Posted: Thursday, 3rd May 2007

“The Austrians tried to say later that they were victims. They were no victims. They were totally happy… cheering, the church bells were ringing,” recalls Maria Altmann of the day the Nazis marched into Vienna. “The women threw flowers at the soldiers and there was tremendous jubilation in the streets. Everything changed.”

Maria, niece of Gustav Klimt’s muse Adele Bloch-Bauer, recounts for Imagine… the personal story of how her privileged family’s belongings were gradually stolen by the Nazis, amongst them several Klimt paintings of her aunt. The Golden Portrait, which was until recently the most expensive painting in the world, went on to make up part of the Nazi's collection of art.

“Adolf Hitler, the young Austrian born artist, had come to Vienna with dreams of becoming a great painter,” explains Alan Yentob. “He spent 9 unsuccessful years trying to earn his living as an artist. But time and again he was rejected but Vienna’s prestigious Academy of Art. Meanwhile Gustav Klimt had established himself as one of the most prominent members of Vienna’s school of Art Nouveau.”

In a story that needs no Hollywood dramatisation, Maria remembers saving her husband from Dachau concentration camp and escaping Austria with her husband and children to arrive in New York with nothing. Back in Austria her uncle was taken by the Nazis under false claims of tax evasion and all his possessions, including the Golden Portrait of his then deceased wife, were taken. In this moving episode of Imagine… we hear Maria’s personal testimony about her painful struggle to recover her family’s once treasured possessions, which, as Alan Yentob explains, forced “all sides to confront painful memories about Austria’s past and uncomfortable truths about the legitimacy of its cultural legacy.”

From the episode Stealing Klimt, 15th May 2007