The Lady in Gold (19 page)

Maria summers at Ischl with her friends, ca. 1934. (
Illustration Credit 24.2
)

Maria in the Austrian Alps, in traditional Tyrolean dress, ca. 1936. (
Illustration Credit 24.3
)

Ferdinand would have been with the Bloch-Bauers at Ischl that summer. But his Vienna Kokoschka show was under siege. Organizers were worried that the uproar in Germany was smothering the exhibit in controversy.

On July 19, 1937, the German government opened its
Degenerate Art
exhibition in Munich. The paintings were hung in a deliberately disturbing jumble. “
Revelation of the Jewish racial soul,” read one slogan on the wall. “
An insult to German womanhood,” read another. “
The Jewish longing for wildness reveals itself—in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art,” one scrawl said. “
Nature as seen by sick minds,” read another. Phrases of speeches by Nazi leaders mingled with the manifestos of “degenerate” art movements:
Impressionism,
Cubism,
Surrealism.

Nine of the works in the Munich show were by
Oskar Kokoschka, as if Hitler and
Joseph Goebbels were nursing a personal grudge against Kokoschka for flourishing as an art student in Vienna the same year Hitler was turned down.

“
As for the degenerate artists, I forbid them to force their ‘experiences' on the people,” Hitler announced at the
House of German Art, where he was presiding over a kind of countershow of officially approved art. “If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison. I will purge the nation of them, and let no one take part in their corruption. The day of punishment will come.”

In an angry July 30 letter to Alma Mahler, his onetime lover, Kokoschka angrily disdained Hitler as a “housepainter from Austria who intends to use the power apparatus he has seized from the Germans to have his supposed rivals, real artists, castrated.

“The courage must be found to put him into a lunatic asylum,” wrote Kokoschka, who still had not shown up in Vienna.

Hitler knew very well what he was doing. He viewed art as political propaganda. “
We call upon our artists to wield the noblest weapon in the defense of the German people: German art!” he had shouted at his first Nuremberg rally in 1933.

Some artists could be subtly recruited.
Hitler knew he was wielding a potent force when an old friend of Ferdinand,
Richard Strauss, was persuaded
to serve as president of the Reich Music Chamber and compose the hymn for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, prompting conductor
Arturo Toscanini to remark: “
To Strauss the composer I take off my hat, to Strauss the man I put it back on again.”

Jewish artists would not be wooed. They would be crushed.
The Nazis banned
Felix Salten's 1923
Bambi,
which now invited interpretation as a powerful political allegory on the mistreatment of Jews. The
Gestapo ordered
Bambi
seized, along with thousands of “un-German” books burned in Germany.

Hitler had once been a penniless artist. Now he had the power to unleash his toxic view of German culture. By August 1937,
more than sixteen thousand “degenerate” artworks would be seized in Germany. Some would be sold at auction for a fraction of their value, “
to make some money from this garbage,” Goebbels said.

Ferdinand paid to extend the Kokoschka show a second time, as if the power of art itself could temper this assault. In Germany, a petty Nazi bureaucrat denounced the “
exhibition of Jewish Communist art” in Vienna, calling it “a protest against National Socialism and a protest against Hitler.”

Ferdinand watched the escalation of the campaign against “degenerate” artists with alarm. It was also an escalation of the repression of Jews in Germany. Why so much hatred? Jews were only one percent of the population in Germany.

Many of the people persuaded to hate Jews didn't actually know any, particularly the provincial German nationalists who derided cosmopolitanism as “asphalt culture,” the culture of the streets or the gutter, of capitalism and free markets. Their antidote to Jewish urbanism was “Germanic”
völkisch
folk culture, represented by their lederhosen and dirndls.

Fritz Altmann kept his word. He made no attempt to contact Maria that summer. After Maria left for the countryside, Fritz and his family were shaken by the death in Leopoldstadt of Fritz's father, severing a tie to the
Altmann family roots. Maria had no idea of this when she walked into the family apartment in September and dialed Fritz's number, before even removing her straw country hat. A woman answered and said Fritz could not come to the phone because he was with a professor from the history museum. He was going over his collection of ex libris, the elaborate bookplates made for wealthy Viennese by artists. Maria's father had an ex libris of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice over a harp encircled by musical notes.
Fritz's collection included a woodblock of Rumpelstiltskin, the Middle European trickster, by the artist
Oskar Leuschner; an
Art Deco bookplate of a jazz piano created for a Vienna musician; and an ex libris of a castle perched on a mountain of books made for Vienna writer
Wilhelm Swoboda, who once reviewed
Mark Twain's
Tramps Abroad.
Adele's ex libris, of the princess and the frog, was in all the books at Ferdinand's house.

To Maria, this sounded absurd. She had no interest in bookplates. My brothers are right, she thought. He's nuts. But Fritz called back. His voice was languid and inviting. His artist had made him a new ex libris, of an open window framing a starry night, with a pointed inscription: “You are always standing in the way of your luck and happiness.” Maria was disconcerted. “I still haven't seen your ex libris,” she stammered. “We haven't done that, or a lot of other things,” Fritz said softly.

A few days later, Fritz arranged their first date.
Maria panicked.

Her siblings had told her that Fritz's affair—if it was even over, they said skeptically—was very passionate. The married woman was older, fascinating, experienced. Surely Fritz would find Maria naïve and unschooled.

Then there was the matter of her unfashionably ample bust. The eve of their date was a hot September night, and Maria's fox terrier, Jahen, watched drowsily from the floor as Maria threw dresses around her bedroom, trying to find one that concealed her generous décolletage. As her lamp burned, she sewed a brassiere into a tight double corset to minimize her breasts. “How come you're still awake?” her brother Karl called down from his bedroom. “It's so hot, I can't sleep,” Maria lied, as she tried on her flattening bra.

The next night, Fritz pulled up to the Luegerplatz, where Maria sat waiting on a bench in front of the red roses ringing the statue of
Karl Lueger. As Fritz drove her to the Kahlenberg, an elegant restaurant on a peak with a panoramic view of the Vienna Woods, it wasn't just infatuation
that left her short of breath. Her brassiere was so tight! At the restaurant, Fritz poured her red wine as the waiter served
tafelspitz,
seasoned beef boiled with root vegetables. Fritz told her of his dream of singing opera professionally, touching her hand from time to time with thrilling familiarity. Maria was a bit tipsy when, on the way home, Fritz parked at a popular lookout over Vienna. They chatted about the latest Shakespeare play staged at the Burgtheater. Finally Fritz leaned over and pulled Maria toward him. His skilled kisses and caresses were overwhelming. Having heard so much about Fritz's affair, Maria made a fumbling attempt to appear more experienced than she actually was. Fritz wasn't fooled. He discouraged her pretensions.

Fritz was finally ready for an old-fashioned courtship.

A few weeks later Maria's father turned seventy-five, and Fritz formally asked Gustav for her hand. Maria's wedding was set for December, barely two months away.

Maria's older brother, Leopold, rolled his eyes. “
If you marry him, you're crazy,” he said breezily. But Maria would have married Fritz the next day.

She ran into
Gustav Rinesch at a restaurant in the Vienna Woods, and breathlessly told him the news. Rinesch's face fell. He opened his wallet to reveal a photograph of Maria in her white gown at the Opera Ball. He kissed her hand with dignity and wished her luck.

Maria's mother made the best of it. At dinner, Bernhard lit a cigar, and Therese hopefully asked if his family was Russian. “
No. We are Galician,” Bernhard said firmly, voluntarily placing himself in Vienna's lowest social caste.

When Maria's father pulled Bernhard aside to discuss Maria's dowry, Bernhard turned his proud, bold gaze on Gustav. “
We don't believe in dowries,” he said curtly.

Gustav was impressed.

Maria and Fritz wed on December 9, 1937. Maria was twenty-one.

Luise cried when she saw Maria walk into the synagogue on Turnergasse in her simple white satin gown, radiant with hope. Luise's own marriage was in trouble. Viktor had always enjoyed women, and marriage hadn't changed him. He flippantly told his wife he was “polygamous.” Luise, still so young and admired, often found herself alone, and humiliated, because of course people knew. It was painful to see Maria so convinced of her love.

At the reception, Maria took Fritz's hand and stood with the guests to
listen to her wedding poem by
Julius Bauer, the lifelong friend of her parents who had once welcomed
Mark Twain to Vienna. The poet, now eighty-four, put on his spectacles and peered at his papers. His hands were shaky and wrinkled.

“
Back in the day, before my head turned gray, I wrote a poem for the grandparents of this bride,” Julius began.

“After a long pause, Thedy gave birth to a fifth child,” he read. “Maria saw the light of this world, an unwelcome belated addition to the house.”

Maria was stung. Therese's chagrin was an open secret, but why dredge it up on her wedding day? “But when the latecomer opened her shining eyes, the whole family was dazzled,” Julius said, winking. “As you can see, she grew into a vision of beauty.”

The old wit careened on heedlessly. He called one of Fritz's philandering brothers a “seducer of women” and described Bernhard as an object of spiteful envy. Julius spared deep-pocketed Ferdinand, calling him a “great industrialist” and a “friend of art and man on whom the golden sun shines.” Mercifully, the poem sputtered to an end.

Maria sat down with Fritz for a lunch of
filet de sole
Metternich.
Luise sat silently at her end of the table, strangely sullen, though she looked beautiful in her chic
Emilie Flöge gown. She put down her napkin and rose from the table. Like many family milestones, this one was bittersweet. She wandered into her father's dark study. There, sunk in a leather club chair, was Gustav. Her father had been ill lately, perhaps suffering from indigestion. Or maybe it was nerves.

Tonight his eyes were filled with tears. Luise reached for her father's hand. “My sun has set,” Gustav said.

Maria was leaving home.

Not long after the last waltz, Maria got her own taste of the complexity of the human heart. She and Fritz drove to an elegant hotel near the Danube, on the outskirts of Vienna. Her wedding night had come at last.

Maria's inexperienced imagination was fueled by Goethe's arousing vision of
The
Wedding Night.

Maria was terribly disappointed. Her long-awaited first embrace was awkward and embarrassing. Maria cursed herself as a “
stupid iron virgin,” a fumbling child, a pitiful disappointment.