Remembering David Pryce-Jones

T he picture attending this post is of the painting Hungarian Shepherd Boy, by the 19th-century Austrian artist Johann Gualbert Raffalt. It’s a lovely little work (only eight by ten inches) of oil on board, no? Yes, lovely. And of value, albeit small.

Which is why the Nazis wanted it.

It has a story — “When the Nazis Stole My Painting” — which proved the most affecting article I have ever read in National Review, penned for the April 4, 2011, issue by David Pryce-Jones, NR’s late senior editor and about as decent and wise a soul as you could ever meet. (On the many NR cruises that David and his beautiful wife Clarissa attended, thousands of this journal’s readers did indeed meet and befriend and become enchanted by him.)

Hungarian Shepherd Boy was among the many items the Nazis confiscated — make that stole — from David’s ransacked childhood home (a mansion known as Meidling, built by his great grandfather, the industrialist Gustav Springer — it too was purloined by the Nazis, who repurposed it as a training facility) after the Anschluss turned Vienna into a city of despair and thievery and torment for its Jewish citizens, which included David’s maternal family. (His father’s side was English and Welsh.)

The painting’s story of theft and confinement spans a half century and then some. It shouldn’t have. Stolen items, when recovered, are returned to the original owner after all. Except that the postwar Austrian government, guided by an acrobatic conscience, had no intention to do so. Its eighth-hearted, if that, “restitution” operations slow-walked and crawled, year after year, decade after decade, in willful bureaucratic intransigence, going through the theatrics of dumb-playing, paperwork-losing, and Kafkaesque processes, clearly expecting (hoping! scheming!), as they had done with so many other claimants, to exhaust the DP-J family’s fight for restoration of what was rightfully theirs. Of the final phase of the protracted process — akin to what many have seen in the powerful 2014 film Woman in Gold — to reclaim Hungarian Shepherd Boy, David writes:

On one or two occasions my cousin or I got through to the Herr Doktor seemingly in charge of this dossier in the ministry. He was never less than charming, making sure to admit and regret the Kafkaesque delay we were experiencing, and offering to conclude the business by next month. Next month would come and go; he would be away, traveling, on vacation. Then they wanted proof of probate in legal form—the extremely efficient French lawyer who had handled my uncle’s estate had experienced this process of restitution and sardonically wished me the best of luck. Then they raised the question of liability. We had once more to provide documentation of our identity as descendants of my grandmother and provide assurance that in the case of a future dispute over ownership none of us would sue, and further that we accepted responsibility should other heirs or as yet unidentified descendants of my grandmother appear. And so the eleven years passed.

This whole procedure, I came to understand, has nothing to do with righting a wrong or making amends. Those eleven years served quite a different purpose. Nazism set in place a huge transfer of wealth and the question became how to keep possession and enjoy it. Oskar Helmer’s original determination to play for time implicitly conceded that Austrians were war profiteers and knew it. Psychologically, they could rid their consciences of residual guilt by making themselves out to be deprived of what they convince themselves by now is theirs. The bureaucratic obstacles to restitution have the purpose of making Jews out to be the kind of grasping and vindictive people who will go to the most extreme lengths in pursuit of their property, casting aspersions on others in the process—spreading out everywhere, in Helmer’s disdainful expression.

David’s compelling description of the tortured process to defy justice, seen through the state’s pathological (putting the “possessed” in “possessing”!) drive to keep this tiny painting, implied plenty too, albeit indirectly, about the culture of the continent and its cold, shameless functionaries and their general refusal to accept culpability for a variety of colossal sins, from antisemitism (before and after the war) to communist tyranny. Or did I miss news of the trials of the Stasi henchmen and Vichy beasts and the Marxist thugs who imposed poverty, fear, abuse, and death on the countries behind the Iron Curtain?

Sorry: Two dead Ceaușescus don’t wipe clean Europe’s slate. So we will leave it to God to render His judgments on the legions of miscreants who poisoned the 20th century, enacting their nefarious programs and final solutions in the shadows of cathedrals.

Excuse the jingoism if you will, because David’s NR article — along with Tuvia Tenenbom’s powerful book, I Sleep in Hitler’s Room — clarified several land-based happenings during NR’s various European cruises. (There were ten to a dozen held over the years, with David and Clarissa on nearly all of them.) It was often experienced, or should I say exposed, particularly on riverboats sailings through Germany and Austria: the difference between American customer service, and therefore the American mindset — I’m so sorry sir, what can I do to fix this? — and the Germanic brand of know-nussing, blank-stare, die-before-I-admit-guilt stance of the hotel clerk or the tour guide or the shopkeeper. One rightly wonders just how pervasive and definitional is this determination to never admit error, to deny culpability, to feign complete ignorance, or to share what grandpa did during the war while he was a motorman for Reichsbahn.

Anyway, David’s makes-you-think/infuriating article is autobiographical, and on that score, I recommend his wonderful, agog-rendering memoir Fault Lines, published in 2015 by Encounter Books, as well as the final book he wrote, Signatures (2020, again by Encounter), which uses personally inscribed books from his home bookshelves as a means to tell of his encounters with famous writers. It too is a wonderful read. What a life he led in 89 packed years.

There is far more to David Pryce-Jones than the above catalogues. He was a highly regarded historian, a literary editor, and one of our era’s true experts on things Arab and things Islamofascist. And as we knew directly, on the high seas of NR voyages, it would be hard to find a speaker who was kinder to our cruise contingent, which always included one or two or a handful who could (and would!) try a saint’s patience. Which is what David had. May he be in their company.