Longing, Troth, and Anti-Semitism in Gregor Von Rezzori
by Anthony Hennen
Austria-Hungary is a relatively hidden empire in the American conscience. Unless one has ancestral ties to it, or found their way to its former lands during a summer trip to Europe, it disappears under the swinging blade that divides western and eastern Europe. A conception of central Europe, or a part of the continent not dominated by the Russians or Ottomans, is missing.
History books or journalistic longreads can fill that void to an extent. But to get a sense of the spirit of a time and place, the atmosphere of it, the zeitgeist—the curious must turn to literature.
In Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor Von Rezzori wrote the novel of a vanished civilization. He avoids self-flagellation and instead gives a series of portraits of life in the interwar period after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Von Rezzori tells of nationalists without a nation, foreigners in a familiar land, with past or future horrors always lingering in the distance. Anti-semitism stalks the novel, a social force bubbling to the surface every now and again to shaping people and places. It is not a portrait of cruelty, abject misery, or suffering. Rather, it’s literature of imagery and impressions, the drama developing through the tensions of class, of personal apathy, and casual ignorance. Von Rezzori is a master of subtlety and doesn’t belabor the point.
The novel stretches from provincial Bukovyna in the late 1920s through Bucharest and Vienna during the Anschluss. The narrator grows from a young teen in Bukovyna to his 20s in Bucharest, ending in Rome as a 60-something divorcé. Von Rezzori offers the reader glimpses of youth heading toward maturity, of self-destructive romance, and of the unsanitized past.
In “Shuskno,” the Gentile and Jewish friendship of two teens can’t last as one discovers scandal and responds with cruelty. Later, a stay in “Löwinger’s Rooming House” of Bucharest ends in slander and personal betrayal. “Troth” is set in Vienna as it approaches the Anschluss, the narrator falling for a Jewish woman while he denies the severity of events around him. “Pravda” finds the narrator visiting his third wife’s Russian great-aunt as “she presented him with the colorful plunder of her memories,” an attempt to recall his past.
Von Rezzori’s work and its melancholy moments have a similar ring to Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing. Sentences swerve from tight and dense to unending, Bohumil Hrabal-style palaverings, expanding from his quasi-existential musings. His stories are also haunted by unavoidable unhappy endings. Such is the fate of falling empires that became bloodlands in the 20th century.
Von Rezzori also knows how to turn a phrase:
“At nineteen, life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes.”
“It was better to have a free outlook over a lovely rolling country with a vast horizon than to be always running your nose against some stone wall.”
“The morbid, rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic swinging cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna.”
“The city and its hurly-burly, the evening swarm of people into the streets and avenues, the strings of light, the tumbles of light, the cascades of light overhead—all these things were meaningless; they were only a haunted world, a carnival of the bereft and desperate, lost under the enormous sky that was giving birth to the night.”
“But I’m afraid even the devil has grown senile—or is banality his last and most dangerous disguise?”
He also shows why history is not sufficient in grasping the past. Von Rezzori show the anti-semitism that wasn’t extreme, but bourgeois. It was inherent in class, economic, and social divides. The casual distaste for Jews emanates from the villager, the urban grandmother, and the boisterous soldier:
“The Jews had, after all, crucified our Savior. But our kind of people, the educated kind, did not require such heavy arguments to look upon Jews as second-class people. We just didn’t like them, or at least liked them less than other fellow human beings. This was as natural as liking cats less than dogs or bedbugs less than bees; and we amused ourselves by offering the most absurd justifications.”
The natural disdain prepared the way for Hitler’s deluge.
Anti-semitism isn’t the only force haunting Memoirs; there is also the psychological damage of remaining loyal to a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Men without a country are scattered across its hinterlands like the decaying architecture of their towns. Skushno, “a spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intensely urgent longing,” works alongside Troth, the loyalty and duty men have to something greater. Though that greater force has disappeared, they cannot cast aside the obligation.
“Anyone who had not died in the battle around that [Imperial Austrian] flag had betrayed his troth and was now living on without character,” Von Rezzori writes. His characters were surrounded by “the oddly empty grief of the people” where “the golden glow of their memories came solely from that sunken golden flag.” The relatively orderly disintegration following the Great War, rather than a cataclysm, made the change psychologically harder. As Gregor describes his father:
“He felt exiled in the Bukovyna—or rather, as a pioneer, betrayed and deserted. He counted himself among the colonial officials of the former realm of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy; and it was the task of such officials to protect Europe against the wild hordes who kept breaking in from the East. ‘Civilization fertilizer’ was his bitterly mocking term for the function he ascribed to himself and his kind: they were supposed to settle in the borderland, form a bulwark of Western civilization, and show a bold front to Eastern chaos. He had come to the Bukovyna as a young man, after growing up in Graz during the most glorious era of the Dual Monarchy; and everything that had become sad and dreary and hidebound after the collapse of 1918 was, he felt, represented in the land where he had been cast away.”
Yet chaos came instead from the West, defeating the Empire and, a generation later, disfiguring the region permanently. The people there could almost feel their fate; they had a “mournful certainty that one lived in a decaying world;” they were “merely one part of the universal dissolution.”
The dissolution has given Gregor, in his 60s in Rome and reflecting on life, an identity issue. His world has “sunk into oblivion” and he “invent[s] myself in my own novels; that’s my way of escaping an unbearable reality.” Surviving it has only been by the random occurrences of fate.
“Had he fallen into a deep slumber back then like Rip Van Winkle and awakened only in the world of today, he would go crazy with despair: what has happened to this world between then, 1919, and today 1979, is so incredible, has changed it so radically that one can scarcely believe the same person lived in both epochs. Whatever his parents, the people of that world of yesterday, were afraid of—today’s reality is much, much worse than anything anyone could have imagined then.”
In the end, it may pay for Americans to be more aware of the former empire in central Europe and its borderlands. Despite the affinity for Western Europe, it is the landlocked empire of old that may have the strongest resemblance to the American empire. As Stiassny, a permanent guest of the young narrator’s aunt and uncle in Bukovina in “Youth,” comments:
“We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American...but we lack political insight for that...Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better.”
As naive pundits question whether America should stay united, they hold an irrational optimism for what the alternative would be. Better an irrational mood that salvages the past instead of utopian bloodshed.
Anthony Hennen is executive editor at Philadelphia Weekly and managing editor at expatalachians, a publication focused on the Appalachian region. Follow him on Twitter at @anthonyhennen