Helene Lieser

Helene Lieser was the daughter of the wealthy textile manufacturer Justus Lieser (1864–1927), who in 1905 divorced her mother, "Lilly" Henriette Amalie Lieser, née Landau (1875–1943), a well-known patron of the arts. From 1916 to 1919 she studied philosophy for five semesters at the University of Vienna, while also attending courses in law, and from 1919 she studied Staatswissenschaften (political science) there. On 26 June 1920 she became the first woman in Austria to be awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.), on the basis of her thesis "Die währungspolitische Literatur der österreichischen Bankozettelperiode" (The Monetary-Policy Literature of the Austrian Bankozettel Period), supervised by Othmar Spann (1878–1950) and Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973); this was also the first dissertation in political science submitted by a woman in Austria. Helene Lieser attended Ludwig von Mises's so-called Privatseminar, was a permanent member of the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft (Economic Association) until her expulsion in 1938, and, after her studies, worked at the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers in Vienna. At the same time, what is probably the best-known trace in Helene Lieser's life, and a contested one, leads into the family's Viennese art world: in the spring of 1917, in the last year of his creative life, Gustav Klimt painted a large portrait of a young woman of the Lieser family, which entered the Klimt literature as the "Portrait of Fräulein Lieser" (Bildnis Fräulein Lieser). Which of the Lieser daughters actually sat for Klimt nine times in his studio has not been conclusively established to this day: in 2024 the auction house im Kinsky named Helene Lieser, whereas the Klimt scholar Tobias G. Natter disagrees and sees the sitter as her cousin Margarethe Constance Lieser. Klimt died in February 1918; the painting remained unsigned and unfinished, was shown in 1925 at the Neue Galerie in Vienna, and was thereafter regarded as lost for eight decades. In April 2024 it resurfaced in an Austrian private collection and was auctioned for 30 million euros; the sale fell through a year later because of persistent questions of provenance and identification, and the present whereabouts of the work are unclear. In 1938 Helene Lieser had to flee Austria because of her Jewish origin (although she had already left the Jewish religious community, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, in 1921). In July 1938 she entered into a marriage (presumably a marriage of convenience) with Karl Berger (Munich 1901 – ?) and thereby became a Yugoslav citizen. Close family members, among them her mother, were murdered by the National Socialists, and their property in the country was plundered. Helene Lieser first fled to Geneva, where she collaborated with Ludwig von Mises until his departure in 1940. Here she was also active on behalf of those persecuted by the National Socialists and, in the circles around the espionage group known as the "Rote Kapelle" (Red Orchestra), she worked for the Soviet and later the British intelligence service. Helene Berger-Lieser, who from 1947 was a member of the board of trustees of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research in Vienna, went to Paris in 1948, where she joined the staff of Sir George Donald Alastair MacDougall (1912–2004), director of the economic secretariat of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). From 1949 she served as Secretary-General of the International Economic Association / Association Internationale des Sciences Économiques in Paris, which was officially founded in 1950 and had been initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); she organized numerous congresses and represented the organization at international congresses. Helene Berger-Lieser, who retired in 1962, died shortly afterwards in Vienna of cancer.