The Lady in Gold (45 page)

“His mother made a big mistake,” she said vehemently, pointing to Hans. “Many Jews did. She simply did not believe what was coming. She should have gone in time. But she didn't. She missed the boat. Many of those people were taken to concentration camps. If it wasn't for Hans, she would never have survived. An entire family Hans knew committed suicide.”

“During the war my husband took Hansl to work at
Henschel Aircraft,” Brigitte said. “Otherwise, he would have been
dead.
”

Hans nodded.

“Dr. Wagner was my military protector,” Hans said soberly. “Professor Wagner invented the guided missile. I was involved with the missile. The biggest was supposed to bomb New York.”

Henschel had a slave labor factory at Dachau. Hans would have been forced to greet his colleagues with “Heil Hitler!” “Everyone did.” Brigitte shrugged dismissively. “It was the polite salutation. Even schoolchildren had to greet ‘Heil Hitler!' Everybody did so. Just as all the children joined Hitler Youth.
Everybody.
”

Hans began to speak, but Brigitte took over. “Things are not as simple as it might look to you in America,” she said. “I believe, and Hansl agrees, that the majority of the Nazis, in the beginning at least, were very good, normal people. Many SS officers began as idealists. Black is not always black and white is not always white.

“There was, in Vienna, a very high percentage of Jews,” Brigitte continued. “After World War I, the population was completely demoralized. Impoverished. Unemployed. The frustration was enormous.

“Because all the Jews of Eastern Europe came to Austria, especially Vienna, the aversion was very high. The Jews had a very close network of industry, of lawyers, of banking business. In the end it was very difficult for a non-Jew to make business in any of these fields. In my impression, it had nothing to do with religion. It had to do with commercial success.”

“It” was a Vienna euphemism for the internments, the concentration camps, the
Holocaust. It. Just as everyone said “National Socialist” instead of “Nazi.”

After
World War II, Brigitte said, “No one spoke of it, ever.

“The families were all involved in it, and to avoid questions, this has never been touched,” she said. “People avoid details. Whenever you get into details, children will ask, ‘What were you doing? What was Grandfather doing?' And there are unpleasant things to answer.

“If a society commits a crime, it's in the interests of society to close the files,” Brigitte said vehemently. “It's in mutual interest to keep silent. It's like a family. In the end, they will stick together.

“Young people now know nothing about what happened in World War II,” she said. They were finding out.
Hans's storybook hometown, St. Wolfgang, was embroiled in a ferocious row over a proposal to rename its lakefront promenade, which honored a local Nazi who had turned in a Jewish woman.

Hans had spent a lot of the war in Vienna with his girlfriend,
Maria Graf, a ballet dancer at the State Opera. He watched her dance there for Nazis. The State Opera had now been purged of talented Jews like Hans.

Then Allied bombs came crashing into the opera house. Hitler committed suicide. The British arrested Brigitte's father, the scientist
Viktor Raschka. Dr. Wagner fled Vienna as the
Red Army marched in, preceded by its reputation.

The SS ordered Hans and the other scientists to head to Nordhausen, home of the infamous Mittelbau V-2 rocket factory, where more than twenty thousand Jews had died. Instead Hans, terrified of the Red Army, fled into his building's cavernous basement.

Subterranean Vienna was a mecca.
People who had seen air raid shelters collapse felt safer in ancient catacombs lined with skulls. Hans spent months in the dark rubble with Nazi collaborators trying to elude arrest and women trying to avoid rape. Maria Graf brought him food. If the Russians came to search, Hans ran through holes battered into the walls of the
burned-out basements that linked entire blocks into a vast labyrinth. Months later, Hans emerged, moved back into Maria's apartment, and married her. He was never arrested.

His mother and sister survived.

“Maria and Hans were very lucky to get this apartment during the war, in 1943,” Brigitte was saying. “My husband's company rented this apartment for Hans. A German diplomat had been living here.”

Who lived here before the diplomat?

Brigitte shrugged.

Hans showed me a joint
Deutsches Museum–
Smithsonian Institution tribute to Dr. Wagner. It said Wagner had moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks and worked for Raytheon and Northrup, then researched guidance and control systems for reconnaissance drones for Fairchild aircraft. And that he engineered the stability system for Bay Area Rapid Transit, specifically the rail under the bay between San Francisco and Berkeley, the publication said.

Hans pointed to an illustration of a missile. “I was an engineer on this,” he said. “This was designed to hit America. But America won the war.”

Brigitte looked at me meaningfully. Not black or white.

On my way out, I stopped under a painting of pretty young nuns peering through the front gates of a convent, like Maria in
The Sound of Music.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Don't you see the soldiers outside?” Brigitte asked pointedly.

Now I saw the spears above the door. What do the soldiers want?

“To rape them,” Brigitte said sternly.

“It's a scary world,” Brigitte said, in her deep German accent.

The next morning was frigid. Snow was piled in drifts as Randol walked briskly into the Belvedere.
Gerbert Frodl seemed preoccupied. Randol listened as Frodl told him it injured his feelings when Maria called him a liar for denying that he had told her Austria might consider giving her the landscapes in exchange for the portraits of Adele. “
I was a bit hurt, that she keeps saying I lied,” Frodl said. “I didn't lie.”

But he did lie, Randol thought.

But Randol remained silent. He was trying not to play the conqueror. Until the paintings were out of Austria, anything could happen. It's not like I waltzed in here like Napoleon, Randol kept reminding himself.

“Well, a lot of people said a lot of things,” Randol demurred.

He didn't want to fight anymore. He just wanted the paintings.

Randol followed the administrator through the maze of underground passageways. He lost track of the twists and turns. He would never be able to retrace his steps and find it on his own. As they wound through the labyrinth, Randol's insatiable curiosity got the best of him. Why was this massive bunker built? For art? For arms? There had to be a reason.

Even fairy-tale palaces had dungeons.

Finally they came to a large room, about twice the size of a Vienna café. Randol was surrounded by some of the most valuable art in the world. The administrator pointed to a gurney.

Randol lifted up the first painting. It wasn't Adele. It was
Mathilde Zemlinsky Schoenberg, his grandfather Schoenberg's first wife. She was holding a baby. The painting was by the brilliant early modernist
Richard Gerstl, an artist who was passionately in love with the married Mathilde. Her composer husband ordered Mathilde to stop the affair. A few weeks later Gerstl finished his last portrait of himself, his mouth opened in mirthless laughter. Then Gerstl took off his clothes and hung himself in front of a mirror. Mathilde promptly followed Gerstl into the grave.
The baby in the painting, Georg, would spend the last days of the war in an apartment lent to him by a fleeing Nazi leader,
Benno Mattel, the son-in-law of
Anton Webern, a former student of
Arnold Schoenberg. When the bombs fell, Georg, by then an adult, hid in a cave in the Vienna Woods filled with women and children, running out to beg Russian soldiers not to throw grenades into the cavern.

In this perilous era, even the most personal painting became an accidental document of something much greater.

Randol idly wondered if the Belvedere had put the Gerstl painting of Mathilde here on purpose. He pushed it aside.

What he saw next amazed him.

It was Adele. Randol stared at her face for a long moment. He stared at the room filled with paintings, each with its own stories, many still untold.

——

If anyone didn't know who Adele was before, they did now.

Randol's attempt to get Adele out of Austria was the talk of the town as Austrian high society headed to that night's premiere of the
Raúl Ruiz film about
Gustav Klimt at the Konzerthaus. The American actor
John Malkovich, who played Klimt, swept in wearing a luminous silk blazer emblazoned with a Klimtesque pattern of squares.

The Konzerthaus, built on the site of the Kunstschau exhibition grounds, where Adele's portrait had first been unveiled in Vienna, was a dazzling temple. Gold angels blew trumpets and gilded muses reclined under a golden ceiling patterned in an Italianate floral design whose radiance rivaled that of Heaven itself.

Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, the city councillor for cultural affairs, was onstage with the actress playing Serena Lederer. “
The era has been so widely celebrated,” he said. Klimt was the “pride of Austria,” he went on. “Freud is not in the film, but his spirit is.” It seemed strange to hear him extol these illustrious characters without mentioning why the whole party ended so suddenly. Though why advertise, on this happy evening, that Freud had barely made it out of Vienna alive, and four of his sisters died in concentration camps? Or that Serena Lederer lost everything and publicly disavowed her own husband to claim Klimt as the “Aryan” father of her daughter? That her sister died in a death camp, and her cherished Klimt collection was torched by Nazis?

When the lights came up, the writer and director of the film, Raúl Ruiz, began to explain his cinematic vision of this “
mythical city, and its connection to the real Vienna.

“
We have Ferdinand to the left and Hitler to the right,” Randol whispered mockingly. “Will all the illegitimate children of Klimt please stand up?”

Randol made his way toward a group of Austrian officials, who seemed surprised and uncomfortable to see him. “
I didn't tell anyone you were here tonight,” one producer, a young Austrian named
Suzanne Biro, told him apologetically. “I was afraid to.

“Austria is split in two,” Biro explained. “One part is with Maria Altmann, and is ashamed, and happy that it is over. And a lot of people are not so ashamed—to the contrary. They are angry about the return of the paintings. I was ashamed. I think it is sad about the loss, of course. But it should have happened sixty years ago.”

Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, a tall, dark man in a black suit, listened as Randol told an interviewer that “
I thought there was no chance of it happening. Art cases always lose.”

Mailath-Pokorny turned to a reporter. “There was a similar case in the city recently, with the estate of Johann Strauss,” he began.

The family of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II, was fleeced by the
Nazis too. His third wife, Adele, was Jewish, a distant relation of Nelly. His stepdaughter and heir,
Alice Meisner-Strauss, was forced to hand over the composer's Aryanized papers. The composer's great-grandfather had been born Jewish. But the Gestapo took great pains to destroy records of this inconvenient ethnic stain when Hitler adopted Strauss as a Germanic icon. After the war, Austria fought to hang on to the Strauss legacy, worth millions.

“
In the end we gave it all back, and then we bought it,” Mailath-Pokorny was saying. “It was very expensive. In the process, you realize you are not the owner, someone else is the owner. So we gave it back. It is still cultural patrimony.”

“
And within Austria, it's not even bad PR! That's the horrible thing!” Randol whispered loudly.

Mailath-Pokorny finally mentioned there was a VIP reception upstairs. The party overlooked Vienna, its city lights and its wintry cityscape. It was in full swing. Austrian officials swirled away from Randol, as if he were contagious. It was
John Malkovich who mentioned the taboo. “
Journalists keep asking me, ‘Don't you think it's a shame that the portrait of Adele and the other Klimt paintings were going to leave Vienna?' ” said Malkovich, towering over the party. “Bullshit! I think it's great!

“That's not a celebration of the loss of the Belvedere,” Malkovich said. “It's a celebration of the owners of the art.
The paintings are theirs. They belong to them.
They might put them on the next plane out of here. Is it sad for the Belvedere? Yes! That's sad. But that's how life is. It's not clean! Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of life is long, but it tends towards justice.' Hopefully, these paintings will be able to be seen by a catholicity of people. I hope so. Where, I don't know.”

The Austrian art world was distraught at the idea the paintings might be lost.

“
It is something that is very painful,” said
Alice Strobl, the Austrian Klimt expert emerita, her eyes bright with tears as she sat under her tall black hussar hat at the Café Mozart, watching snow flurries fall outside.

Strobl, ninety, discovered her passion for Klimt during the war, when she was ordered to report to a state office of music and culture.
“The Nazis
made everyone work,” she said, shrugging. “I was lucky. I got peaceful work.” It was the height of the Nazi obsession with so-called German culture, and “it was weird,” Strobl said. In 1943, her co-workers suggested she go to the Klimt exhibition.

Strobl was stunned. Klimt's Faculty Paintings were like a spiritual awakening, a religious calling.

After the war, Strobl visited
Gustav Ucicky's widow, Ursula, at the propagandist's apartment on Strudlhofgasse. Strobl gazed in awe at the stolen Klimts, mesmerized by
Water Snakes.
Ursula Ucicky “was very nervous,” Strobl said. “She was afraid she would lose the paintings.”