The Lady in Gold (27 page)

Not all Klimt's children could afford art. The Gustav born to Mizzi Zimmermann was a
World War I veteran who now enlisted in the German army for a second round as cannon fodder. Mizzi sold all her Klimt drawings to support her son, whom she was unable to launch out of working-class obscurity.

But Ucicky was an established film director. He had money and access. He was obsessed with the art of a father he had seldom seen. He was vain about his looks. He dressed theatrically in black, letting tendrils of his wavy hair fall over his large, wide-set eyes. He was friendly, curious, intelligent, and deeply insecure about his childhood of squalor with his mother,
Maria Ucicka, a poor Czech laundress.

Ucicky might have followed the path of his Viennese colleague Billy Wilder and become a world-class director. He began brilliantly enough. At seventeen, in 1916, Ucicky wandered into Vienna's first major film studio,
Sascha Films, owned by the notoriously corpulent
Count Alexander Joseph “Sascha” Kolowrat-Krakowsky. Ucicky was hired as a camera assistant.
Soon he was working with a promising young director,
Michael Curtiz.

In 1927, Ucicky was asked to direct
Café Electric,
starring
Willi Forst, a famous stage actor then appearing in Vienna in a musical,
Broadway.
Café Electric
followed a young dance-hall girl, Erni, from her initiation into bohemian café society to her descent into a demimonde of seduction and heartbreak. Forst suggested his
Broadway
co-star, a sultry young German named
Marlene Dietrich, for the part.

Dietrich had her own ideas about the role, and she was anything but compliant. Perhaps Ucicky was unnerved by the raw sexuality with which Dietrich infused Erni. He didn't want her for the role.
But Forst threatened to quit if Dietrich wasn't in the picture. Ucicky was stuck with Dietrich.

Ucicky's boss, Count Sascha, became obsessed with Dietrich, and wanted her for his next films. But the count's health was poor. He was forced to watch
Café Electric
from his hospital bed. Dietrich was critically praised for her portrayal of a sloe-eyed masochistic femme fatale, a blue angel sinking into hedonism.

National Socialism was opening a lot of doors to opportunistic young men like Ucicky. He began to drift into Nazi circles. Marlene Dietrich, by then renowned for
The Blue Angel,
snubbed him. She began to polish her English, seeing hatred where her countrymen saw pride and the promise of jobs. By 1930 Dietrich had gone to America.

In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, and Ucicky became a “
sponsoring member of the SS.” Perhaps he had found the family and fellowship he craved. More likely it was a career move. Young Ucicky was made a director at the national film institute, which was now controlled by
Joseph Goebbels. He began to sport a swastika on his lapel.

Wilder was Jewish. He began packing his bags.

Where his peers saw darkness, Ucicky saw opportunity. He directed a mendacious little Nazi propaganda film,
Refugees,
about a German village imperiled by menacing dark-skinned Slavs eager to ravish blonde German women. A German officer modeled on Adolf Hitler comes to the rescue.

Nazi films about rapacious Slavs or malignant Jews were a deadly serious effort to motivate German soldiers who would be ordered to kill ethnic “enemies.” One typical propaganda film of the time portrayed Germans locked in concentration camps and brutalized by murderous Poles.

In 1934, Ucicky's
Refugees
was awarded the first State Film prize, created by Goebbels for films that glorified National Socialism.
His next film,
Morgenrot
(Dawn), about a German submarine commander, was screened by Hitler three days after he took office as chancellor.

Ucicky had made his choice.

One night in 1935, Ucicky was sipping wine at the apartment of a screenwriter when Billy Wilder sauntered in. Eying Ucicky, Wilder re-marked, “
For me, the air stinks with a Nazi in the room.” Wilder walked out, went into exile, and fulfilled his promise as a cinematic genius.

Ucicky returned to Hitler's Vienna as a key player at the quirky old film studio of Count Sascha—now an efficient Nazi outfit renamed
Vienna Film. Ucicky was a darling of the Führer. In 1939, Ucicky mingled with Hitler and Goebbels at festivities for
Richard Strauss's opera
Friedenstag,
which were also a celebration of the composer's seventy-fifth birthday.

Strauss was an uneasy camp follower. His daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish, and her family was in danger. In 1935, Strauss had refused to remove the name of librettist
Stefan Zweig from the German playbill of one of his operas. “
Do you suppose Mozart was consciously ‘Aryan' when he composed?” Strauss grumbled in a letter to Zweig that was intercepted by the
Gestapo.

Ucicky had no pesky qualms.
He waved over opera singer
Hans Hotter to offer him a film role, and invited him to meet Hitler. Ucicky recruited one of Vienna's greatest actresses,
Paula Wessely, who had once brought Maria Altmann to tears as a victim of unrequited love in Schnitzler's
Liebelei.
He persuaded Wessely to star in
Homecoming,
a propaganda film about “
a handful of German people whose forefathers emigrated East,” to Poland.

Wessely played Marie, the schoolteacher jeopardized by the brutal Polish police who torch her German school. The Poles herd German men, women, and children into prison cells. As they prepare to shoot them, “German tanks arrive, proving that the Führer always acts in time,” the Nazi playbill for the film said.

Ucicky's film presciently foreshadowed tactics the Germans would use in Poland. As Ucicky built his luxury villa, his films paved the way for the murderous German offensive on the East. Austrian Nobel laureate
Elfriede Jelinek would someday call Ucicky's
Homecoming
“
the worst propaganda feature of the Nazis.”

Newly rich with Nazi wealth, Ucicky began to hunt for his father's stolen paintings, with the help of Vienna's top Nazi,
Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter, or Reich governor, of Vienna.

Ucicky got one Klimt from the
Dorotheum auction house, then a clearinghouse
for Aryanized valuables stolen from Jewish families. This painting had belonged to Bernhard Altmann. It was a small portrait of a young woman, her face fraught with vulnerability. Ucicky apparently suspected that the beleaguered woman in the painting was his poor laundress mother.

Now Ucicky wanted to see the rest of the Bloch-Bauer Klimt collection.

The fate of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts was left to
Erich Führer, a hatchet-faced, arrogant hack of a lawyer with a pedigree to match his serendipitous name. Führer, an early illegal Nazi Party member, had helped defend the plotters of the failed 1934 Nazi coup that fatally wounded the Austrian chancellor,
Engelbert Dollfuss. Führer ended up in jail with the plotters—one of whom was
Felix Landau—for six months. Führer's reward was a post as vice president of the Austrian bar association, now gutted of its Jewish lawyers.

Since the
Anschluss, Führer had become a legal double agent, a vulture lawyer, awarded the lucrative concession for managing the state theft of property of Jewish families whom Führer quietly plotted to fleece personally.
Führer would compile a distinguished roster of desperate clients, including
Richard Strauss's poor Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice;
Serena Lederer and her daughter, Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt;
Louis Rothschild; Freud's four sisters—and now poor Ferdinand.
They may not have been aware that Führer had been promoted to the rank of SS Hauptsturm-führer.

Führer sent Ferdinand obsequious birthday cards. Behind his back, Führer called Ferdinand an “
ugly Jew,” and secretly disregarded his wishes. Führer was going to cash in on the Klimts.

Klimt's son, Gustav Ucicky, soon learned who controlled the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. He tracked down Erich Führer. Ucicky coveted
Schloss Kammer am Attersee,
which was hanging in the Belvedere.
Schloss Kammer am Attersee
was a lovely painting of the beautiful golden yellow Habsburg castle at Seewalchen, down the road from the Villa Paulick, where Klimt vacationed with
Emilie Flöge.
Ferdinand had donated the painting to the museum in 1936, deferring to Adele's wishes.

Führer had a solution. On September 30, 1941, he met with Grimschitz, the new Belvedere director, to cut a deal. He proposed to buy
Schloss Kammer am Attersee
from the Belvedere. In return the Belvedere would get two paintings that
Erich Führer controlled as the
Nazi-appointed “representative” of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. One was Klimt's botanical explosion,
Apple Tree.
The other was the spectacular gold portrait of Ferdinand's long-dead wife, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

The German art collectors for Hitler's Führermuseum weren't interested in Adele's gold portrait. But the painting was a familiar icon to Austrians at the Belvedere. Thanks to Ferdinand's generosity in lending it to shows abroad, it had become a visual talisman of the country of Strauss and Mozart at a time when Austria was struggling to forge a new identity.

Erich Führer, the Nazi lawyer who helped the Reich fleece Ferdinand, 1965. (
Illustration Credit 38.1
)

The deal was struck.

Führer sent the gold portrait of Adele to the Belvedere with an obsequious letter signed “Heil Hitler!” The Belvedere art historians knew, of course, that Adele Bloch-Bauer was Jewish, the wife of the man whom government
Aryanization files called “the Jew Ferdinand Israel Bloch-Bauer.” But the painting could be reinvented, just as Ferdinand and Adele's Elisabethstrasse mansion was being refitted with offices for the
German Railways.

Adele's identity disappeared with a simple stroke of the pen.

Her gold portrait turned up in a book that announced the Belvedere's acquisition, in the winter of 1941, of an “
awe-inspiring portrait of a woman covered with a shimmering crust of gold. Perhaps the most significant of [Klimt's] works, the dark head emerges, as if drowning in gold, the golden ornaments transporting her from the realm of the ordinary. We are beheld by a goddess, but not from afar, like the solemn, sainted gold mosaics of Ravenna.” This was an earthly goddess, a Judith “with an unrestrained sensuality, like a wild Salome in flames,” wrote the author of the 1942 book
Gustav Klimt: Ein Künstler aus Wien.
Strangely, he did not identify this illustrious painting, perhaps to avoid drawing attention to a backroom deal involving people he knew personally, or to the origins of a woman who was now a racial enemy.

An illustration in the book gave the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer a new German title:
Dame in Gold.

The author of this cover-up was Klimt's old friend, the writer and set designer
Emil Pirchan, who had once praised the artist's virile physique, and had likely known Adele personally. It was a sad end to Pirchan's long and rich career. “
Heil
Klimt the Hero!” Pirchan wrote.

Adele, the long-haired sylph with the Grecian gown and tedious wedding poem, was no more. The wealthy muse of Klimt, his patron, his friend, and perhaps much more, was wiped away. Adele Bloch-Bauer was now simply the “Lady in Gold.”

For most Klimt patrons, erasing the Jewish stain wasn't quite so easy.

Jewish society families who had supported the
Secession with Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer were now intermarried with Gentile aristocratic families. The Nuremberg laws banned marriage between Germans and Jews, putting these families in a precarious position.

The daughter of August and
Serena Lederer had married into a Gentile brewing dynasty and was now Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt. Elisabeth and her mother, Serena, had been painted by Klimt, as had Serena's mother, Charlotte Pulitzer.

They had imagined themselves members of Austrian society. Now, with the Nazi takeover, they were simply unwanted Jews. Serena had been slapped with the usual trumped-up tax charge against Jews, and she was fighting it, unaware that this would be futile.

Elisabeth was in despair. Her four-year-old son had died after the Anschluss. Her “Aryan” husband, Baron
Wolfgang Bachofen-Echt, demanded a divorce from Elisabeth in August 1938, and her property was being transferred to him.

How this sinister predicament had befallen the delicate Elisabeth, raised under the careful tutelage of Gustav Klimt himself, was difficult to comprehend.
As Klimt had once admonished, Elisabeth had not grown into a silly “petit-bourgeois.” Elisabeth, a sculptor, was shy and gentle, with deep convictions. In Klimt's portrait, she was ethereal, fragile, with enormous dark eyes, and surrounded by powerful Chinese dragons that resembled the statue in the foyer of her parents' country home. In life, the girl whom
Gustav Rinesch nicknamed “Beautiful Lisl” was a soft-spoken hothouse flower, determined to live her ideals.