Note

Von Rezzori was a fine writer and I am convinced that it is only a matter of time before he is rediscovered as a classical author in the mould of other writers of his period such as Stefan Zweig.  His current obscurity is shown by the ease in which it is possible to obtain second-hand copies of his mostly out-of-print books.  I have found excellent hard-back copies at prices as low as £0.99 on both ebay and Abebooks, and  I have managed to build up a set of von Rezzori’s main works with very little trouble at all.

In The Snows of Yesteryear (which has the sub-title, “Portraits for an autobiography”), von Rezzori recalls his Bukovinian childhood by presenting pen-pictures of his nurse, mother, father, sister and governess. Von Rezzori was born into a comparatively well-off family, but with more than a little of what we now call dysfunction.  His father was a robust hunting-man, happiest when in the forests with his friends.  When not hunting, he was womanising, much to his wife’s distress.  He has what von Rezorris describes as a “pathological” anti-Semitism, but loathed National Socialism because of its socialism.  When viewing a magazine cover containing a portrait of Adolf Hitler, von Rezzori’s father commented, “Germany rises once more.  But have a look at this fellow:  I wouldn’t hire him as a stable boy!”

In a region of highly mixed ethnicities but with a surprising degree of tolerance, the young Von Rezzori found his father’s Anti-Semitism highly embarrassing and we read of several episodes in which his father’s outbursts against Jews led to a cringing desire to hide-away.   No doubt these experiences were the raw material for von Rezzori’s book, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

Von Rezzori’s mother was a sickly obsessive who kept her children close to her, not even letting them play freely in the garden.  Towards the end of her long life (she died when she was 86), the family realised that in fact her health had been excellent and her constitution tough, but while Von Rezzori was growing up, his mother convinced everyone that “as someone in poor health, even the simplest of tasks were beyond her”.

The author’s sister was four years older than him and was his chief tormentor during his childhood.  He writes, “one thing is certain to her.  I had to be a thorn in her flesh. For four years she had lived alone in the radiance of her father’s love, unmolested by her mother’s shifting emotional outbursts.  Then one day I appeared on the scene and forthwith the splendour faded away”.  A picture of intense sibling rivalry emerges, but von Rezzori alas was unable to develop a more mature relationship with her in later years for she died of cancer at age 22.

Perhaps the most vivid portrait in the book is of von Rezzori’s nurse, Cassandra.  He writes, “when she joined the household, it was said, she was hardly more than a beast”.  Dressed in traditional costume of a wrap skirt, sleeveless sheepskin jacket and leather buskins, von Rezzori’s mother called her “the savage one”.  Von Rezzori believed that Cassandra was in fact his wet-nurse, a fact denied by his mother.  Von Rezzori tells many tales of this eccentric and much-derided figure, but when the family had to flee to Trieste before the Russian advance after World War I, Cassandra, who spoke no language correctly was able to negotiate safe passages by use of snatches of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, Turkish and Yiddish, “assisted by a grotesque, grimacing mimicry and a primitive, graphic body language that made everyone laugh and that everyone understood”.

Despite the sadness of experiencing his parents’ separation at an early age and many other childhood traumas and disappointments, this book is no Angela’s Ashes.  It would not fit into the “tragic childhood” genre so popular today.  For one thing despite the dramas of a mid-European life in the early 20th century, von Rezzori is far too stylish a writer to deliberately pull the heart-strings.  There is no sorrow in this book, rather a practical, no-nonsense description of events and a set of sympathetic portraits of the people who featured in his young life.

The book would be of interest to anyone interested in this period of time, but makes a worthwhile read in itself because of the quality of von Rezzori’s writing and the vividness of the images he produces.

The Penguin catalogue page for The Snows of Yesteryear can be seen here.

Generally Von Rezzori’s is thought of as a chronicler of the first half of the 20th century when Europe’s old alliances were crumbling and one war after another redrew the Continent’s boundaries.  Von Rezzori was a mid-European, finding himself transferring nationalities every few years as the nations traded citizenship with one another.  It is therefore strange to read this later novel, which is far more “modern” than his other work, being set firmly in the last decade and dealing with modern Western culture rather than pre-war Germany or the aftermath of the Austro Hungarian Empire.

We meet the narrator in Venice, a place that disgusts him with its faded splendour, its tourist-infestation and general seediness.  His opulent hotel makes no impression on him, for his life has been spent in such surroundings.  He finds his hotel room more like a bordello, with its mirrors tilted towards the bed and its gold-framed Birth of Venus on the wall.

While flicking through tourist brochures in the hotel lobby, he finds a brochure for the newly launched Orient Express.  The narrator finds himself both intrigued and disgusted by the thought of reviving this once great expression of romantic European travel.  For he had travelled extensively in Europe when such trains were the main way of transporting yourself across the Continent and he well-remembered their style and opulence.

He recalls, “the gleaming windows of the restaurant car”, where, “one saw the glint of soft lights on cut-glass decanters and silver champagne buckets, and the waiters’ geometrically stark black-butterfly bows against chalk-white shirt-fronts”. The narrator sees the revived service as “an abortive ham-fisted rendition reduced to cheap parody, a vain endeavour to convey to a world sold on cheap criteria something that had once been sublime reality”.

Over the next few days, the narrator spends his time reflecting on his life, recalling many scenes that typified his experiences and his relationships.  The narrator typifies world-weariness, for although he has had an eventful life, as he nears the end of it, he experiences a sense of utter meaningless which brings him to see the futility of all the encounters and adventures which seemed to important at the time.  Meanwhile, the Orient Express brochure keeps beckoning to him and eventually he succumbs to the call to participate in the dream presented within its pages and books himself a passage.

The train is fairly much as he expected, the facilities are good and the staff attentive.  The train lacks modern conveniences such as air-conditioning and showers, but the narrator is happy to be lulled back to an earlier time and takes advantage of the time to relax in comfort.

As he travels he recalls his own lost Europe and looks out of the windows with contempt at the pollution and dirt which covers so much of the industrial areas he passes through.  He remembers the border crossings when passports had to be inspected and visas stamped.  It is all so much easier now, but something has been lost.  He meets a fellow passenger, a female tour guide and dines with her, eventualy managing to wangle an assignation, as he has done in many foreign cities in the past.

Alas, things do not work out as he expected, and with an ironic flourish, von Rezzori deposits the narrator on a the ferry at Calais surrounded by “an array of colourful parkas, adolescents . . . already masters of the world”.  Now, he thinks,

. . . we shall embark on the last, only truly great adventure.  The adventure we seek throughout our lives, above all in carnal knowledge and in love.  Now its time to enter the Black Hole which gobbles everything up and regurgitates it, in the eternal process of maintaining business as usual.  Stillness would reign at last, probably.  But all this he would find out.  The mere passage of time would prove it.

The Orient Express is a fitting way of saying goodbye to Gregor von Rezzori.  We have accompanied him through his childhood in Bukovinia (The Snows of Yesteryear), seen him explore the cultural precocities of pre-war Europe (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite). We have seen him sparkle in pre-war Berlin (Oedipus in Stalingrad) and heard his verdict on the aftermath of the Second World War, and in particular, the  Nuremburg Trials (The Death of my Brother Abel).

Now we say farewell to this author who surely describes mid-20th century Europe like no other.  The range of his interests and experiences covers all the key themes of the period and his artistic vision allows us to see behind the events of history into the European mind, which he understood in a unique way, allowing it to express itself so surely in his many-faceted writings.

I’ve filed this post under “Austrian fiction” on the basis that von Rezzori took on Austrian nationality after World War II, when his home region of Bukovina, originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had passed through the hands of Russia, Romania and Ukraine.  Truly, von Rezzori was highly qualified to chronicle the maelstrom of mid-Europe in those tumultuous years, and as I read his books I find a unique voice which is quite impossible to pin-down as German, Romanian, Russian or Austrian.

von Rezzori is primarily a writer of novels.  Even where the writing seems to be autobiographical, the reader is never too sure how authentic the memoirs are.  In an interview with Bruce Wolmer, when asked about the conflation between the first-person narrator of his books with himself, von Rezzori replies, “this is such an old discussion:  To what extent are books autobiographic?  Its ridiculous.  You can’t eliminate yourself totally unless you’re Shakespeare”.  And yet, in von Rezzori, we find completely authentic voices, whether its “Gregor” in Confessions of an Anti-Semite, or Baron Peter in Oedipus in Stalingrad, von Rezzori’s characters have a convincing, if unappealing world-view.  Von Rezzori understood these people, he knew where they were coming from, and he was unashamed to tell their stories without the need for constant corrective commentary – their words alone are their judge.

I’ve been collecting everything I can find by von Rezzori and basically I think I’m lucky that this author is so little known.  This fine hardback first edition of the first English translation of Oedipus in Stalingrad, cost me £0.99 on ebay.  Quite a find I would think, particularly with each chapter starting with a little drawing by von-Rezzori to set the scene.

The book is set in Berlin in 1938 and 1939, and concerns Traugott von Jassilowski, who is the son of an undistinguished family in East Prussia.  Traugott is a social climber and on arrival in Berlin somehow assumes the title “Baron” despite living in a boarding house along with other middle-class single men, all trying to make their mark in the bustling city.  Traugott soon discovers Charley’s Bar, a place of inventive cocktails and a clientele either rising or falling but definitely “just passing through”.

Charley’s Bar?  Its just gone all to hell now . . . I can still tell you the exact position of every nail in the place:  the bar here, Charley behind it (drunk of course) together with Tom (the Mixer, not Tom Mix), the gallery of grand playboys hanging on the brown-panelled wall behind them . . . the regulars’ table with the witty doctor and the blonde thoroughbred.

If this all seems a little like a Chicago Speakeasy, then maybe the similarities are there, but this is Berlin, and the whiff of imminent disaster from Allied bombers is never too far away.  But Charley’s clients prefer to keep their head in the sand.  Politics hardly enters this book.  Apart from the occasional greeting “Heil”, these people are just not involved with what’s going on around them.  Kristallnacht has passed them by, and as for imprisoned and executed Jews, Social Democrats and Communists, there is just no mention, for at Charley’s Bar the party just goes on and on.  How very different to, for example, Hans Fallada’s novel, Alone in Berlin, where the problems of living with Nazi ideology infest every page.

Traugott Jassilowski is employed as a features-writer for the Gentlemans’ Gazette, a job that seems to leave him plenty of time for philandering and drinking, and before long, he hitches up with the “blonde thoroughbred” (we never get to know her name) and they marry and live in a small apartment in Berlin.  The blonde thoroughbred is incredibly beautiful but also totally relaxed about her effect on men.  She truly loves Traugott, but finds it hard to stop loving other men too.  Her shapeliness and blonde mane of hair, cascading over her shoulders just seem to attract too much attention, and before long, her marriage to the rather difficult Traugott leads to marital problems which are just too much to ignore.  By that time, von Rezzori has begun to interleaves Traugott’s troubled Oedipal mental history into the relationship, something the blonde thoroughbred finds too complicated to cope with.

The bare bones of the story utterly fail to describe the experience of reading this book.  Von Rezzori shows signs of being a post-modernist writer, interrupting his story whenever it suits him to enter into dialogue with his readers.  He is very concerned with the impossibility of a human being finding the truth behind what he sees:

I’ve often thought of the phenomenon of lying:  not philosophically of course, not in any basic terms, but quite literally: after all one does have something like imagination . . . And admit it:  what would life be like, this one-times-one, without the differentials, and integrals of the lies we tell?  What would it come to, this world, this marvellous misunderstanding, this adventure, without them.  It occurs to me that we exist in an entirely different environment than we think.  Not one of the creatures that crawl here on earth nor even the ones that fly in the air resemble in any way the images of our inner world; . . . . . the jellyfish cloud of lies with which we transform the cold, unlit deep-sea landscape of naked truth into the incredible realms of inner life.

For von Rezzori, the difficulty is not that human beings lie, but rather that they don’t even know they are doing it.  They merely describe what they see inside themselves and interpret everything through the lenses of their inner vision so that the concept of an accurate witness to events is a fading chimera, a monstrous creature made of the parts of multiple animals.

This is just one of many examples of von Rezzori’s unique world-view.  He writes just after World War II, when confusion reigned in Central Europe, and there was a massive rush to move on from the terrible past.  I wonder whether his lack of confidence in people’s ability to tell the truth was anything to do with his belief that the Nuremburg war-trials (on which he reported for the Hamburg press) were a sham?  In the interview with Bruce Walmer, von Rezzori argues that,

They were a failure and therefore a great delusion. This was not due to, say, moral failing or any manipulations behind the scenes, it was due to my great enemy, stupidity, overwhelming collective stupidity. Or the impossibility, even on the part of intelligent people, to cope with things established by stupidity.

Objective truth as such is an impossibility because,

Whatever we do is not only led by our individual fullness but by trends in the zeitgeist, by things that are far out of the reach of our control. We don’t know what happens to us. I mean the simple proof is that if you take a German newspaper of, say, 1934 and read an article written by Dr. Goebbels, you wouldn’t believe your eyes. The crap he has said. And—I know, I lived through it—people read it as if it were the Bible. Intelligent people, but totally blinded at the time.

Despite the deeply philosophical statements which occur in this book, it is also a fantastic story.  These people lived on the edge of total annhilation, and von Rezzori treats us at the end of his book to a “what happened afterwards” glimpse into the fate of his characters,

Endings! Endings! Dear friends, you wanted an ending for your story, and here it is, effortlessly unraveled, and ending without truly being one, just as in those fairy tales that finish, “And they all lived happily ever after, and if they haven’t died, they still are alive today”.

The ending is in fact somewhat equivocal and slightly unspecific – our hero Traugott

. . . is no longer among the living, but neither did he die.  He was taken from us.

But this as it should be, for von Rezzori has described a class and a place which really had no future in the post-war reconstruction.  These lives just came to an end.  They disappeared, and to dwell too long on the specifics of their demise would be pointless.

In the interview mentioned above, von Rezzori says, “I cannot read ten lines of Robert Musil and keep on writing, I stop for a week at least”. And in some ways, this book follows on well from A Man Without Qualities, for Musil also documented the end of a social class, with incisive insight into its failings and inadequacies.

The translation from the German is superb, a tumbling cascade of words, in which the author worked with H F Broch Rothermann (son of Hermann Broch, a Vienna associate of Robert Musil).  In his 1982 interview, von Rezzori claimed that,

It can’t really be translated, because it’s written in sort of German slang as if Ernst Junger were a drunken Prussian officer telling a story in a bar. It’s about German snobbism, about somebody who comes to Berlin in ‘38 in order to conquer the world, a sort of Berlin Rastignac. It pokes fun in a most atrocious way.

However, I found that the spirit of this language is carried over in the translation, but into immensely stylish English, far-removed from the slang, bar-talk described by the author.

I now have three other von Rezzori books on my To Be Read pile and can hardly wait to crack on with them.  But on the other hand, I don’t want to rush them, for these are books to be savoured and pondered over.

Gregor von Rezzori is a deeply reflective writer.  He writes what might be called memoir-based fiction, but he is not just interested in his stories, but wants to bring out the meaning behind them.  His mind is hugely inventive and the reader gets the impression of someone who can see all points of view and incorporate them into his stories.  He seldom allows his characters to get away with expressing their prejudices and long-held opinions but always sets them in juxtaposition with someone holding an opposing view, or else shows the absurbity of their statements by setting them in a context of personal decline and ultimate failure.

A true European, Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine) towards the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire.  His home town was absorbed into the Romanian Kingdom and after World War 1, Rezzori studied in Vienna and other European cities, settling eventually in Bucharest until 1938 when as a German speaking Romanian he was compelled to move to Berlin.  After the war he earned his living as an author, a screen-play writer and an actor moving around Italy, France and the USA, eventually settling in Tuscany.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite consists of five stories, illustrating the decline of the old European aristocracy and the prejudices they took with them to their demise.  It would be a mistake to think that this book is as its title might suggest, “anti-Semitic”.  Quite the contrary, for although the book’s characters exhibit anti-Semitic attitudes, the author allows this to show their ignorance and stupidity.  Very often the Jews they despise are more clever, witty and successful than their old-European adversaries, and in some ways, the book would be better titled as “confession” rather than “memoir”.  However, no doubt Rezzori, known for a mischievous streak, preferred the bolder title as a provocation to his readers.  I can’t help but be reminded of Jonathan Littel’s opening sentence to his novel written in the first person about a senior SS officer, The Kindly Ones;

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.  I am not your brother you will retort, and I don’t want to know.

For in the same way, Rezzori teases his readers by drawing them along with his first-person accounts of these prevailing mid-20th century attitudes, until suddenly they are forced to protest, No, that’s not right, and quickly distance themselves from Rezzori’s undeniably sympathetic characters.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite consists of five stories, each one revealing a different aspect of the anti-semitic position.

The first story, Skushno (a Russian word meaning ennui, a dreary boredom, perhaps a spiritual condition), concerns Bubi, a boy sent to live with his uncle and aunt in “one of those out-of-the-way hamlets with tongue-twisting names which on maps of the European south-east make the riverine regions along the Prut of Dniester seem like civilised territories”.  Bubi’s uncle and aunt are kindly people and allow Bubi to live in a tower usually reserved for hunting guests.  Bubi explores the deeply rural and run-down townlet and the first discordant note is introduced when he finds that,

On weekdays, the place was almost lifeless, if we disregards the straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children who romped among the sparrows in the dusty roads

Bubi forms a strong relationship with his Uncle Hubert and learns with relish of the beer-drinking fraternity which he belonged to while at University.  He is entranced by the stories of student life, particularly the uniform the fraternity used to wear, a ludicrous outfit of white trousers, knee-length boots, a velvet jacket and a fur hat.  He persuades his Aunt Sophie to make him a replica of this outfit and delights in strutting around his tower rooms, observing this new self in the mirror.

The next day he walks out to the village in his new clothes, only to be set upon by a gang of Jewish children who dance around him, mocking him as more and more children join in the ribaldry.  Outside the Jewish doctor’s house he is met by a boy his own age who blocks his path.  Bubi thinks that “he looked like a yong ram staring closely into the blazing fire.  But even more unforgettable than the stamp of this face, the look of a downright smug self-assurance lodged in my mind”.  The boy touches Bubi’s fox tail cap and enquires if he is a Hasidic rabbi.  The boy turns out to be the doctor’s son, Max Goldmann, and rapidly dismisses the gang of children. As the two boys talk they discover things in common and despite Max’s supercilious and condescending manner they form a casual friendship.

The rest of the story describes an increasing and unrelenting challenge to Bubi’s anti-Semitism. Max turns out to be more clever and sophisticated than Max in every way.  Bubi’s Aunt Sophie discovers that Max is a brilliant pianist and becomes his sponsor.  Uncle Hubert has a dispute with Dr Goldmann and refuses to duel with him, resulting in Uncle Hubert being expelled from his fraternity for cowardice.

Despite the anti-Semite tones of the opening of this story, Rezzori depicts the ascendancy of intellectualism, Jewish or otherwise, and the decline of old reactionary Austro-Hungarian values.  The story is about the new, modern world rising over the old world, but also about the irrelevance of race as an indicator of talent.

The next story, Youth, finds a young man away from home, living in city lodgings and trying to build a career as an artist.  He is tormented by sex and has many causal and sordid encounters, at one point suspecting that he has caught the dreaded syphilis.  He falls in love with a young girl he sees in a wheel chair, without any real contact with her, and builds up a picture in his mind of a beautiful, tragic, pure woman, the feminine ideal which he can never possess.

The young man is forced by financial problems to take a job and finds employment as a window-dresser, imagining that his creative talents will be recognised by his company leading them to invite his to become a designer.  This of course never happens and despite his longing for “the girl in the wheel-chair” he forms a deep and long-lasting relationship with a Jewish shop-owner, some years his senior, who has the title “The Black Widow”.

The story is of course about the oft-found literary conflict between the slut and the madonna.  The girl in the wheelchair is complete fantasy.  Had the young man got to know her he would no doubt have found all sorts of human failings in her.  But in The Black Widow he actually finds a complete woman, clever, loving, faithful, who is actually a real-life and whole person and a far better proposition than the disabled girl who he has never met.  The young man of course ruins the relationship with the Jewish woman and never finds the girl in the wheel-chair (or what she represents in his mind).

The other thee stories show similar conflicts, ending with the final story Pravda (Truth), giving an insightful voyage around the memories of an elderly “old-European” as he reflects on the second of his three marriages, showing his inability see his Jewish wife as anything other than Jewish despite her secularism and disconnection from Jewish tradition.

This book is rich, not only in the quality of the story-telling but also in the writing.  Rezzori’s talent is on a par with other writers of the inter-war period such as Stefan Zweig.  I have been able to build up a collection of Rezzori’s books by using ebay and AbeBooks and I am pleased to see that this title Memoirs of an Anti-Semite has been republished by the New York Review of Books. I hope that other publishers pick up his other titles to bring Rezzori’s writings to a new audience.