Secrets of a Suitcase: The Countess, the Nazis, and Middle Europe’s Lost Nobility, Pauline Terreehorst [trans. Brent Annable], Hurst, £25

Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 2004. Journalist Pauline Terreehorst wins Lot 0379 – a vintage Gucci suitcase of the type she’s long wanted. When she picks it up round the back of the auction house, Terreehorst finds it comes with a stack of stuff from the 1920s and 1930s: riding jackets, moth-infested furs, cocktail dresses, lace, buttons, and postcard albums full of missives addressed to a Countess Margrit Szapáry.

Drawing on archival material from Berlin, Salzburg, the Hague, and Vienna, Terreehorst investigates the story behind her serendipitous find. She presents Margrit as a committed Habsburg who remained devoted to ‘traditional social hierarchies and classes’ after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, later becoming an ‘anti-Nazi countess’ who one-upped Göring. The book was published in the Netherlands in 2020, where it was a bestseller. Its broad appeal was perhaps because it raises a compelling question: what should ‘old’ elites do with themselves when political structures change around them?

Margrit was born into the Austro-German House of Henckel von Donnersmarck. She met her husband Sándor Szapáry, a Hungarian count, in 1900 in Abbazia, a health resort on the Adriatic, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Croatia. Sándor died in 1904, but not before the couple had begun work on their home, Finstergrün Castle, located in Silesia – a region divided between present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany. Finstergrün was brand new but constructed in medieval style. Margrit furnished it to match: she collected 15th- and 16th-century Central European furniture, and commissioned an artist to paint a medieval tournament on one of the interior walls, a knock-off of an Italian 14th-century fresco.

Margrit’s funds for the project, Terreehorst tells us, originated from the exploitation of Silesia’s rich natural resources. Continental Europe’s first coke furnace kicked into operation here in 1796. Margrit’s grandfather, a pioneering industrialist, ran a vast network of iron and steel plants; he staffed them by building prisons on his land, whose inhabitants worked for free. Given her wealth, Margrit’s life, Terreehorst says, was animated by the principle of noblesse oblige. During the First World War she dispensed advice to locals via a nutritional pamphlet issued in 1916 (‘Cook delicious food,’ it advised).

In 1918, the Habsburg Empire fell; in 1919, the Austrian nobility had their titles removed. But Margrit’s work continued regardless, albeit with diminishing funds at her disposal. The war bonds she had bought were now worthless and the transfer of much of Upper Silesia to Poland in 1922 wiped out most of the aristocracy’s industrial holdings. Meanwhile, the National Socialists were on the rise in Germany. The Fatherland Front took power in Austria from 1933, seeking to defend it against the Nazis by aligning themselves with Mussolini’s Italy and Miklós Horthy’s Hungary. The strategy failed; Germany annexed Austria.

Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring had grown up visiting his godfather’s castle nearby Finstergrün. This meant he knew of, and wanted, Margrit’s furnishings. Margrit sold him a Gothic four-poster bed in either 1938 or 1939 (Terreehorst says both at different points). Then Göring’s personal assistant pestered Margrit for more furniture. This was the beginning of the Nazi looting of Jewish estates and the emptying-out of the occupied Netherlands and France. By 1945 Göring had amassed 4,249 artworks, including Bruegels, Cranachs, and Rembrandts, at his house, Carinhall. To get Göring off her back, Margrit left Finstergrün, selling 410 items to Munich art dealer Adolf Weinmüller instead. It is this move that makes her an ‘anti-Nazi countess’ to Terreehorst. Göring seized Finstergrün in 1941 and made it a Nazi school. It was purchased by the Evangelical Youth Movement in 1972.

What is it that compelled Teerrehorst to reconstruct this world? The reader does not get a sense of her personal investment in the story she unfolds. But Terreehorst does much to establish the grandeur of Margrit’s cosmos, its glamour intensified by its presentation as ‘lost’. The characterisation feels a little overblown, given that Europe’s nobility has not been wiped out, but remains influential in many spheres of public life. Even those that lost their estates are in the present: their remnants – buttons, dresses, postcards – are bid for in auction houses. But distance, for Terreehorst, is romance. The descriptor ‘fairy-tale’ is used often. So are cinematic metaphors, suggesting the filming of a period drama. (Terreshorst wonders why the British nobility get all the films set on landed estates.) The 21st century is contrasted unfavourably with the 20th. The conclusion observes that large old dwellings like Finstergrün hold more history than ‘soulless’ blocks of flats. It’s certainly true that houses that haven’t been lived in for long contain less history than ones that have.

Terreehorst’s prose is light and readable. She is former director of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute; the surfaces and textures of Margrit’s universe are described with some grace. The book’s strongest sections come when Terreehorst appears in the narrative, inviting the reader into her research process – browsing the estate sale in Sotheby’s, pulling documents out of boxes in Salzburg, interviewing a surviving Szapáry countess. I would have liked much more of this. It’s missing at points. For instance, in the chapter titled ‘Double-Entry Bookkeeping’, Margrit’s household ledger is mentioned once in passing. Without reference to the evidence, it’s not always clear how judgements about Margrit’s character have been reached. Why was she disappointed at a ‘lack of gratitude’ when a Finstergrün servant stole her visiting niece’s jewels in 1924, rather than, say, inconvenienced, angered, uninterested, ashamed, indignant?

Many of the book’s problems arise not from Terreehorst’s approach in particular, but from the broader impulse to explain the past in terms of individuals’ struggles for freedom. Central Europe’s structure of myriad principalities meant that Austro-German noblewomen had, Terreehorst says, ‘more opportunities to develop themselves’. I find it difficult to accept the idea of noble philanthropy as a grand self-improvement exercise. It was paternalism pure and simple: Margrit performed her duties in exchange for deference. Likewise, Magrit’s choice to furnish Finstergrün with ‘frugal’ medieval trappings is parsed as ‘an act of rebellion’ and ‘proof of a woman’s ability to single-handedly forge a new world for herself’. Such descriptions obscure the historical context. Medieval furnishings reinforced aristocratic tradition, presenting an unbroken link between the 20th-century inhabitant and the feudal era. It was a relation to the past that became popular in the 20s and 30s, especially among Nazis seeking to return to a period in which – they believed – national character had been pure, unsullied.

The difficulty Terreehorst encounters is that political identity – what kind of freedom someone wants – is rarely a secure possession. Margrit might have fundraised to build a statue of the late Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph in the 1930s, but she also appears pragmatic, interacting with the authoritarian Fatherland Front, which Terreehorst presents as a ‘rather problematic’ government. In February 1934, Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg ordered the summary execution of eight people involved in a socialist uprising; in June 1934 Margrit accepted the Golden Medal of Honour for services to Austria. In either 1937 or 1938 (the book lists both), Margrit hosted Schuschnigg at Finstergrün, ordering the construction of an effigy of a pair of crossed hammers – the Front’s symbol. In the end, Margrit did not sell to Göring, but she did sell to Nazi collaborators, because they were everywhere in the art market by then. Adolf Weinmüller’s business profited vastly from Nazi links. In 1933, for example, he had been given the job of aryanising the Trade Association of German Art and Antiquities. He swallowed up Jewish auction houses in Munich and Vienna. In this light, calling Margrit an anti-Nazi countess is a bit of a stretch.

The most propulsive part of Secrets of a Suitcase is Terreehorst’s narration of the Nazi art-looting across Europe. But she stops short when it comes to explaining Göring’s desire, which she says was motivated purely by greed and a desire to show off to others. The artworks were ‘wallpaper’ to him: ‘… their unique portrayals of the human condition, and the reflections they inspire on the highs and lows of existence, were rendered impotent by their display at Göring’s’. The enormous literature on Nazi aesthetics aside, what exactly is so distasteful about the idea of Göring as a connoisseur, someone who could take pleasure in an aesthetic experience? Perhaps it’s threatening because it brings him close – a Nazi couldn’t enjoy art like me. That a Nazi and non-Nazi might both find something beautiful in the same painting requires a view of history and of politics that is much murkier and more challenging than Terreehorst’s account allows.