{"id":10212,"date":"2015-04-20T10:13:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T17:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=10212"},"modified":"2015-04-23T19:15:22","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T02:15:22","slug":"where-the-story-starts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/20\/where-the-story-starts\/","title":{"rendered":"Where the Story Starts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"woman-in-gold\"
Portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch by Gustav Klimt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s hardly a state secret that the Austrians weren\u2019t very nice during WWII. Yes, there was a resistance movement, there\u2019s always a resistance movement. But we all know what happened. The Nazis robbed and murdered millions of people. After the war, Austria quietly integrated stolen art into its museum collections and returned to their genteel formality.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn unfortunate episode, best not talked about, there was nothing to be done,\u201d is my personal take on how Austria, as a nation, grapples with the horror of WWII.<\/p>\n

All this is at the front of my mind because I went to see Woman in Gold. The movie tells the story of how Maria Altmann — who fled Vienna in the early days of Nazi occupation \u2013 reclaimed Gustav Klimt\u2019s portrait of her aunt. The painting, once housed in the Belvedere Museum \u2013 I saw it there years ago \u2013 is now in the Neue Gallerie in New York City. Efforts to recover the painting started about the time I started spending a lot of time in Austria; I remember reading reports in the newspapers about the case.<\/p>\n

\"lifeballplakat2015_akezptanz\"
Conchita Wurst Life Ball Poster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just a few weeks back, Austria\u2019s new pop culture icon, Conchita Wurst, was recast as Adele Bauer-Bloch, dressed up in golden Klimt style and photographed for a poster promoting the Life Ball, a Europe\u2019s largest AIDS fundraiser. The Ball is in Vienna this year (May 2015). In case you\u2019re not tapped in to European drag artist Eurovision winner culture, well, that\u2019s who Conchita is; she won the Eurovision song contest.<\/p>\n

Conchita hails from just up the road from my Austrian home. Literally, it\u2019s only 20 kilometers from where I live when I\u2019m there to Bad Mitterndorf, Conchita\u2019s hometown. Austrians seem to have embraced Conchita whole-heartedly; I regularly drove past a mechanic shop with a banner out front that read, \u201cWelcome to Bad Mitterndorf, Home to Tom Neuwirth, Eurovision Song Contest Winner 2014.\u201d When you know how conservative the region is, you can’t help ponder the weirdness of this. An auto shop celebrating a drag queen in a rural Austrian town. What?<\/p>\n

My Austrian husband told me he\u2019d read the powers that decide what happens with the Woman in Gold painting are less than delighted with the latest depiction of Adele Bauer-Bloch as a bearded, cross-dressing pop star. My sense is that Austria is rather amused by it, but to my mind, it\u2019s also another incidence of convenient national amnesia. There\u2019s a scene in Woman in Gold, the movie, where a man confronts Maria Altmann (played by Helen Mirren) saying, \u201cIt\u2019s always about the Holocaust with you people, isn\u2019t it? Can\u2019t you move on?\u201d History is so very inconvenient, plus, there was nothing to be done. It is terribly inconvenient to think about the history of this painting in which Conchita is recast. Can’t you just move on?<\/p>\n

\"cabaret\"
Movie still from Cabaret<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Conchita would not have been tolerated under the Nazis; this is hardly a ground-breaking epiphany. \u201cDegenerate\u201d art was not allowed, gays and lesbians were treated no better than Jews. Conchita is a phenomenon that is either distinctly modern, or a weird throwback to the Weimer era , a period in which arts and culture thrived. She could have walked right out of Cabaret, the 1972 musical that takes place just as Nazism is rearing its ugly head in Europe.<\/p>\n

Conchita as the Woman in Gold embodies Austria perfectly. She is grounded in the immediate but refers to a glorious past, she glosses over the unfortunate aspects of her roots, and we are in on the joke, ha ha, isn\u2019t it funny that we have a bearded lady as our icon, are we not forward looking, you can hardly consider us intolerant, now, can you?<\/p>\n

Only yes, we can. Xenophobia is alive and well in Austria. During my winter stay, the newspapers horrified me. Nearly every day I\u2019d see a spread about Muslims juxtaposed with a spread about the need to remain vigilant and militarize. Sometimes, the stories on Muslim communities were human interest, holidays, or interviews with refugees, but they were invariably paired with stories that used the word \u201cTerrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The country also maintains a willful ignorance about the past in the most unexpected places. I was once confronted by a tour guide for explaining that actually, we know exactly how this Hebrew gravestone ended up in the outer facing walls of one of Graz\u2019s government buildings. Graz was a hotbed of Nazism; Nazis destroyed the Jewish cemeteries and used the stones as pavement and masonry. \u201cWe have no idea why this is here,\u201d the guide had said to her English speaking charges.<\/p>\n

\u201cBullshit,\u201d I said, loud enough for everyone to hear. I\u2019d been walking around the city with my family, my in-laws. \u201cWe know EXACTLY why it\u2019s here.\u201d And I proceeded to explain what I\u2019ve just told you \u2013 it was there because the Nazis put it there. The guide was very angry and accused me of operating a tour without a license, a much greater crime in Austria than being ignorant of history.<\/p>\n

I read several reviews characterizing the bureaucrats in Woman in Gold as cartoonish, practically heel clicking Nazis. I\u2019m typically loath to make generalizations, but I\u2019ve been through immigration in Austria and the Austrian government literally affects my daily life. To say those involved are rigid would be an understatement. I thought the bureaucrats accurately portrayed, and I thought that the young journalist who took forever to share his motivation for supporting Maria Altmann\u2019s case showed the hesitancy and optimism of an under-appreciated class of Austrians who want justice for a shameful past while still trying to build a better future for their complicated nation.<\/p>\n

Projections everywhere, surely. Please forgive me, I can\u2019t help it. I was raised Jewish, married an Austrian, and my path has taken me, over and over, right into the very messy past of the Jews in Austria. I also pay a distracted sort of attention to the plight of Austria\u2019s minorities, because while I may be American, I\u2019m still Jewish and very much a subclass while in Austria.<\/p>\n

There are many things I do not understand, but I know this is true: History does not start at a convenient way-point for those living it. It starts at the beginning, and so should we.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hardly a state secret that the Austrians weren\u2019t very nice during WWII. Yes, there was a resistance movement, there\u2019s always a resistance movement. But we all know what happened. The Nazis robbed and murdered millions of people. After the war, Austria quietly integrated stolen art into its museum collections and returned to their genteel … <\/p>\n


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