• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There is a special organisation that identifies particular libraries belonging to Jews. When I go through the membership booklet for the Wiener Club for 1935 – President Viktor v. Ephrussi – I see that eleven of his friends have their libraries taken.

Some of these crates are taken to the National Library. Here the books are picked over by librarians and scholars and then they are dispersed. As with the art historians, these are busy days for librarians and scholars. Some of these books are to stay in Vienna, some end up in Berlin. Others are destined for the ‘Führerbibliothek’ planned for Linz, still others for Hitler’s private library. And some are earmarked for Alfred Rosenberg’s Centre. Rosenberg, the early ideologue of Nazism, is a power in the Reich. ‘The essence of the contemporary world revolution lies in the awakening of the racial type,’ wrote Rosenberg grandiloquently in his books, ‘for Germany the Jewish Question is only solved when the Last Jew has left the Greater German space.’ These books, choked with rhetoric, sold in their hundreds of thousands with a popularity second only to Mein Kampf. One of the duties of his office became the confiscation of research material from ‘ownerless Jewish property’ in France, Belgium and Holland.

All across Vienna this is happening. Sometimes Jews are forced to sell things for next to nothing to raise money for the Reichsflucht tax in order to be permitted to leave. Sometimes things are just taken. Sometimes taken with violence, sometimes without, but always accompanied by a penumbra of official language, a piece of paper to sign, an admission of guilt, of involvement in activities that run counter to the legality of the Reich. There is lots of documentation: the list of the Gutmanns’ collection runs over page after page. The Gestapo take Marianne’s eleven netsuke of the boy playing and the dog and the monkey and the tortoise, the ones that she showed to Emmy a lifetime before.

How long does this separation of people and where they have lived take? The Dorotheum, Vienna’s auction house, runs one sale after another. Every day there are sales of sequestered property. Every day all these things find people willing to buy them cheap, collectors willing to add to their collections. The sale of the Altmann collection takes five days. It begins on Friday 17th June 1938 at three o’clock, with an English grandfather clock with Westminster chimes. It sells for only thirty reichsmarks. Each day is neatly enumerated to reach an impressive 250 entries.

So this is how it is to be done. It is clear that in the Ostmark, the eastern region of the Reich, objects are now to be handled with care. Every silver candlestick is to be weighed. Every fork and spoon is to be counted. Every vitrine is to be opened. The marks on the base of every porcelain figurine will be noted. A scholarly question mark is to be appended to a description of an Old Master drawing; the dimensions of a picture will be measured correctly. And while this is going on, their erstwhile owners are having their ribs broken and teeth knocked out.

Jews matter less than what they once possessed. It is a trial of how to look after objects properly, care for them and give them a proper German home. It is a trial of how to run a society without Jews. Vienna is once again ‘an experimental station for the end of the world’.

Three days after Viktor and Rudolf come out of prison, the Gestapo assign the family apartment to the Amt für Wildbach und Lawinenverbauung, the Office for Flood and Avalanche Control. Bedrooms become offices. The grand floor of the Palais, Ignace’s apartment of gold and marble and painted ceilings, is handed over to the Amt Rosenberg, the Office of Alfred Rosenberg, the Plenipotentiary of the Führer for the Supervision of all Intellectual and Ideological Education and Indoctrination in the National Socialist Party.

I picture Rosenberg, slight and well dressed, leaning on the huge Boulle table in Ignace’s salon overlooking the Ring, his papers arrayed in