The Lady in Gold (48 page)

The baroness was born in 1943, into the Protestant family of Erich's wife,
Baroness Elisabeth von Jacobs. Erich hid art above her family's ceiling when he fled. After the war, the childless Erich paid to fix their bombed-out roof and sent the baroness to a French
lycée.
When he died, she inherited his restitution claims.

The baroness pulled out a letter from
Felix Hurdes, a postwar culture minister. “Look. He says, ‘We would love to give you back your art, but if we give it to you, we have to give all the art back to everyone,' ” the baroness said.

“Does anyone really believe Adele would have given her paintings to these people if she had lived through the war?” the baroness said irately. “They returned
Adele
only because they had to! The whole world was watching the case!

“Don't you think that if they really regretted everything that happened with the Nazis, they would stop finding excuses not to return people's paintings?”

The senior legal counsel for the Austrian State,
Gottfried Toman, clung to his conviction that Adele's wishes had been violated. “She wanted a monument to herself in Austria. Now she's hanging in a museum in New York. I seriously doubt it was the intention of
Adele Bloch-Bauer for her paintings to be spread all over the world,” Toman said on a warm, golden afternoon
in October under the arched spires of the Café Central. His cheeks were pink from the sun, contrasting with his navy blue barrister's suit, set off by a gold silk tie and a tiny gold pinky ring. He had a deferential, courtly demeanor.

“
Adele was an extraordinary person in her lifetime,” Toman mused, sipping his cappuccino. “You know, if you compare the portraits of Adele, it is quite fascinating. The first portrait is very erotic, full of love and understanding. The second one is a pale, ghostly face, with tobacco-stained teeth. I think it is quite clear that at the time of the second painting, the affair was definitely over.”

Toman, too, had succumbed to the cult of Adele.

“I think Maria was Randol's greatest asset,” he said. “I'm not sure he would have won without her. She had a certain elegance, a sense of humor, a way of speaking German that people remember hearing when they were children.”

Toman still believed that someday a document or letter would surface to prove that he was right, that the paintings belonged to Austria. “The only problem we had with this case is we never found the so-called smoking gun. We both had no hard evidence,” Toman said. “He was so totally convinced that he was the only one who knew what justice was. I've never met someone so absolutely convinced he was right. It was more of a crusade than a legal battle.

“And of course, from a financial standpoint, it was the case of a lifetime,” Toman added drily.

“I had no Maria.” Toman sighed. “I had the burden of history. This was extraordinary. The position of Maria Altmann, fleeing the
Nazis, was of course terrible. But it was not relevant, from a strictly legal point of view. This is a case based on a will of 1923. This has nothing to do with the
Holocaust. Of course it was easier to argue this case behind the windshield of the terrible events of the Holocaust.”

The fact that the chairman of the panel was German-born “affected his decision-making enormously,” Toman said. “If an Austrian had been sitting in the driver's seat, it would have been different,” he said. “Many Austrians have personal guilt. But it's not like the collective guilt that Germans share.

“This was not a legal decision,” Toman mused. “It was a referendum on the events of
World War II.” And even that era was not so black-and-white, Toman said, repeating an Austrian refrain that was by now familiar. Toman's own father had faced a simple choice, “to be in the German army
or be unemployed.” His uncle had joined too. “Personally, I have the feeling that Austria felt the Nazi approach was a new approach for a new time,” Toman said. “They didn't know the evil of this regime, or they didn't want to see it. After
World War I they had lost their world. And here comes this guy who says ‘I will show you a new dawn.' Of course, he said some ugly things about the Jews. But people didn't know it would lead to the
Holocaust. Many, many people were involved with this regime, and thought it could be an advantage to the economy, and then realized, in wartime, what it meant.

“Personally, I'm glad I didn't live in this time. I don't know which way my life would have gone. Standing in line, unemployed with my kids, I don't know what I would have done.

“Do you know fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys were pressed into the SS? Not everyone who was in the Waffen SS has personal guilt. Is every one of those fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys guilty? Were they really able to make their choice? It is sometimes easy to make decisions after World War II. I don't know what my personal fate would have been. Who knows?”

Who could have guessed the history of Vienna would be told by its paintings?

Adele was no longer a beautiful enigma. Vienna, too, was being stripped of mystery, as Adele and Klimt's other stolen women changed the city's relationship with its past. Each stolen painting had a story, and each story raised pressing moral questions. Regardless of whether one believed the Bloch-Bauer Klimts should be returned, it was impossible to look at the paintings the same way again. It had been possible to avoid history. But not the talismanic images of these blameless, insulted daughters of Vienna.

The restitutions gave the paintings a potent unspoken psychological dimension, like the dream symbols of Freud. “
It stirs up a lot of things for the old people. Things they don't want to deal with,” observed
Felicitas Kunth, the new provenance director of the Dorotheum. “There's too much personal guilt.”

Artistic provenance was no longer just an investigation into the authenticity of Vienna's artistic treasures—it was a rediscovery of its past. One expert,
Sophie Lillie, wrote a Bible-sized catalogue of stolen art for Czernin's
Library of Theft,
called “What Once Was”; it revealed a ghost town in Vienna of lost families, lost salons, lost love affairs, lost paintings, and lost lives. The high-profile restitutions led to other questions, such as,
What did my grandfather do during the war? One Belvedere provenance researcher discovered that his father had attended an elite Nazi military academy and his grandfather had commanded a slave labor camp where he shot a man. “
My oldest friend was from a hard-core Nazi family,” Lillie said, over goulash, at an outdoor table at the Café Korb.

“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.