LONDON – “Austria to Start Returning Artwork Looted by the Nazis” was a headline last week in The International Herald Tribune, exactly 53 years and 7 months after the defeat of the Nazi Reich. And close on 90% of those who should benefit from restitution, whose homes and businesses were looted and whose precious artifacts transported either to German and Austrian museums or often to the homes of Nazi leaders, are now dead. Even if you were a Rothschild your name and influence in all these post-war years may not have been sufficient to regain what was stolen. If you were Jewish in Austria it was as if the state in all its successive plumages since the war, socialists, centrists or coalition was not going to pull its finger out on your behalf. Even the promise made in the Austrian parliament earlier last month on the belated return of works of art is so circumscribed as to raise serious doubts whether many pictures will ever find their rightful owners or their heirs.
It wasn’t only art and treasure that got short shrift, it was people too. After the war Austria made the most desultory efforts to woo back its Jewish emigres who had fled to the U.S., Canada and Britain, the likes of Nobel science winners Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schroedinger working in the U.S., and philosopher Karl Popper and economist Friedrich Hayek teaching in London.
Austria, as John Kenneth Galbraith has long maintained, has arguably been post war western society’s most successful economy, producing not only handsome growth but equitably distributed well-being. Nevertheless, politically and morally, it has been seriously schizophrenic: it has buried its head in the sand about its Nazi past, even to the point of electing as president in 1986 Kurt Waldheim, despite the evidence, that had then recently surfaced, that he had concealed parts of a dishonourable war record when he successfully saught and occupied the office of secretary-general of the United Nations.
If 1998 was the year of exposure of Swiss banks when they were compelled by a combination of Jewish activism and American congressional and governmental pressure to make their financial peace with the Jewish community, it looks like there could well be the makings of a repeat performance for Austria in 1999.
A book to be published in Vienna in the spring, “The Extinction” could be the catalyst. As one might expect from the author, Hubertus Czernin, whose previous books exposed Kurt Waldheim and the disgraced Cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer, accused of homosexual offenses, he recounts a tale of scandalous proportions. The book’s subject is the Nazi looting of Austrian art. One chapter already being passed around is a story of the late banker Alphonse Thorsch. This week, his great grand-daughter, Countess Marie-Therese Gudenus, has been in Washington in an attempt to bring the book’s findings before the U.S. government’s four day conference on the Holocaust that began on Monday.
Alphonse Thorsch died in exile in Canada in 1945. The struggle of his heirs for the restitution of his property proves the point, says Mr Czernin, that “the more important the cases were, the more aggressive and careless the attitude of the Austrian government and bureaucracy became”.
Thorsch was enormously rich, the owner of a private bank second only to the Rothschild’s. His house was a palace of 60 rooms and his desk was that of former First Minister Metternich. In March, 1938 the National Socialists stormed in, turfed out the occupants and confiscated the house, the paintings, carpets, jewels and most important, the bank. (Interestingly, the desk turned up in the office of the Austrian vice-chancellor in 1967.)
Nineteen pictures were restored to the family in 1949; one more followed in 1952. But most have not been. The trust established by Thorsch in his will, in the name of his grandchildren, has saught time and time again to win the return of the looted property, but to no avail. Since the family couldn’t say where the art was or where the capital was transferred to, the government has maintained that the family “is not in a legal position to demand restitution”. Nor did the state offer to help with the search.
In 1970, Marie-Therese’s mother, Angela, renewed the family effort. Again the government rebuffed her, arguing that she was not capable of taking over the management of a bank. Even when her cousin, the internationally well-known Hamburg banker, Max Warburg, became involved the government refused to act. (His bank, also confiscated, was speedily returned shortly after the war by the German authorities, which have a good record in such matters.)
Austria fifty three years on still lives the lie that it was a victim of Hitler itself. (A street witticism: The Austrians like to pretend Hitler was German and Beethoven Austrian.) Successive governments have acted as if they believed that if they did nothing or, at least, very little, the problem would go away and solve itself. Three generations on it hasn’t. And why should it?
Note for editor 1) dateline Vienna. 2) I can be reached by phone on +44 385 351172 or by e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
