Von Ripper's Odyssey: War, Resistance, Art and Love

By Sian Mackay

The Austrian aristocrat Baron Rudolph von Ripper (1905–60) was acclaimed internationally as an artist, military hero and bon viveur before his astonishing legacy was unintentionally erased by history. Fortuitously, the recent discovery of a dossier of his letters and photographs at an uninhabited Spanish villa has led to its resurrection i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sancho Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780952883739

Book preview

PROLOGUE

One day towards the end of the twentieth century, a telephone call at my Palma apartment would alter the course of the years to come. An acquaintance was on the line inviting me to take a look at a file containing letters and photographs from the 1950s. At the time, I was researching the lives of prominent Europeans who had been visitors or exiles to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Georges Sand, Frederic Chopin, the Austrian Archduke Louis Salvador and Robert Graves were names on my list, and, as my informant knew, I was always on the lookout for others.

She lived in a town on the foothills of the Sierra de Tramuntana where I found her house set in a garden of fig, pomegranate and olive trees at the top of a steep incline. It was autumn in Mallorca, the ravishing time. The file lay on the garden table, and I curbed my impatience to open it whilst she brought out lunch and poured the wine. It was a dog-eared blue cardboard file with elastic closures such as you could buy in any island stationery shop at the time. By way of distracting myself, I remarked on the bees swooning on the purple fruits of the snaking fig tree overhead, and I admired away to the east the distant opaline view of the bay of Pollensa.

‘I found the file over there,’ she said, ‘at an uninhabited villa in Pollensa.’

We chatted until lunch was over and at last she opened the file. Carefully she set aside a sheaf of letters some written in an old German script, mysterious and flimsy on airmail paper, others in English. Then we sat side-by-side looking at photographs, mostly black and white, which spanned decades. Who were these people in the photographs, severe looking military men from another era, groups of smiling women wearing dirndls, on holiday perhaps, in the Alps? Who was the sophisticated couple, the suave man with the taller, beautifully groomed woman at his side? There they were again dressed to the nines at a ‘swanky’ evening party suggesting Hollywood movies of the 1950s.

What had my hostess been doing at an uninhabited villa, I wondered? And how did she discover the file?

‘A few year ago I was scouting on behalf of a Scottish artist who intended to run painting holidays here in Mallorca,’ she said. ‘We were searching for a villa big enough to sleep a group, with at least one large room for a studio. Our budget was tight. We weren’t looking for the cream of the crop, and one day I heard of an uninhabited villa near Pollensa that was up for rent.’

‘If it had been uninhabited for some time, the rent might be lower?’ I said.

‘That’s what we hoped, and I went to see it. Its spacious, light interior immediately struck me as the perfect base we’d been looking for and, although no one had lived there for a long time, a fresh lick of paint would soon revive it. I wandered into the garden where a small changing pavilion stood beside the swimming pool, covered with green algae and peppered with pine cones from the wood beyond it. The pool, too, could easily be cleaned up, I thought. The door to the pavilion was unlocked and I stepped into a time warp: dinner suits and evening gowns from a bygone age hung from a rail, party clothes mildewed and frayed with age. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and my sense that I had entered a fairy story increased when a large spider ran across the bench and disappeared under the hems of the dresses. It was as if the spider had arrived to draw my attention to the pile of warped books lying there and, concealed among them, this blue file.

‘Realising that the pavilion would have to be cleared of the clothes and books as a condition of my associates renting the villa, I opened the file. And, standing in that silent pavilion, I had a hunch that its contents might be important. Back home that evening, I couldn’t get the mouldering clothes, the spider and the images I’d seen in the photographs out of my mind.

‘The upshot was that my colleague was keen to rent the villa and I went back a second time. The estate agent agreed that Ca’n Cueg – ‘The House of the Frogs’ – needed some improvements. Apart from the occasional rental, it had been uninhabited for half-a-century, and, when he told me he’d send someone to bin the contents of the pavilion before we moved in, I made up my mind to rescue the file. I’ve looked through it many times since then, and discovered that it must have been abandoned along with the clothes in the pavilion when the villa was sold in the 1960s.’

‘Abandoned by the previous owners?’

‘Yes, they were Baron and Baroness Rudolph von Ripper, the couple in the photographs who bought Ca’n Cueg in the early 1950s. He was an Austrian artist, and although I’m not up on twentieth-century art, I took a couple of photographs of two strange murals inside the house.’ She passed them to me, and the Modernist-style murals suggested that Rudolph von Ripper was far more than the lotus-eating socialite photographed at lavish parties. He was an accomplished artist.

The story haunted me, and I longed to know more. As I would discover, the blue file was too slim to tell the whole story of this Austrian aristocrat’s life, but its contents hooked me in and I went on to track down further sources in Germany, Austria and the USA. Month after month, year after year, the wonder grew as I pieced together von Ripper’s heroism in war and resistance, art and love. Rudolph ‘Rip’ von Ripper (1905–1960) was a soldier as well as an artist, acclaimed in Europe and America for both these roles during the first half of the twentieth century.

Throughout his life, he was a fierce opponent of tyranny in all its forms. I followed in his footsteps to the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was tortured on account of his powerfully anti-fascist art, deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Third Reich. He recorded his terrible experiences with searing eloquence in his masterwork, a portfolio of Surrealist prints entitled Écraser l’Infâme (‘To Crush Tyranny’). In flight from the Gestapo, Rip fled to America in 1938 where Picasso’s New York dealer arranged exhibitions of his work. Guggenheim fellowships followed and Time magazine made him the toast of the town when its January 1939 cover was illustrated with one of the prints.

Clue by clue, I became immersed in his life and art. Baron Rudolph von Ripper lived – and loved – with brio throughout the great and tragic eras of a lifetime that spanned both world wars and he befriended many of its luminaries including Klaus Mann, Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux and Benjamin Britten. I read newspaper articles about ‘the Soldier with an Easel’, and books by his friends in high places describing von Ripper’s heroism. He became an American citizen and a highly decorated military hero of the Second World War when his astonishing feats included the capture of Hitler’s favourite commando, Otto Skorzeny, in the Austrian Alps.

‘The bravest man I ever saw,’ said a top general. ‘The kind they write books about,’ wrote Ernie Pyle, the American war correspondent. Why then had history forgotten this heroic war artist?

Post-war, Rip became a CIA agent and lived with his second wife, Evelyn ‘Avi’ Leege, at Ca’n Cueg, their dream home in Mallorca. In the 1950s the island was being promoted internationally as a honeymooners’ paradise. But Mallorca was also a safe haven for agents, spies and former Nazis and Rip realised the truth of his friend Gertrude Stein’s remark, ‘Mallorca is Paradise, if you can stand it,’ when Otto Skorzeny moved into a villa nearby.

Rudolph von Ripper’s Homeric odyssey makes thrilling reading, but in the course of writing this book my most cherished hope has been to restore his astonishing art to the twentieth-century canon.

Edinburgh 2016

INFERNO

1905–1938

CHAPTER ONE

THE STARTING PISTOL

In a crowded third-class railway carriage, a sixteen-year-old Austrian nobleman sits sketching the life around him: widows cradling infants, lovers, wounded soldiers and down-and-outs like himself. He has chosen a corner seat, a little apart from the others. No one would take him for an aristocrat in his latest disguise of peasant shirt, tweed waistcoat, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. A dark cotton cap conceals his need of the haircut he’ll get when he earns some cash (he has heard that a coalmine near Duisburg is hiring men). No one takes a second glance at the youth whose large head is bent over his sketchpad, and who now and then looks up to capture through his good eye the faces that fascinate him most. The carriage rattles and the wheels on the tracks beat out a metallic accompaniment to Rudolf von Ripper’s journey from Berlin. His knapsack contains cheese, bread, apples, basic drawing materials, his shaving kit, two books (Dante’s Divine Comedyin Italian and a volume of Rimbaud’s poems in French) and the few family photographs he succeeded in snatching prior to his hasty departure from Austria. When night falls and the carriage darkens, one by one his fellow passengers doze off, and, by the light of his torch Rudolf studies the photographs intently, as if they hold clues to his unknowable future. All that has befallen him since he left home (in a shameful rage) merges with his uneasy dreams.

There is a photograph of himself as a boy in his sailor suit, squinting into sharp sunlight that casts his shadow on the ground and on the whitewashed wall behind him. His stiff-backed Prussian father, Major General Eduard Maria Ritter von Ripper, is buttoned into his military greatcoat, and his sisters, Clara and Valerie, wear fur collars and muffs with their thick winter coats. And he thinks it curious, given his present predicament, that even then, when he must have been around nine years old, he chose to stand a little apart from his family, hands stuffed into his pockets. No one smiles. It is winter at Lemberg on the eve of the Great War. He remembers his father instructing them to look straight at the camera and not to move a muscle before the click of its shutter.

In another less formal photograph, he’s wearing summer shorts and an oversized black beret that suggests the artist he longs to be. This time he’s beaming into the camera, linking arms with his sisters and their friends, forgetting for a few moments the waves of ambivalences and contradictions that disturb his privileged existence. This scene might have been captured at Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), Goerz (now Gorizia, Italy) or Klausenberg (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania.) No information is written on the back of the photograph. It was so long ago he can’t remember where it was taken. Certainly, it must have been somewhere in the Crown lands, as the far-flung regions and principalities of the Austria-Hungary empire where his family had residences were called before the First World War.

Rudolf Karl Hugo von Ripper had been born on 29 January 1905 at Klausenberg, the provincial capital of the Austria-Hungary Empire. On the night of his birth, Gustav Mahler’s prophetic song cycle Kindertotenlieder (‘Songs on the Death of Children’) was performed for the first time in Vienna. The boy was practically a prince, with blue-blooded Catholic parents from the highest echelons of imperial society: Claire, Countess von Salis-Samaden, a Central European aristocrat, and Baron Eduard von Ripper, aide-de-camp to the previous Hapsburg emperor, Charles I. On account of Rudolf’s father’s high rank and responsibilities, the family frequently travelled vast distances to one or other of their imperial residences, and the child attended several Jesuit schools. These upheavals were both exciting and confusing to a privileged boy born in the Crown lands who had many strange provinces, customs, languages and climates to conjure with, and a complex history to grasp.

The dual Austria-Hungary Empire in which Rudolf was raised evolved after the Ausgleich or ‘Compromise’ of 1867 transformed the former Austrian and Hapsburg monarchies into a double-headed hybrid ruled over by Emperor Franz Joseph I. It incorporated many countries and ethnic groups: Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Poles, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and Italians, whose peoples collectively spoke at least eleven languages. When Rudolf was born, Franz Joseph was seventy-five years old and had ruled over these peoples for almost forty years. Would the sun never set upon the Empire his subjects wondered? Their eerie restlessness induced in them a collective sense of impending doom that preyed upon their stagnant country and crept into the avant-garde art and literature of the time. In The Radetzky March the novelist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) describes the pre-war Crown lands as tedious backwaters far removed from Vienna, stage sets for lonely young officers trapped in crumbling army barracks and mirthless small town bureaucrats whose lives sift away like sand in an hourglass. General von Ripper had charge of ‘crumbling army barracks’ near the Russian front, and, dressed in the uniform of a boy soldier, his only son, Rudolf, often accompanied him on tours of inspection.

In common with other aristocratic children, servants, nursemaids and tutors attended Rudolf and his sisters, and despite the boy’s facial imperfections – a large head, a weak sideways-looking eye, buckteeth and lisping speech – his indomitable spirit charmed everyone. He was affectionately known as ‘Rip’. The love that surrounded him was not in doubt but the divergent aims and influences of his heredity were hard for the youngster to reconcile. Even as Baron Eduard was schooling his son for the highest military office, his mother, ‘Mutti’, was nudging him down artistic paths and had him tutored in drawing and painting from the age of three. Stealthily, as he lived through each stage of childhood, twin embryonic personas vied within his young soul. Sometimes when he visited military barracks with his father, he ardently wished to impress everyone he met with the notion that he would become a great soldier like his forebears. At other times, encouraged by his mother to capture scenes of the country life surrounding their estates, when Rip sat sketching or painting in the tranquillity of the studio or out in the landscape, he felt passionately drawn to art.

Despite the disruptions to family life, the family’s frequent removals from place to place, Rip learned to ride, fence and handle a pistol under the watchful eye of his father. Rip’s father was a man to be reckoned with; not a cruel man, but an autocrat devoted to his family at the same time as he wielded power in the imperial army. There were shoots on the family estates: wild boar, partridge, pheasant and everything else deemed suitable for the table. Great weight was given to learning in Austrian aristocratic circles and, whether they found themselves in Klausenburg, Lemberg, Goerz or Salzburg, the von Ripper children’s education continued under the Jesuits. They learned to speak several languages, to dance, practise music and art, and to read Goethe, Schiller and Dante as well as Greek, Russian, French and British classics in translation. Most of these leather-bound works could be found on the shelves of their father’s extensive library: vermillion, brown, navy-blue and green leather bindings with gold tooling, each colour denoting the section of the library the books belonged to. There, young Rip was at liberty to absorb illustrations of the art of Renaissance Italy and the Dutch Masters. In this hushed place he could hunker down on a vast Oriental carpet representing a garden of earthly delights: pomegranates, orange and cypress trees, gazelles, and strange geometric formations that begged to be copied into his sketch books.

Rudolf von Ripper would have been familiar with a handsome seven-volume set titled Die Balearen (The Balearic Islands) in the ‘Anthropology’ section of the library. Perhaps his parents even put this lavish creation of the Archduke Louis Salvador (1847–1915) into his hands. After all, as courtiers, the Baron and Countess were near contemporaries of the Archduke whose escapades they had followed with a mixture of disapproval and admiration. Louis Salvador had been a controversial figure at court since, despite the fact that he was second in line to succeed Emperor Franz Joseph, he had abandoned his glittering Hapsburg inheritance in favour of the primitive island of Mallorca. Die Balearen was his labour of love, his homage to the Balearic Islands: several volumes published in Leipzig between 1869 and 1884 and bound in navy-blue leather tooled with gold. This masterpiece of anthropology, geography and art was illustrated with Louis Salvador’s own accomplished drawings of the islands Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera. Islands scarcely bigger than dots on the spinning globe on Rip’s father’s library desk, dots in the Mediterranean Sea, roughly halfway between Barcelona and North Africa.

The boy absorbed feisty images from Die Balearen to mingle with his dreams: strange rock formations, caves, mountain villages, olive groves and sea inlets haunted by pirates. He learned how to pronounce the name Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands – ‘Ma-yorka’ – and that it meant ‘great whale’. He longed to explore this magical island, and, like Louis Salvador, one day he would. But first, he had to live through his troubled childhood and the ensuing years when he, like the Archduke, would become a wanderer.

General von Ripper and his family were often summoned to Vienna to participate in affairs of state. Stefan Zweig’s novella Fantastic Night unfolds there on the eve of the First World War when ‘the mellow and sensuous city of Vienna … excels like no other in bringing leisurely strolls, idle observation and the cultivation of elegance to a peak of positively artistic perfection, a purpose in life of itself …’

The capital of the Austria-Hungary Empire was a startling contrast to the Crown lands at the beginning of the twentieth-century, and there Rudolf von Ripper encountered another of his personas: not his soldier self and not the artist, but the stiffly dressed courtier to whom others were obliged to show obeisance. He was still too young and too protected to realise that, even as Emperor Franz Joseph showed himself daily in his state coach travelling between his Schönbrunn and Hofburg Palaces, radical intellectuals were plotting to put an end to the old man’s monotonous reign. In the minds of the geniuses – and evil genies – scheming in the salons and coffee houses of Vienna in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century, a shockingly new, modern world was being invented. Later, Rudolf von Ripper would piece together their faces in an astonishing jigsaw puzzle depicting the weltanschauung of the times. Joseph Stalin was in Vienna writing a communist pamphlet; Leon Trotsky had crossed the Russian border near Lemberg and travelled on to Vienna where he had been living for seven years; Adolph Hitler (1889–1945) a bearded, long-haired down-and-out, was living in seedy hostels and hawking recherché watercolours on the streets of the capital. People noticed him wearing a rubberized yellow cycling cape without a vest underneath, sweating in the summer heat and stinking horribly. The mentally disturbed would-be artist haunted the city like a ghost, excluded from the company of Vienna’s respected writers and artists whose names and achievements would shape the twentieth century: Rilke, Kafka, Roth, Musil, Zweig, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka and Wittgenstein.

In this extraordinary era, within apartments overlooking a leafy Viennese courtyard, Sigmund Freud was probing the human subconscious. The Austrian doctor had realised that the suppressed neuroses embodied in his patients mirrored the starchy, pompous regime that ruled them. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) belonged to a wealthy Viennese-Jewish family and he, too, described in his novels the sexual mores pullulating behind the façade of the fashionable society he knew so well. Zweig’s characters are out of touch with reality, trapped in the neuroses Freud wrote about. The protagonist of Fantastic Night is a cryptically named Baron von R..., a wealthy aristocrat who wears faultlessly correct suits of English tailoring and a pearl in his cravat. Is it mere coincidence that Zweig’s fictional soldier Baron von R... bears uncanny similarities, not only in his abbreviated name, to Rudolf’s father, Baron von Ripper? He was ‘a figure in high society … acquainted with the most distinguished figures of a city with a population of millions,’ – yet who has lost the ability to feel human emotions – ‘a cogwheel performing its silent function in the great machine that coldly drives its pistons, circling vainly round itself.’ Baron R... realises that he must embrace ‘low-life’, ‘the dregs of humanity’ in Vienna in order to rediscover his own humanity before returning to his military base in the Crown Lands. At Rawaruska near Lemberg, he dies fighting with a regiment of Austrian dragoons in 1914, the year