The Lady in Gold (49 page)

“I was almost sixteen when our father died; Hubertus was only eleven. Hubertus started to realize, on his own, how many lies were under the layers of secrecy. Hubertus discovered the whole psychology of Austrian amnesia.”

At the height of the Waldheim affair, some of their relatives stopped speaking to Hubertus. “They said, ‘One doesn't do that to one's president. One lets the past rest in peace,' ” Franz Josef said.

“Adele was a symbol of Austria too. When Austria lost
Adele
, a lot of people were sad and shocked. ‘Our paintings! Leaving Austria!' They were saying goodbye to
Adele
. And to another illusion.

“Paintings are not as important as a president,” Franz Josef said. “But Hubertus saw in
Adele
the same layers of half-truths, lies, and amnesia he grew up with, even in his own family.”

There turned out to be plenty of information implicating their banker father, Count Felix Czernin. Documents of the American Office of Military Government for Germany called Count Czernin a “German espionage agent.” The files said Czernin—“alias Burger, Agent No. A-306”—joined the German Nazi Party in 1939. He was said to be deeply involved in the
Aryanization of Jewish property, and to have reported on his progress to a top Aryanizer for Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring.

In 1945, in the dregs of the war, Felix was reportedly arrested for treason somewhere, but managed to escape. Another Czernin count was an adjutant to
Odilo Globocnik, the “Butcher of Lublin,” and did something to deserve Himmler's SS death's head ring.

There were also whispers in the family about another relative, the late
Igor Caruso. Caruso, an Italian aristocrat, came to Vienna to work at the pediatric clinic of the
Steinhof Hospital in 1942, when it was an infamous Nazi euthanasia center. Caruso had said he was horrified when he discovered this and quit to work for
Prince Alfred Auersperg, a neurologist and SS man. Caruso died in 1981.
But new Nazi-era archives were emerging on his boss, the unpunished Heinrich Gross, who still had a flat at the hospital as late as 1996. The last preserved brains of euthanized children were
finally buried in 2002, after scores of children's remains were “discovered” in the clinic's cellar and laboratories. The press would report that Igor Caruso had personally evaluated fourteen children who were later euthanized. One magazine headline would call Caruso “
a perpetrator who called himself a victim.”

For Hubertus, the search for his country's conscience began at home.

The once-impenetrable Belvedere had itself become a center of intrigue. Its director,
Gerbert Frodl, was now linked to Austria's failed effort to keep the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. Behind his back, Belvedere staff sniped that the museum archives contained a photograph of Frodl's father giving the “Heil” salute from the back of an open truck filled with stolen art. Frodl was born in 1940 and so was only a toddler when his father became one of Hitler's art collectors. It was a dark inheritance indeed.

The Belvedere's secrets were spilling out. Staff whispered that the museum's bunker had been a last resort for Hitler, its construction ordered by the Nazi foreign minister,
Joachim von Ribbentrop.
One curator said it had been a vast underground military center that was walled off after the war to outfit a small portion with the necessary climatic conditions to store paintings. “This wasn't for art,” another museum official said. “It was in case Berlin fell. It would be one of the possible structures of command for a government-in-exile.”

It sounded far-fetched.
But Hitler built a number of secret underground headquarters. Perhaps Nazi governor Schirach had hoped a special contingency bunker would restore his lost favor with Hitler.

Officials at the Belvedere and the Federal Monument Office maintained for years they had no idea why the bunker was built. Yet
Hans Aurenhammer, a highly respected postwar Belvedere director, wrote in detail of the Belvedere during wartime in his 1971 history,
Das Belvedere in Wien.
His book shows Hitler presiding over a 1940 reception in the Belvedere's Marble Hall, in one of the many period photographs that are now locked out of sight somewhere.

In those days, Aurenhammer wrote ruefully, the Belvedere was rechristened the Castle of the First Reichsmarschall by the National Socialist daily, the
Völkischer Beobachter.
By 1943, Aurenhammer wrote, “
Vienna was no longer far from the combat zone. Under the pond of the Upper Belvedere a large bunker was built that Hitler was to move into in case of the transfer of the headquarters to Vienna. Of course, this did not happen.”

The fortified refuge was completed in 1944. The Central Air Raid Police Command Post of the Vienna district moved in. There was a monitoring tower on the roof. In the park, there were floodlights and a flak battery with heavy antiaircraft guns. “
The protest of the Gallery's management against this exceptional threat to the Belvedere was in vain,” Aurenhammer wrote.

It was too late. The Belvedere was a military target. Allied bombs thundered down. Prince Eugene's roof, modeled on the billowing tents of the Turks he had conquered, caved in.

Long after the war, the Austrian architect
Hans Hollein wrote about the “
Führer Headquarters” in the bowels of the Belvedere, comparing the museum to a volcano with an incendiary “subterranean secret.”

Were Austria's paintings hidden in an old refuge for the Führer? Frodl had no comment. He swept past reporters and strode briskly out of the Belvedere gates, then down toward the Theresianum, where, in another era, Nazis trained child cadets to shoot.

Three years after the initial query, a new administration provided a brief explanation for the “subterranean secret.”

“
Please note what the Belvedere has to say about the bunker,” spokeswoman
Lena Maurer wrote in a November 2009 e-mail. “The collections of the Belvedere were sent out in 1942/43. In June 1943, the construction of the bunker for the protection of Adolf Hitler began, between the palace and the pond. From October 1944 onwards it was used by the Central Air Raid Police Command Post for the Vienna district. On November 18, 1944, bombs of the Allied forces hit the palace and destroyed part of the western wing. On February 21, 1945, massive air raids led to severe damages to the main building.

“Please do not hesitate to contact me in case you need any other information.”

What was left of
Adele Bloch-Bauer in the Austria that clung to her as indispensable cultural property?

There was little trace at the drafty old
palais
on the Elisabethstrasse. The
cubicle partitions of the Austrian train headquarters had cut her elegant salon to pieces.
Plaster moldings and ornamentation had been ripped out in what struck Randol's Vienna partner,
Stefan Gulner, as a Freudian desire to ravage the
palais
: to strip this Jewish mansion to its bones. An underground parking garage marred a view of the pretty Schillerplatz. Rusty bullet holes pocked the metal door into the attic, a relic, perhaps, of
Red Army troops searching for fugitive Nazis and
Wehrmacht soldiers. When the mansion was marked for restitution, Ron Lauder was advised not to buy it. It had lost too much integrity.

The gutted old place posed another question. What would have become of an aging Adele had she stayed? Would she have been driven to exile, despair, and death, like other Jewish models of Klimt?

Whatever her conceivable fate, there was nothing left of her here.

But in this country of the “beautiful corpse,” the relationship to the dead, like the past, was intimate. So I set out to visit Adele Bloch-Bauer's grave on the chilly gray morning of All Saints' Day. A miserable drizzle was falling on Vienna's peaked mansard roofs when I reached Vienna's Central Cemetery, a who's who where the graves of “Handsome Karl”
Lueger,
Karl Renner, and
Kurt Waldheim mingled with those of Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, and Johann Strauss, father and son. Here angels beckoned from elaborate family mausoleums, their ceilings painted, like the Sistine Chapel, with mortals reaching for the divine.

Adele was not in the celebrity directory. At the administration office, a stout matron wearing a cap of short gray hair and a severe expression frowned at the name of Adele Bloch-Bauer. “
Jüdische? Jüdische? Nein!
Not here,” she announced loudly, shaking her head. “It is a Jewish grave. She's in Döbling.” I insisted. She sighed with exasperation. A younger, bespectacled gentleman went to a computer and came back with a printout for an Adele Bauer at the Döbling cemetery across town. The matron plopped the paper down triumphantly. “The model of Klimt?” I asked.

“She's not here,” the young man insisted.

Was it possible the subject of the most expensive painting in the world had passed unnoticed? Perhaps in Vienna, so frozen in time, yet with such a complicated relationship with its past. I said I would walk to the crematorium and have a look. The matron threw up her hands. I walked toward the white
Art Deco gates of the cemetery for the cremated. Chestnuts and potatoes roasted on open fires in the parking lot, giving off their tantalizing garlic-and-salt aroma. The complex was a maze, as thickly wooded as the Black Forest. There was a narrow dirt path along a mock castle wall. Above, a black raven cried loudly as it flew from treetop to treetop.

I was about to turn back when I came upon the stark black-gray granite plaque lettered in gold: adele bloch-bauer. Beneath it were dry brown stems of long-dead flowers, mercifully upstaged by a lush green wild fern, as if nature itself had stepped in to celebrate this forgotten grave. The ledge held a rusted votive. Here, unadorned and obscure, lay the remains of Adele.

Someone in Vienna honored Adele's memory.

The cemetery in Hietzing, the district where Klimt had his last studio, was a stroll through the century. Bronze angels and roses decorated the
grave of
Katharina Schratt, Emperor Franz Josef's mistress, near the remains of
Karl Renner, the fickle opportunist. Klimt's good friend
Egon Schiele rested with his wife nearby. The remains of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt and her handicapped son lay not far from those of
Gustav Ucicky, her alleged half brother, close by where her brother
Erich Lederer was likely turning in his grave.

Between two weeping birch trees there was a small arched brown marble headstone, with
Art Nouveau lettering: gustav klimt. At its center was the face of Adele, from the gold portrait, no larger than a playing card, laminated against rain and snow. Adele seemed to stare up from Klimt's grave with pleading eyes, like a holy card of Mary Magdalene, between two burning candles. An older man appeared in a worn suede jacket, with a ruddy, unlined face, and began clipping the tiny hedge with blue berries that cradled the grave. I asked him about Adele's picture. “It's not from me!” he retorted vehemently.

Was he related to Klimt? He looked up with piercing blue eyes. His glance was fierce and unsmiling. “
My grandmother was one of his models,” he said finally. “She is the girl in the Schubert painting. The painting was burned. Many were burned. It was terrible.” The painting of Mizzi Zimmermann, torched at Schloss Immendorf.

“My father was the son of Klimt,” he said finally.

His name was
Gustav Zimmermann. Gustav didn't get much out of being the grandson of Austria's most famous artist. His father was serving in
World War I when Klimt died, and was a sergeant in the German army when Gustav was born, in 1939. Gustav had spent his life selling used cars. No one invited him to the Belvedere, or to Klimt film premieres with
John Malkovich.

But for years Gustav had been a lone guardian of the Klimt myth. Klimt's Josefstädterstrasse studio had been torn down years before. Gustav
was a member of a small community group that had saved Klimt's last studio, not far from the cemetery, from being razed to make way for a shopping mall. His grandmother told him she was already pregnant at the time of the Schubert painting. “She was very young. He liked young girls,” he said ruefully. “He was surely not a bad man. But a really good man? I don't know.”

Gustav was helping organize an exhibition of Klimt's letters to Mizzi. He invited
Gustav Ucicky's widow, Ursula. But she blew him off. “Probably she's afraid of being asked about the Nazi period and her husband. And she has all those paintings. People are asking questions about paintings like that nowadays,” he said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully.

He looked at the picture of Adele, yellowed by rain and sun. A warm foehn wind was blowing in from the southern Alps, pushing away the clouds and melting the snow. Suddenly the cemetery glowed with sunlight.

Later, over dinner at a restaurant overlooking a cobblestone street near St. Stephen's Cathedral, Gustav spoke of the difficulties of Mizzi's life as a single mother. She had another son with Klimt, Otto. When little Otto died, Klimt blamed her for not taking him to the doctor soon enough. Gustav studied a picture of Mizzi in the Schubert painting, reproduced in a book on the table, alongside his collection of her letters from Klimt.

“It was painful for Austria to lose those paintings,” Gustav said. “But it was just. I think Adele's will was finally interpreted in the right way. Because it was clear that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer bought the paintings of his wife. He paid for them, and it was clear they were his. If Adele had lived longer, she would have changed her will a thousand times, had she known what was to come.”

His bright blue eyes were thoughtful. “The funny thing is, the Belvedere didn't even want most of those paintings in 1938,” Gustav said. “They made the deal with Ucicky where they sold the paintings to pay for the ones they wanted. It's like a crime story.

“The truth is, if it weren't for the restitutions, Austrians would have never known anything about
Adele Bloch-Bauer.”