointed Randol toward Hubertus Czernin.

Hubertus was now seriously ill. Austria's dashing investigative reporter couldn't even struggle up the stone stairs of the Federal Monument Office to ask for archives. He worked with difficulty, in great pain.

He no longer found the stonewalling of Austrian officials amusing. Now he was as impatient as Randol. “
Maybe you do understand, now, that from time to time I want to sue the whole republic! They play games—with you, with the heirs,” Czernin wrote Randol in a furious e-mail on December 29, 1998. “I asked Frodl yesterday if he could fax to me Adele's last will. He didn't want to, because ‘If I do, it will be sent around the world.' And that's the reason I'll send HIM around the world.”

Hubertus had moles in the Vienna archives. Adele's will was key. Randol believed it was a nonbinding request and that Ferdinand had paid for the paintings, making him, in Austria's patriarchal society, their legal owner. After World War II, it was difficult to argue that Ferdinand would have given them to Austria. In January 1999, a fax from Czernin began to scroll into Randol's office. It was Adele's will. Czernin found more damning evidence:
Erich Führer's letter transferring Adele's portrait to the Belvedere, signed “Heil Hitler.”

That same month, a Vienna Advisory Council on art restitution, the Beirat, recommended that Austria return 241 pieces of the Rothschild collection, which it had long insisted were “donated,” to the Rothschild heirs.

Things were changing.

——

That March, Maria's spirits soared as she flew over the Alps, her resolve strengthening with the sight of the massive peaks and luminous glaciers. She had been invited to speak at a restitution conference. Life was picking up for this octogenarian. She had a mission now—a score to settle with history.

When the taxi stopped at Karl-Lueger-Platz, Maria was overwhelmed with nostalgia. Here was the composers' park, where the young Maria had wandered disconsolately while Fritz dallied with a married woman. At the Stubenbastei, Maria stopped at the front door of her long-ago home, the peaceful haven where she had climbed into her father's arms and inhaled the smell of his leather chair. The concrete Roman legionnaire with wings on his helmet and snakes at his sternum still held vigil above her doorway. She thought of ringing her doorbell. But what was the point? There was nothing left. The names on the apartments belonged to strangers.

The Austrians had shamelessly stolen her family's life and offered no contrition. Even Maria's favorite actress,
Paula Wessely, who had made her weep in
Liebelei,
had remained in Austria to entertain Nazis.
Her
Gestapo minder,
Felix Landau, was barely punished, Maria would learn. He escaped American detention and lived for years in Bavaria as an interior designer. He finally got a life sentence in Germany, but was freed after ten years. Landau was a free man in Vienna the last decade of his life; he died in 1983. Former Nazi governor
Baldur von Schirach had served only twenty years, and lived long enough to be interviewed by
David Frost.

Maria hailed a cab. The Ringstrasse curved near Adele and Ferdinand's house, which still housed national railway offices now of Austria. The cab stopped at the Belvedere. Maria climbed the grand staircase until she came face-to-face with Klimt's golden Adele in the grand salon.

Maria remembered listening to Adele hold forth as famous men listened. So intimidating to a little girl. Now Maria looked at Adele's pale face with a lifetime of understanding, and saw the vulnerability and discontent. Maria saw her eagerness, the aspirations never realized. Now her aunt seemed poignant. Maria asked someone to photograph her in front of Adele. As the camera flashed, a young guard warned that photos were prohibited. “
This is my aunt!” Maria retorted angrily. “This painting belongs to my family.”

The young man regarded Maria with respectful curiosity. Museum
guides never explained this enigmatic woman. The guard asked: Who was she?

When Maria met
Hubertus Czernin, he was terribly ill. Yet he was so intelligent and drily funny, so
charming.

Hubertus arranged a meeting with the culture minister,
Elisabeth Gehrer. Maria told Gehrer she would consider a negotiated solution.

Maria would later testify that she also met with Frodl.

She said he took her to a café near St. Stephansplatz. “Now that we are alone, let's say what's in our hearts,” she quoted him as saying. Maria said she told Frodl they were not truly alone, she and other heirs had a lawyer—but he should speak frankly. She said Frodl told her: “Look, we have enough landscapes. We can spare landscapes, but just don't take the portraits away.”

Frodl would later deny this exchange took place.

Randol got a free ticket to Europe that April by accepting an invitation to appear on a German game show,
I Carry a Big Name,
a sort of European
What's My Line
in which contestants guess a panelist's famous relative. Jet-lagged, Randol sat next to a great-grandson of opera singer
Enrico Caruso and a grandson of German writer
Heinrich Mann, who dressed like a rock star and said he wanted to found an “Island of Love” off Brazil.

Randol made it through the show with his college German, and took the next plane to Vienna. He carried an eighty-five-page argument for the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts to present to the Beirat council. But in June, the Austrian panel recommended against returning the Klimt paintings. It said only sixteen Klimt drawings of Adele and twenty pieces of Ferdinand's porcelain should be restituted. The decision was far from unanimous. One panelist resigned in protest.

The Belvedere “is not the legal owner of these paintings,” Maria wrote to the Beirat. We “are keenly aware of the Gold Portrait's importance as a national treasure. Once the Beirat decides to recognize our legal right to the paintings, we would then be in a position to work out a way with you that leaves the portrait in Vienna.”

Maria never got an answer to the letter, or any others she wrote to Austrian officials. “
In the old Vienna, people kissed the hand, they answered letters,” she would grumble.

——

Randol was furious. “The recommendation of the Beirat is based on lies,” he wrote Hubertus in a scorching e-mail. “The world now knows that the Klimt paintings are Nazi-looted art. No amount of whitewashing, or legalistic argumentation can erase that fact.”