Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  very flattering, to share a passion for custom-made shoes with someone from the first section of the Gotha Almanac of German Nobility, even though one risked being taken for a con man; but it turned out that there were other common features: the prince knew the Carpathians, had hunted there himself; they also found common ground by remembering that in the good old days when one could hunt to one’s heart’s content in the headwater region of the “swift” and “golden” Bistriţa River, the villages had teemed with Jews. The old prince did not regard the danger they posed as now entirely averted, despite the cleansing that had taken place there, too. His son, the heir apparent—endangered on his maternal side (the old prince took it for granted that one knew who the heir apparent’s mother was and what dubious legacy she had brought into the family: “Well, the Lützelburg line, as we know, has always had a proclivity for dangerous friendships, hence the unfortunate connection with the Hohenzollerns”)—the heir apparent was in the hands of a Jewish conspiracy, had allowed himself to be talked into investing his money (a great deal of money, by the way) in a film production, was going about with Jews, and had, incidentally, invited not only the Greek shipper Niarchos to go shooting but also the Baron de Rothschild; the old prince, who spoke fifteen languages, had indulged in the jest of addressing the shipper Niarchos in ancient Greek and the Baron de Rothschild in Hebrew: “The surprise was delightful, I have never seen such round eyes!” The old prince now went on in Rumanian, although not altogether intelligibly, since he had learned it, like most of his fifteen languages, from books, but nevertheless it sufficed to communicate what he had on his mind: “I am gaining the insight that you, writing film scripts here at midnight, are personally involved in the cinema business”—one could put it that way, yes, indeed—and the old prince went on in German for the sake of simplicity, “Well, would you be kind enough to come to our place in the next few days, to have a look at the crew my son is surrounding himself with? These people have been camping in the Gundlach Wing for weeks, and it can’t be locked, there are all sorts of valuable items in it, who knows? …”

  He then visited the historic castle, three hundred rooms, more than fifty alone in the Gundlach Wing, to meet the heir apparent—tall, blond, round-faced, slightly jittery head movements, but merrily sparkling eyes, a keen sense of humor, a malicious, black humor—and to meet the Jewish conspirators: a movie weasel, very imaginative, eccentric, plucked as a child in Buchenwald from the breast of his mother, who had starved to death, brought to an orphanage in Reims, outstanding pupil at the lycée, then the École Normale, assistant director to all the kingpins of the nouvelle vague, now production head of a new, evidently serious company; yes, and she, first impression of her wonderfully free, radiantly happy laughter (“I can be so happy when I’m happy!” she once said about herself rapturously)—

  the luncheon with the prince’s father in the Loitpurg Wing; behind the thronelike seat of the old prince a gigantic canvas darkened like smoked meerschaum: a knight in armor lying in a landscape full of mountains, castles, cities, hamlets, a landscape filled with huntable creatures; growing from his genitals like a weathered oak the family tree of the princely house, the coat of arms clustered like cherries, hanging in the branches, row for row, generation for generation, heavenward … the old prince speaking only with him, the new guest, the heir apparent quite openly amused at the movie weasel’s deliciously unabashed, occasionally even insolent behavior toward his father, at times it gets critical, he expects the old prince to order the whipper-snapper to leave the table, but an iron upbringing keeps the situation under control even in the most precarious moments, only the old prince for his part becomes quite bluntly suggestive: after speaking in detail of family history, he shifts to the Holy Roman Empire, pointing out the catastrophic influence, which historians have as yet inadequately recognized and which is still to be investigated, that the emancipation of the Jews exerted upon the decay of the Reich: the Austrian Tolerance Edict of 1782 was suicidal, one need go only a bit further to see how the Jews profited from the dissolution of the old Empire, the further recognition of their civil rights step by step—1808, under King Jerome (“Well, typical!”) of Westphalia; 1814, in Prussia; and by 1850 complete equality there (“Krauts, it stands to reason!”); then the foul play of Bismarck’s founding of the German Empire under Jewish patronage: “According to the Imperial Law of 1869, all still extant limitations of civil and civic rights are hereby declared null and void ….”

  he knows all this, has known it by heart since childhood: if he shuts his eyes, he might think he was at home; even the voices, the diction, the unembarrassed smacking of lips while eating are the same … and he is ashamed when the heir apparent takes up the threat with merrily sparkling eyes and explains the family tree on the wall to him and to the movie weasel, to his personal guests, and begins a simple arithmetical calculation:

  “Now every last one of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, nicht wahr? As a child, I once figured out that since our family tree goes back thirty-five generations, that would make quite a number of forebears: a total of thirty-three billion, five hundred thirty-six million, five hundred thirty-eight thousand, one hundred sixty-eight people—the very opposite of this painting, where we all spring from one single man and spread out into an oak tree. If we keep counting back, let’s say sixty generations—which would reach all the way back to the birth of Christ, then the number of ancestors would run into the trillions. But until the eighteenth century, the population of Europe totaled hardly more than some hundred fifty million—am I wrong, Papi? Please correct me if I’m not making sense!—So every single one of them must be our ancestor, thousands of times over. And the Jews of Heidelberg were exempted from persecution by the Inquisition because they could prove by their tombstones that they had not been in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, they had already been in Heidelberg at that time, they had come with the Romans—nicht wahr, Papi?—so our veins must be carrying at least the blood of all the Jews who were living in Europe back then ….”

  he envies this son for his courage, his independence, his freedom toward his father: he himself would never have had the nerve as a young man. He admires the young prince’s hardness against himself: the young prince drags one leg, the result of childhood polio; the physician, having little hope of saving him without serious paralysis and atrophy, suggested a transfusion of his own blood, which, because of his constant dealings with polio victims, had presumably developed good antitoxins and would therefore strengthen the child’s blood against the pathogens, but the prince’s mother strenuously protested: commoner’s blood in her son’s veins, and a Jewish commoner’s to boot—she would not suffer it even with the risk of seeing her child crippled ….

  he becomes a friend of the young prince, lives in the Gundlach Wing; in the evenings, they drink very heavily, the movie weasel the most, but holds his drinks badly, reels through the vaults of the arsenal, and flaps his arms in a kind of bat dance, singing, “They see their death in us, the princes and the dukes and counts! The descendants of the knights fear us—We are the worm in their family tree—Ha, I am the angel of death for the master caste, the master race, the death of all masters—I am the Malakhamoves of the self-styled masters ….”

  and she laughs her beautifully free laugh, throws back her head with its chestnut-red curls—he does not know what she is doing here, what function she has in the film project they are tinkering with—anyhow eighty percent of all film projects are cloud-cuckoo-land—she might be the costume designer—anyway she is very beautiful, no better reason for her presence ….

  and the heir apparent, who makes a point of drinking his guests under the table, lets his wicked eyes sparkle and says to him, “Congratulations. You have charmed my father completely” (they are using the familiar form by now, have begun their third bottle of whiskey); “Poor Papi is totally isolated: he’s had a falling-out with the family, he c
an’t stand other aristocrats, he can’t go about with the philistines, as he calls them; what he lacks are perfect toadies, he must be very grateful to you ….”

  and he himself is silent to this perfidy, merely exchanges an ironic glance with her: it is the first glance of rapport between them—

  then the heir apparent, beads of sweat on his forehead, with the first signs of difficulty in speaking, expatiates on his family’s anti-Semitism, tells about a grandmother in the Lützelburg line who could not be moved to set foot in a Jewish house—a refusal that might involve occasional problems in Berlin during the 1870s; once, however, it could not be avoided, and she went, eating her way through a pompous dinner without uttering a syllable to the host, next to whom she had been seated, she did not even perceive the hostess; on the way home, she was asked by her husband, “Well, it wasn’t all that bad, all in all?” She cheerfully shook her head: “No, because I had a clever idea. I paid for the food. I pushed the money under the plate before leaving the table.”

  whereupon he got up, saying: “I believe it’s time for me to go.” And, turning to her, “For you too? If you like, I’ll accompany you back to town.”

  he held out his hand and she took it: they went away, hand in hand—

  and now they are once again facing the young prince, more than three years have passed—naturally, the heir apparent had sent a gigantic bouquet of roses with profound apologies for his inexcusable drunkenness (“I knew it: he is the most chivalrous man I know. Once, I felt sick during a meal, I was horribly embarrassed in front of the old man, but I couldn’t help it anymore, I barely managed to get to the dining-room door, and there I had to vomit—and he, the young one, put his arm around me and said, ‘You’re perfectly right. One can’t really eat what the cook expects us to put up with these days! …’ And once, we were strolling in the park, and Jacques, whom you call the movie weasel, had drunk too much again and had to pee just when the old man came along. Naturally, the old man pretended not to notice anything, but his scorn was so tangible I became dizzy—and the son instantly stood next to Jacques and peed too …”)—they saw the young prince, the chivalrous man, less and less after their marriage, and lately it had been a good while; now his attitude makes it plain (these crowned heads have an astonishing way of expressing themselves without words) that he is informed about their quarreling, and also approves of their mutual reinventings, as something he has always believed and articulated, his forte is his knowledge of human beings. They run into one another in a theater lobby, she is wearing a black dress, her only adornment an emerald brooch which he gave her at the birth of the child, and the young prince compliments her on it—“It is a very early present from my husband,” she says meaningfully, and the prince returns the smile and says, “Oh, and the stone is genuine?”

  and he did not slap him in the face, he simply turned on his heel and walked out of the theater, and, coming home (or at least the apartment they called home at that time), he packed his bags and went off, ultimately landing here in Rome after several detours and provisional sojourns, divorced from her at last, and resolved to do everything he could to get his little boy away from her baleful influence.

  Today, after twenty years (the boy would be going on twenty-five today—he cannot imagine him a twenty-five-year-old, he would not like to imagine him a monstrous replica of himself, he still sees the pale childish face with the enormous black eyes, and he feels a sharp pang in his heart each time, alleviating the pain with the thought that in many ways, in every way, it is better that the poor thing died … ), today he looks back on all that as if it were not really his own story: in fact, it did happen to someone else, not the man now walking along the Via Veneto with a box of marrons glacés in order to pay the doubtless final visit to the ninety-four-year-old aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife; for she probably will not make it much longer, la cara zia Olga, even the last time her life spirits were drooping critically ….

  seldom does one feel the power of the present so strongly as at this moment, he thinks: the past is always fairyland. How could she fail to understand this, his quondam, second, Jewish wife? Granted: a past in which you are presented to schoolmates as the crucifier of Christ and then to a pack of SS bulls as the model German Girl while you think you are about to be raped eighty times and then strung up on the nearest branch, this cannot be shaken off lightly, this cannot lightly be reinvented into a fairy tale; likewise, his first, East Prussian wife could not rid herself of the images of the flight from the Russians; yet that should probably not be compared to the other…. Well, he too has a number of horror images at his disposal—Germany under the hail of bombs provided a wealth of them, but they belong to another existence, probably because even when those images were being stamped upon him, he saw them as though someone else were seeing them ….

  to be sure: now, with the detachment of the sixty-five-year-old (although still with that certain childlike naïveté in the sky-blue gaze, the naïveté that is part of his compelling charm), he senses that his strength for reinventing reality is beginning to wane, the reality-forming reinvention of the present as well as the transfiguring fairy-tale reinvention of the past. It is drizzling over Rome, one cannot even get a decent winter in this lousy town: a negative plate of a town, in every respect, a ghost town of thick-blooded vulgar human flesh and ghostly rubble of the past: the traffic hectic as if it were an industrial center in the Ruhr, yet nothing happens here, absolutely nothing: a town of abstract administrators, of lawyers, even in cardinal’s red—sheer luck that his little boy was spared having to grow up here—just imagine what might have become of him: a young bomb-throwing radical—a Jewish leftist intellectual like the ones who helped the Bolsheviks in Russia…. well, they are being recompensed by the Russians nowadays, those stupid wretched Jews, always seeking the truth, the absolute, the Eternal Holy Empire ….

  if she were here now, his former, second, Jewish wife (she had loved Rome so much, he had probably moved here to spite her by living here without her), if she were with him now, he would take her to Doney, one could still sit there, not very cozily, of course, on a kind of inverted summer terrace, but she could eat the typical tartuffo ice cream of Rome there which she liked and he could take her hand and say to her:

  “Do you know why—why we quarreled? Don’t say a word, I too know it, and I too know that it was not so harmless, so irrelevant as I made it out to be. I knew you were stupid, my darling, and I loved you very much for what I often tenderly and often with hatred called your stupidity; yet you should have understood that as someone lost among the lotus eaters, like yourself, I couldn’t believe in the truth of reality. One can’t believe in a reality that comprises Auschwitz and the Opernball of Vienna at the same time. One simply has to escape into possibilities that make it appear possible. Yet, one must not fool around with the dreadful power of invention: a fool can create a reality that drives millions to madness, I know, I know…. Only, you must admit that it was grotesque when, between the two of us, you, the fervent art-consumer, the glowing admirer of art-creators, should believe in the reality of facts, and I, the lowbrow, the pedestrian, should be elevated by my powers of invention … isn’t it ridiculous? And even more so, that you, the Jew, defended the absolute, the unconditional, and I the goy defended the relative like a rabbinical student…. Look: my betrayal of pure truth—isn’t it also a possibility for the fallen angels to make the world lucid? You who believe in art the way St. Cecilia believes in resurrection in God, you ought to have known that my transfigurations, the fairy tales I wove out of images from my and other people’s past, were an act of love; love—as we both always knew—is identification. Well, this was the only way to identify with a world one was bound to hate and a mankind one loathed and despised. Transfiguration as the alchemists’ who strove to change vulgar metals into gold—I could even identify with myself; had I not done this I would have denied myself. But I did make something lucid with my love and my hate, didn’t I? … Yes, I kno
w,” he would have quickly said, “we shouldn’t get at it psychologically, the thing’s too general. What is truth? Naturally not in the sense of whether it’s true that this waiter already has flat feet at a young age, but rather in the metaphysical dimension—the way the Russian aunt of my present wife understands it. The way she feels truth when she utters the word with her heavy Russian accent and cracked Slavic voice. When she says ‘pravda,’ the word is virtually surrounded by a nimbus, by the pealing of Easter bells—just as I told you when we were still in love the word skushno means not just homesickness or yearning but far, far beyond it, way beyond the dusky horizon, the homesickness, the yearning for God … but, honestly, my beautiful, once so tenderly beloved wife, are we Russians? I mean, do we believe in God? Or do we only occasionally act as if we did, out of despair because we really don’t and also because we enjoy doing so, as artists: as actors of ourselves, for the sake of the “as if,” just as we enjoy acting as if we were Russians when we drink vodka or listen to the Don Cossacks…. Look into my eyes and tell me what truth is!”