The Lady in Gold (26 page)

A few days later, armed men pulled up to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. Emile's mother was in bed, recovering from a hysterectomy. Emile went upstairs to tell her the men were searching the house. She closed her eyes and sighed. She asked Emile to bring her a robe.

“
Burn your diary,” she whispered weakly.
“Burn it!”
Emile locked the bathroom door and regretfully held a match to his journal of the year leading up to the
Anschluss, fanning the smoke out the window. The men came into the bedroom, and his mother pointed to the drawer where she hid her jewelry.

One man paused before Klimt's poppy field, hanging over the Steinway piano, and studied the exuberant blooms.
He pulled it off the wall.

Many of Berta's friends, like
Felix Salten, had already fled. Salten knew that men who would burn
Bambi
were capable of far worse. Berta showed up to take refuge in the sanatorium, joined by her friend, Egon Friedell. Friedell was distraught, and he walked the grounds with Berta, berating himself.

Friedell had once suggested that benevolent dictatorship, as in ancient Greece, could defuse modern tensions. Berta had argued that “
a dictatorship without a gospel of hatred is impossible.” Friedell had insisted that the enlightened dictator should be a man who had never known hatred, “and so he was doubly unhappy when history made him realize his error—when Hitler became dictator of Germany.”

Now Austria was in the grip of this destructive man, whose gospel of hatred demanded scapegoats.

Friedell felt guilty. Even anti-Nazi intellectuals like himself had frittered away precious time in the world of culture, disdainfully leaving the sordid business of government to the hack politicians who had ushered in this fratricidal present. “One has to pay for one's sins,” Friedell kept repeating to Berta.

A few days later, at his apartment, Friedell heard a loud knocking in the hall. It was the
Gestapo. Friedell thought they were coming for him.
He walked to his open window and dove out to his death.

Klimt's mosaic of Jewish patrons and friends would be pried apart, piece by piece, by men incapable of creating beauty but determined to steal it. The plunder of the families who gave Vienna its luster would not be engineered by mobs. It would be carried out by well-dressed gentlemen with pretensions to genteel respectability.

On the cold morning of January 28, 1939, an eminent group of Austrian art curators gathered at Ferdinand's elegant Elisabethstrasse palace to divide up Ferdinand and Adele's art.

Like many
Aryanizations, this one had a flimsy legal pretext: a trumped-up tax charge against Ferdinand's sugar factory. But it hardly mattered. The Bloch-Bauers were now exiles. They were free to scatter Ferdinand's collection like a smashed piñata.

It might appear unseemly for academic art lovers to lend their expertise to the bizarre mix of “law,” eugenics, and thievery called “Aryanization.” Yet these learned men eagerly fought for the chance to come to Elisabethstrasse to choose art for Hitler's monument to Germanic culture, the “Führermuseum” in Linz, Austria, that would be the jewel in the crown of the thousand-year Reich. Art was not just an interest for Hitler, it was an obsession, and these men wished to ingratiate themselves with his new regime.

Art curators had always had a symbiotic relationship with monied elites. The new elites just happened to be Nazis. These men didn't think of themselves as thieves. They thought of themselves as a distinguished gathering,
though their discriminating aesthetic sensibilities would be used to bolster Nazi conceits.

They were men with precisely the kind of imperious self-regard that Klimt had detested. Not only were they accommodating Hitler, they were endorsing the Führer's rejection of the world's brilliant modern art—a betrayal of their profession. Worse, some of the treasures they pulled out of Viennese collections would be sold for a more nefarious aim: to finance Hitler's assault on Europe.

Since the day of the
Anschluss, the confiscation of Vienna's vast Jewish art collections had become an irresistible opportunity for career advancement and financial gain.

“
Thousands of Jews were fleeing the city voluntarily or by force,” wrote a young art historian,
Walter Frodl, who had joined the Nazi Party as a student in 1933. “Before finishing the necessary paperwork they had to apply for an export permit for their artworks. The few functionaries at the office had to work day and night.” Frodl “spent weeks that summer and fall in Vienna, driving through the boroughs by cab. I found this whole job rather disgusting. It was not just about visiting big houses and collections, but every apartment had to be inspected, even if the ‘artwork' was just a cheap carpet, a piece of embroidery or a photograph of the grandparents.”

Now a meticulous team of art appraisers would sift through the collections of Ferdinand and Adele. The man sent to evaluate Ferdinand's porcelain was one of his old “friends,”
Richard Ernst, who had helped persuade Ferdinand to pay the bills for the Kokoschka exhibition in 1937.

Ernst had insinuated himself into the Elisabethstrasse mansion in 1925 to write an admiring illustrated monograph about Ferdinand's porcelain.
Now he could get his hands on the porcelain itself.

Leopold Rupprecht represented the Vienna Art History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches, at the meeting, though he would soon start working for Hitler's Führermuseum. The federal monument office, which oversaw art confiscations, sent
Josef Zykan and
Waltraud Oberwalder, who would list works they coveted as Austrian “patrimony,” to be banned for export so their owners could not take them out of the country.

Vienna art institutions had turned out to be more corrupt than Klimt had ever imagined.

The dream of a new
Austrian Gallery at the Belvedere was extinguished.

Adele's old friend, Belvedere director
Franz Martin Haberditzl, was tainted by his association with “
degenerate artists” and his Jewish ties.
His
wife's Jewish heritage meant his daughter was also in danger. Haberditzl was abruptly dismissed and banned from contact with museum staff. His Jewish deputy, Heinrich Schwarz, “
relieved of his duties for racial reasons,” fled the country.

In this fearful climate, Haberditzl's second deputy,
Bruno Grimschitz, won a promotion to a post he might never have attained on merit. Grimschitz, who now flaunted the fact that he had been a Nazi Party member even when it was illegal, was named the new director of the Austrian Gallery.

Grimschitz stood in the Belvedere gardens wearing a black suit with a bow tie, a white pocket handkerchief, and a very pleased smile.
He closed the Moderne Galerie, which had been re-created by Haberditzl and his visionary patrons. Later, he would claim he had wanted to protect the art from being seized as degenerate and auctioned off. For now, Grimschitz would display art that was in keeping with Hitler's definition of Germanic
völkisch
identity.

The Austrian Gallery's new mission was quite different from the original one.

Kajetan Mühlmann, a Nazi aesthete who inspected Aryanized property to “collect” art for Hitler, had been given an apartment at the Belvedere. “
He has no conscience; he does not care about art, he is a liar and a vile person,” an Allied interrogator would one day say of Mühlmann.

For now, one of his first tasks was to pick through
Bernhard Altmann's art collection, more than a hundred works by Klimt, Degas,
Canaletto, and Waldmüller that had been turned over by Maria's minder,
Felix Landau.

The fact that Jews were publicly deemed antithetical to the new Germanic cultural identity undermined any personal qualms about stealing their art. Museum officials came back to Ferdinand's
palais
on February 22, and the
Gestapo's Herr Maloch stood by as officials began what
Karl Wagner, the director of the
Stadtische Sammlungen, called a “
negotiation between agencies.”

Museum officials tried to identify paintings that they could use to jockey for position with Hitler. As the men walked through Ferdinand's drafty mansion, they spotted paintings that would be perfect for the “Führer's reserve,” or
Führervorbehalt:
Hitler's personal art stash—a collection of all the beautiful things Hitler coveted but had been denied as a poor artist in Vienna.

Hitler's conservative taste in art was well-known. Two
Rudolf von Alt
paintings were selected from Ferdinand's collection for Hitler's ongoing “
Alt Aktion”—a Nazi grab of von Alt's work. Next came Ferdinand's dynastic Waldmüller of
Count Esterhazy as a boy. Rodin's bronze
Allegory of Liberty
was picked for the Führermuseum. A tapestry was chosen, and two more Waldmüllers.

Elisabethstrasse was a gold mine.

Some of the best paintings in Ferdinand's collection would be given away to cement relationships.
Hermann Göring, whose wife supposedly wore Adele's diamond necklace, would be flattered with four Bloch-Bauer Waldmüllers for Christmas:
Children with a Vat of Grapes, Young Girl with a Dog, Old Woman with Children,
and
After the Fire.

Ferdinand's porcelain would be passed out to museums like party favors, and the remaining pieces would go to public auction.

The men mostly ignored the Klimts. They eyed Klimt's 1903
Birch Trees
indifferently. They barely glanced at the portrait of the older Adele with stained teeth, and didn't even jump at the golden portrait of Adele.

The Führer wanted paintings that celebrated German values, not portraits of decadent Jewish society women—who were now officially referred to by the ugly term
Judensau,
or Jewish sow.

Klimt was not even on the list of artists whose work was too important to leave the country. Excited by their loot, the curators left the mansion without the Bloch-Bauer Klimt collection.

Hitler, once excluded from the Vienna art world, now controlled it absolutely, and everyone felt his influence, from dispossessed collectors to the most prominent Vienna artists. As Vienna's Jewish collections were plundered, plans were made to dispose of the degenerate art seized from museums with a public auction.

Oskar Kokoschka had four hundred of his works confiscated. From exile in England, he railed to Alma Mahler about Hitler, “
momentarily Lord of the World, who has begun, out of resentment, to hunt artists, because he himself failed to make it.”

Carl Moll, Alma Mahler's stepfather, the
Secessionist painter whom Kokoschka had once called “my best friend in Austria,” now embraced Nazism. He chastised Kokoschka for his intransigence. “
I would like to do something to help you, but your politics make it impossible,” Moll wrote from Vienna. “America is the only place for you now.

“
There are 75 million people,” Moll wrote, referring to the population of the Third Reich, “and the fact that some people get trampled, what does it mean? Has this not always happened?”

And by the way, Moll added, “
Uncle Ferdinand has left Vienna without saying goodbye.”

In August 1939, Hitler was massing troops on the Polish border.

Thea's mother, Ada, had put the Dutch flag of her gay husband on her door. He and his boyfriend had smuggled out as much of her money and jewelry as they could. Now Ada was nervously awaiting her exit papers, as people like her were being arrested all over Vienna.

She couldn't take money or jewelry, so she went on a frenzied clothes-shopping spree, buying up silk dresses, fine lingerie, smart new shoes. The more nervous she became, the more she shopped. In the midst of it, she got an urgent call from Holland: Don't wait any longer, her husband said. Meet me at the Swiss border. War is imminent, and you will be trapped.

Ada and
Gustav Rinesch rented two Packard sedans for Ada's trunks of clothes. They stopped in the Alps, at Alt Aussee, to see Ada's mentally handicapped daughter, Susi. Ada gave money to the farmer who cared for Susi and promised to send more, though soon the farmer would write to tell her there was no need.
Doctors had “euthanized” Susi, a “useless feeder,” in the Nazi program of “mercy killings” of disabled children.

They reached the Swiss border at midnight. Ada's faithful Dutch husband stood there in the rain. German border guards pulled open Ada's trunks. They threw her silk dresses and lingerie on the ground and walked on them with muddy boots.
Ada sat on a trunk and sobbed. The German guards laughed. They let Ada cross.

Hitler declared war on Poland the next day.

Rinesch had packed off the last straggler of the Bloch-Bauers, the glamorous family he had once hoped to marry into. “
So the whole Bloch-Bauer family—respected old Austrian and Viennese citizens, connoisseurs and art collectors—had been turned into ‘Jewish swine,' and kicked out of the German Reich,” Rinesch
wrote. “People hated them because they were educated, rich, and supported culture, art, history and science,” Rinesch wrote. “The lovely Bloch-Bauers, whose destinies, tragedies and travails touched me and moved me, and could fill several romance novels.”

With that, Rinesch reported to the German army. He was assigned to be a translator at Stalag 17, the notorious prison camp that would be immortalized in a Hollywood film by
Billy Wilder.

Gustav Ucicky was a prominent Nazi propaganda filmmaker, who dined out on his status as an illegitimate son of Gustav Klimt. Now he was scouring Vienna for paintings by his father that were being stolen from Viennese Jews.

Ucicky bought the ethereal portrait of
Anton Felsovanyi's beautiful mother. Gertrud had left it with a baroness friend when she fled. The baroness was now the mistress of an SS leader and
Gertrud Felsovanyi's art and jewelry was trickling into the black market. Ucicky bought the sensual, undulating women of
Water Snakes,
stolen from
Jenny Steiner, a sister of
Serena Lederer who had fled Vienna.