The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [102]
He is correct. Most art objects are to be sold on or auctioned off to raise money for the Reich. Some items are to be bartered with dealers for other objects; some items are to be given to the Führer for his new museum that is being planned for his birthplace of Linz; others to the National Museums. Berlin closely monitors the situation. ‘The Führer plans to personally decide on the use of the property after its seizure. He is considering putting artwork first and foremost at the disposal of small Austrian towns for their collections.’ Some pictures, some books, some furniture are earmarked for the collections of the Nazi leadership.
In the Palais Ephrussi this process of assessment is now under way. Everything in this great treasure-house is held up to the light and examined. This is what collectors do. In the grey light from the glassed-in courtyard all these objects from this Jewish family are held accountable.
The Gestapo write rather acidly about the taste behind the collections, but note that thirty of the Ephrussi pictures are ‘museum-ready’. Three Old Masters are given directly to the ‘gallery for painting’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, six to the Austrian Gallery, one Old Master is sold to a dealer, two terracottas and three paintings traded to a collector, ten sold to another dealer in the Michaelerplatz for 10,000 schillings. And so on and on and on.
Numerous ‘artistic and high-quality pieces that are unsuitable for office purposes’ go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the Museum of Art History) and the Naturhistorisches Museum (the Natural History Museum). All other ‘unsuitable’ objects are taken to the ‘Depot of Moveables’, a huge storage depot from which other organisations can come and take their pick.
The very, very best pictures in Vienna are photographed and pasted into ten leather-bound albums, and then these albums are sent to Berlin to be looked over by Hitler.
And in a letter from (initials illegible) Reference: RK 19694 B, from Berlin on 13th October 1938, there is a note that ‘The Reichs Fuehrer SS and Chief of the German [sic] submits with letter of 10 August 1938, received here 26 September 1938, 7 inventories concerning property and objects of art confiscated and sequestered respectively in Austria, also 10 albums of photographs and the catalogue are available in the office, the inventories and the certificate are attached.’ And apart from the ‘Palace including grounds and forest of the Jew Rudolf Gutmann’ and ‘7 estates of the family property of the House Habsburg and Lothringen as well as 4 villas and 1 palace of Otto V. Habsburg’, there are the art objects sequestered in Vienna, including the property of: ‘Viktor V. Ephrussi, No. 57, 71, 81–87, 116–118 and 120–122 . . . Confiscation has been made in favour of various offices: Austria, Reichs Fuehrer SS, NSDAP, Armed Forces, Lebensborn and others.’
While Hitler looks over the albums and chooses what he wants, and while these matters are being discussed and the difference between confiscation and sequestration is mulled over, Viktor’s library is taken away: his history books, the Greek and Latin poetry, his Ovid and Virgil, the Tacitus, the runs of English, German and French novels, the huge morocco-leather edition of Dante with the illustrations by Doré that so scared the children, the dictionaries and atlases, Charles’s books sent from Paris, the incunabula. Books bought in Odessa and Vienna, sent from his dealers in London and Zurich, his lifetime of reading, are taken off the library’s shelves and sorted and packed into wooden crates, and then the crates are nailed shut and are carried down the stairs into the courtyard and heaved onto the back of a lorry. Someone – initials illegible – scrawls a signature across a document, and the lorry coughs and starts up and drives