The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [115]
Restitution of property stolen from Jews . . . [should be] not to the individual victims, but to a collective restitution fund. The establishment of such and the following foreseeable arrangements is necessary in order to prevent a massive, sudden flood of returning exiles . . . A circumstance, that for many reasons must be paid very close attention to . . . Basically the entire nation should be made not liable for damages to Jews.
When, on 15th May 1946, the Republic of Austria passed a law which declared that any transactions that had made use of discriminatory Nazi ideology were to be deemed null and void, it seemed that the path was open. But the law was strangely unenforceable. If your property had been sold under the policy of forced Aryanisation, then you might be asked to buy it back. If an artwork was returned to you that was considered significant to Austria’s cultural heritage, then its export was blocked. But if you donated works to the museum, then a permit for other lesser artworks might be forthcoming.
In deciding what to return and what not to return, the government agencies used the documents to hand that held the most authority. These were those put together by the Gestapo, who were noted for their thoroughness.
One file, on the appropriation of Viktor’s collection of books, noted that a library was handed over to the Gestapo, but ‘there is no record describing its full content. However, there can only have been a small number of works, given that the document confirming the takeover mentions the content of two large and two small boxes as well as of a rotating bookshelf.’
So, on 31st March 1948, 191 books are returned from the Austrian National Library to the heirs of Viktor Ephrussi; 191 books are a couple of shelves full, a few yards out of the hundreds that made up his room.
And so it goes. Where are the records Herr Ephrussi kept? He is still held culpable, even after death. Viktor’s life of books is lost because of a document with its initials illegible.
Another file is on the appropriation of the art collection. It contains a letter between the directors of two museums. They have an inventory made by the Gestapo, and they have to sort out what happened to the pictures ‘of the banker Ephrussi, Wien I., Lueggerring 14. The inventory does not form a particularly valuable arts collection but the wall decoration from the apartment of a wealthy man. From the style it seems clearly to have been put together according to the taste of the 1870s.’
There are no receipts, but the ‘only paintings, which were not sold, were the absolutely not sellable ones’. The implication is that there is not much one can really do.
Reading these letters, I feel idiotically angry. It is not that it matters that these art historians don’t like the taste of ‘the banker Ephrussi’ and his wall decoration, though the phrase is far too close to the Gestapo’s ‘Jew Ephrussi’ for comfort. It is the way in which the archives are used to close down the past: there is no receipt for this, we cannot read that signature. It was only nine years ago, I think, and these transactions were by your colleagues. Vienna is a small city. How many calls would it take to sort this out?
My father’s childhood was punctuated by Elisabeth writing letter after letter against the backdrop of failing expectations that the family would get their fortune returned. She wrote partly from anger at the way in which pseudo-legalistic measures were put up to dissuade claimants. She was a lawyer, after all. But mostly because all four siblings were in real financial need and she was the only one in Europe.
Whenever a picture was retrieved, it was sold and the money split. The Gobelin tapestries were recovered in 1949 and sold for school fees. Five years after the war the Palais Ephrussi was returned to Elisabeth. It was not a good time to sell a war-damaged Palais in a city still under control of four armies, and it raised just $30,000. After that Elisabeth gave up.
Herr Steinhausser, Viktor’s former business partner who had