Austria’s ‘Heirless’ Heirlooms

Their gray-blue eyes smile from the canvas: two pretty, young children in ruffled white collars, hands resting primly on a book inscribed, “Forever, to Mommy and Daddy.”

That painting breaks Robert Liska’s heart. It speaks of life, yet it represents death. “It is so poignant,” says Liska, a leader of Vienna’s tiny Jewish community.

The work by Carl Jacob Leybold, a minor 19th century painter, is among thousands of pieces of art stolen from Austria’s Jews by marauding Nazis after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. Nearly 60 years later, the paintings and sculpture, along with coin collections, furnishings and other “heirless” heirlooms, will be auctioned today.

For decades, the pieces languished in the dank, old Mauerbach Monastery outside Vienna. Austrian governments unwilling to recognize their country’s collaboration with its Nazi occupiers made little effort to track down rightful owners. Only last year, under considerable pressure, did Austria release more than 8,000 pieces to local Jewish authorities.

Most--possibly all--of the owners were murdered in concentration camps or have otherwise died, and only a few surviving family members have been located. These heirs often had to identify art based on childhood memories and have waged an uphill battle with Austrian authorities.

For Austria, the disposition of the artwork--after years of denial and delay--represents the latest step in this country’s hesitant coming-to-terms with its Nazi past.

Unlike Germany, Austria--which produced many senior Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler--continued to deny until recently its role as willing servant of the Third Reich, preferring to portray itself as a victim.

In response to the rise of Austria’s political far right, including a neo-Nazi movement and anti-immigrant sentiment, leading politicians and the cultural elite are being forced to confront what has been called the Miracle of Amnesia here.

“We live in the city of Freud, where sublimation, repression and suppression are an art form,” Liska said. “If you accept the historical doctrine that Austria was the Nazis’ first victim, then you have little reason to scrutinize your responsibility.

“If, on the other hand, this is a New Austria, one has to be prepared to look at his own history in a responsible fashion. And the returning of Jewish property is a natural consequence.”

The auction is being handled by Christie’s, which printed a 400-plus-page catalog of the collection, the London firm’s largest ever for a single sale. Christie’s officials said they expect the auction to bring in more than $3.5 million, which will be donated to Austrian Holocaust victims or their descendants anywhere in the world, based on the recommendations of a committee.

More than a third of the 180,000 Jews who lived in Austria before the war died in the Holocaust. Most of the rest were expelled or escaped to other countries. Today, Austria has about 7,000 Jews, many of whom fled here from Eastern Europe.

Liska, born in Vienna after the war to Jewish emigres from Czechoslovakia, and others in the Jewish community conceded that it only was with certain qualms that they agreed to handle what is known as the Mauerbach collection.

“It was the government that needed to find a solution,” he said. “In the end we decided we couldn’t shy away from it, . . . even if it meant we were doing a job that should have been done 30 years ago.”

Indeed, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Austria has come under criticism from a handful of Jews attempting to make claims on what they believe to be their family property.

From their home in Israel, relatives of Joseph Lilienthal, an affluent Viennese lawyer in the early part of the century, are demanding that 45 works of art be removed from the auction, alleging that the pieces belonged to Lilienthal’s extensive private collection.

The elegant 20-room Vienna home of Lilienthal and his wife, Cecilia, was ransacked and confiscated by the Nazis. The couple were killed in the Holocaust, but not before smuggling their two daughters, Ricki and Lilith, to safety in what was then Palestine. A son, Mark, escaped from the German concentration camp of Dachau.

Through years of struggle with Austrian authorities, the family had won back 13 paintings from the Mauerbach collection by the early 1990s. When Lilith Lilienthal Doron was glancing through the Christie’s catalog, she spied “Portrait of a Lady” by Franz von Stuck.

“This painting used to hang in our house,” she told the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “But how do I prove today that it belonged to us?”

“I remember once when my father took me to his office and showed me a painting on the wall. ‘Look, Lily,’ he told me, ‘this is a painting by the painter Titian.’ But I was never really interested in the collection. I was a little girl, and I was jealous of the collection. I always thought he loved his paintings more than his little girls.”

Doron’s son Benjamin accused the Austrian government of failing to make more of an effort to find victims’ descendants, and the Austrian Jewish community of failing to exert sufficient pressure on the government to do so.

“It simply cannot be that, just like that, our paintings will be sold to some Kuwaiti prince or some Saudi oil tycoon,” he told the paper. “These are paintings that my grandfather collected.”

Paul Grosz, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Austria, said his group is attempting to process a handful of last-minute claims. One such claim, he said, has resulted in the removal of an 1847 Anton Melbye sea scene, a similar 1900 work by Heinrich Persen-Angeln and nine painted Japanese plates. But in the end, he said in an interview, there may be some disputed sales today.

Jews have lived in Vienna since the 1200s but were periodically expelled or banished from the central part of the city. A stock market crash and other economic factors fueled a fresh wave of anti-Semitism after 1873.

Sixteen years later, Hitler was born in the Austrian town of Braunau. A frustrated artist, he eventually would apply twice for admission to the Vienna School of Fine Arts and be rejected both times.

Once he had risen to power in Germany and launched his assault on the rest of Europe, Hitler and his troops began amassing huge collections of confiscated art. By 1940, almost every Jewish home in Austria had been ransacked. Historians say Hitler took special delight in raiding Vienna and was collecting the best works to build his own art museum in the Austrian city of Linz.

“Hitler obtained most satisfaction in transferring property from Vienna, from the big ‘non-Aryan’ Viennese collections of Baron Rothschild or the Polish Count Karl Lanckoronski,” historian Brigitte Hamann writes in her new book, “Hitler’s Vienna.”

More than 3 million pieces had been stolen by the Nazis by the end of World War II. U.S. troops liberating Austria discovered thousands of art-filled crates stored in salt mines. Much of this would eventually become the Mauerbach collection.

The Allies returned many works to their owners, but when the Allied occupation of Austria ended in 1955, they turned over more than 8,000 pieces to the Austrians on the condition that attempts be made to find the owners or their heirs. Very few claims, however, were accepted by the courts.

In 1965, an Austrian Jewish woman living in New Zealand wrote to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for help in regaining a painting owned by her slain father. It was the last thing she remembered seeing as she was dragged from her Vienna home in 1939 and expelled.

Wiesenthal, a survivor of Austria’s most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Mauthausen, took up the woman’s case. He discovered caches of “heirless” properties--as well as paintings belonging to Holocaust victims that were being used in Austrian embassies.

Largely due to Wiesenthal’s pressure, the Austrian government was forced in 1969 to introduce laws requiring publication of a list of the Mauerbach items.

Still, only a few hundred pieces were returned to heirs in the years that followed, while hundreds of claims were rejected by the Austrian courts. In an interview in his Vienna offices, Wiesenthal said judges demanded intricately detailed information from people claiming to be heirs and seemed to be discouraging claims altogether. One claim was rejected, he said, because the family was a centimeter off in stating the dimensions of a painting.

The artwork continued to languish until 1984, when the New York magazine ARTnews published the results of its own eight-month investigation that found “neglect, ineptness and questionable legal maneuvers” by the Austrian government in its handling of “a legacy of shame.”

But still, few claims were successful. Last year, following another round of bad international publicity, the Austrian parliament voted unanimously to transfer the collection to the Jewish federation.

On behalf of the federation, Christie’s then began a painstaking process of examination, cataloging, authentication and identification of the pieces. It had very little to go on. The federation had no records on who had owned the items. A seal or stamp on the back of a frame, for example, might be the only clue.

“Here we were confronted with a total void, a tremendous challenge,” said Anke Adler Slottke, director of the sale for Christie’s and one of the first to inspect the property. “We had to start from ground zero. . . .

“One shuddered, quite frankly. The works were delightful, in good condition . . . yet you knew what had happened [to the owners]. We were all quite affected.”

There are only a handful of “big names” among the artists and few valuable “rediscoveries” of well-known lost works in the collection, leading some to speculate that the finest specimens managed to find their way to private vaults.

What the collection does show is a frozen-in-time glimpse into the lives of Austrian Jewish families before the war.

Most of the paintings are salon portraits, landscapes and still lifes. They depict a conservative, bourgeois life of plush furniture, silk-lined walls and fine carpets.

Among the noteworthy pieces are “The Oriental,” by Friedrich von Amerling, several watercolors by Rudolf von Alt and an important marble bust of Alexander the Great from the 1st century BC.

And there are simple items that speak from beyond the grave: Programs from the opera. A passport for one Jacob Oppenheimer “allowing free transport of hospital supplies.”

Leaders in the Jewish community and the art world said they are hoping the sale will set a precedent for other countries to turn over art and artifacts stolen from Jews during the war.

That Austria is taking this step reflects a very recent change. This is, after all, the country that elected former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986 despite allegations about his wartime activities. And earlier this month, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party of Joerg Haider gained a resounding boost in European Parliament elections, coming in a close third behind the country’s two main parties.

Austria’s official view of itself as Hitler’s victim, rather than his accomplice, really only changed three years ago, when Chancellor Franz Vranitzky went to Israel and acknowledged that Austrians had suffered but were also “willing servants of Nazism.”

“I believe that this sale may truly be considered successful if it contributes to raising . . . public recognition of the injustice that was perpetrated, and thus to helping this country come to terms with its past,” Grosz told a news conference last week.

But in the interview, he was less sanguine:

“It is the end of a sordid story, and I hope it is the beginning of a better self-understanding. But the next decade could also be the decade of the Haiders. I am not convinced people learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others.”

Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.