Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  In my boyhood, I found it very difficult to reach any precise notion of what “character” really was. For my father—he repeated it often enough—Styria had a distinct character. Naturally, I had to assume that this was connected to its “mountainous character,” which was always brought up in Austrian books on local history and geography. A propos, instead of “character” or the lack thereof, they occasionally talked about “backbone.” “The boy simply has no backbone,” I had once been forced to hear when refusing to own up to some prank. Styria had character because of its mountain backbone. Now, the Bukovina did have a mountainous backbone, too, although not quite such a spectacular one as the Hohe Tauern. But rocky peaks did loom here and there from the green cones of the forest Carpathians, and the poetic gentleness of the flowery slopes was all too deceptive in obscuring the wildness of the deep forests in which they were embedded. If the word “character” signified what I sensed about it, then these tremendous, wind-swept black forests had at least as much character as the glacier-crowned massifs of Styria.

  Even my father had to admit that hunting in the Bukovina was better, more adventurous, more primeval than in Styria. Nevertheless, he dreamed of a hunting ground in Styria and shrugged his shoulders when he was sharply reminded that owners of hunting grounds in Styria dreamed of having a hunting ground in the Carpathians. When I finally asked him what character was, he replied without hesitating: “Troth, more than anything else.”

  Now I thought I understood him. “Troth” was a much clearer fetish than the throat-scratching concept of “character.” Since earliest childhood I had been taught to idolize this notion of loyalty, or troth. It was obvious: my father could not love the Bukovina, because he had become a Rumanian citizen after its defection from the Dual Monarchy. He had been compelled to commit an act of disloyalty, like the engineer Malik, who had changed his name. Only in my father’s case, the conflict was tragic: through loyalty to the hunt, he had been forced to be disloyal to his flag. And what that meant was urgently brought home to me.

  In those years, the first great war was still close by. Traces and evidence of it survived throughout the countryside: shot-up farms, barbed-wire entanglements, ditches and dugouts in the heart of the woods, the wasteland of villages over which the Russian offensives had rolled. When I viewed such things, I was seized with a strange excitement, a mixture of fear and yearning, which—projected out of myself into the world comprising my experiences back then—I found mirrored in certain evening moods. In the oppressively hopeless dove-blue of the twilights, as in the dramatics of blood-red and sulphur-yellow sunsets, I experienced the shock that the war had brought to my parents’ lives. Under such skies, the flag of our allegiance had sunk in the tumult of battle and amid the croaking of ravens over the field of warriors. It was the golden flag with the black, two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire which had been carried on by Imperial Austria. And anyone who had not died in the battle around that flag had betrayed his troth and was now living on without character.

  With the mind of a child, always open to thrilling sublimity, I kept reviving the catastrophe of that destruction and that unwilling disloyalty over and over again. This alone explained the oddly empty grief of the people in my immediate surroundings, their resigned and only ironically reflective stance: their deadness, which allowed them to continue existing in an everyday rut that was barely aglow with the melancholy of golden memories, kept them going even though they seemed not to care about the present. My father and mother in the Bukovina were as old and as much a part of a previous era as my grandmother and my crotchety maiden aunts in Vienna. Their dogs had gray heads and trembled when they walked, like Marie. They lived only when they talked about bygone days. The golden glow of their memories came solely from that sunken golden flag.

  This sunkenness even explained the melancholy of the landscape in which I grew up. Beautifully canopied by the silky blue of a usually serene sky, the woodland was afflicted with melancholy, the melancholy of eastern vastnesses, creeping in everywhere: into the dove-blue of twilight hours as into the summer heat brooding over the fruit-bearing earth, into the submission of the peasants and the Jews to God’s will, into the gentle flutes of shepherds from the meadowed slopes of the Carpathians. These flutes died out when the wintry winds began whistling from the steppes and high deserts of Asia, which suddenly shifted close to us. The Jews and peasants then pulled up their shoulders and curled into themselves even more humbly; the earth turned to stone beneath the frost; and the twilight hours were no longer ambiguous stages of the universe, leading to mute and colorful celestial dramas: they now were a deeper freezing and darkening over a grayish-white, skeletal world. This was a landscape of catastrophe: the proper setting for a destruction growing from a mythically ancient dichotomy. For not only one empire had gone under with the sinking of that golden flag. Not only we—or, as we said, “our people”—had carried it, but also our adversaries, the Imperial Russians. Not only our emperor had gone down with the flag, but their emperor too.

  The myth at the source of this tragedy had been drummed into me like a litany. It was the myth of the Holy Roman Empire of the Caesars, which had split apart. The black eagle in the golden field of the sunken flag had two crowned heads rising from his breast—shielded with coats of arms—because the empire had two capitals and two heads: Rome, and Byzantium, the Constantinople of the Emperor Constantine. A breach of troth was at the beginning of this myth: the defection of a part from a unified whole. Two empires arose from one and soon were bloodily fighting one another. For each considered itself the true descendant of the original one great Imperium. Each symbolized this claim in the same flag. Under this flag, Eastern Rome and Western Rome unpeacefully divided the world, until one of the Asian storms that had menaced Western civilization since time immemorial broke loose once again, and Byzantium decayed and ultimately fell into the hands of the pagans.

  Western Rome too had gone through dark and disorderly times, which were historically conjured away, as it were, under the term “Dark Ages” and inadequately bedizened with monarchical figures like Alaric and Odoacer. We leaped across centuries in order to come up all the more sensationally with the figure of light: Charlemagne, whom the Germans call Karl the Great, the reviver of the idea of Holy Empire and the founder of the Roman Empire of the German Nation. I cannot evoke my boyhood without his image. A bronze replica of a mounted statue of him stood on my father’s desk, and I often gazed at that replica in deep meditation. The thought that after more than a millennium, his slippers and gloves still belonged among the Imperial treasures filled me with awe.

  Nevertheless, I was puzzled by one enigma: how could Charlemagne, who was a Frank, after all, and thus, strictly speaking, a Frenchman (and, as a French governess furiously assured me, still viewed as a Frenchman by the French)—how could he be the new founder of an Empire of the German Nation? Needless to say, my father had explanations at hand which, while not dispelling my qualms, did divert me from them. In a higher sense, he maintained, one could think of Karl the Great as a German emperor because his descendance was thoroughly German. Germans, with the glorious Stauffers in the lead, had worn his crown and given the Holy Roman Empire an eternally German stamp. Besides, my father added, not quite logically, in medieval times (which had now lightened from the “Dark Ages” to the “High Middle Ages,” the epoch of cathedrals and many-towered cities, of knights and ladies, of minstrels, inspired master stonecutters, and altarpiece painters)—in those times, such distinctions had been meaningless. People didn’t have national sentiments in the modern sense. You just followed a flag, that was all. Either you were born lowly and were a serf belonging to a lord—you followed him blindly wherever he went, and you never thought beyond your own parish—or else you were born into knighthood and served some count or prince as a true liegeman, which might expand your horizon by a few provinces; but in the end it was all the same. It made no difference whatsoever which of the many nations of this imperium these l
ords belonged to with their little flags and their liegemen and serfs; it made no difference what language they spoke or what costume they wore. For they were all vassals and subjects of the Emperor and the Empire.

  This was comprehensible because it was graphic. The world seemed well ordered to me. The Empire was the epitome of order. From the emperor at the top down through the great vassals and their liegemen with their subliegemen and serfs, it was all as hieratically articulated as a pyramid. This could be enacted. This could be represented in the parades of my tin soldiers. This could also be grasped abstractly. Its mechanism was simple. One person protected the other, the higher one always the lower one; and one served the other, the lower one always the higher one above him. And thus up and down the ladder, like the hierarchy of angels under the Almighty’s Heavenly Throne. And that was why the Empire was Holy, said my father. It was God’s state on earth. Not just purely and simply a political construction, a state constitution that offered uniform protection, uniform leadership and administration to a gigantic territory that was inhabited by many nations and threatened by many dangers. It was more than that: it was an idea and ideal; an ordered image of the world, of human society striving to make God’s will come true. The divine right of the Emperor was not as it would be today, an arbitrary usurping by power-drunk demagogues mounted on a pedestal made up of interwoven interests—financial, mercantile, and political. Oh no! It was the very symbol of what God wanted the state to be. And this state was held together not by material interests alone but by the ethical principle of troth, loyalty, allegiance, the allegiance of vassals, the unconditional obedience that the liegemen had sworn to their lord and his flag, just as we, the immediate liegemen of the Habsburgs, had sworn allegiance to the Austrian imperial house and to the flag of the Empire with the two-headed eagle in the golden field.

  Usually at this point my mother got up and left the room. Whereupon my father felt obliged to help me, as a small boy, to understand things better. He explained to me that in spite of the fact that we were of Italian descent and had become subjects of Rumania, we were still Austrians, and that living in the Bukovina meant a sort of unfaithfulness forced on us by unlucky circumstances—one of which was that shooting in the Bukovina was much better than in Styria. Still, as Austrians, we should have stuck to our flag. Unfortunately that flag didn’t exist anymore; the imperial flag of Austria had been replaced by the vulgar flag of the new republic, with which, fortunately, we had nothing to do. The old imperial flag was the flag of the emperors of the House of Habsburg, who for six hundred years had been the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, founded by Charlemagne. For six hundred years, the emperors of the House of Habsburg had worn his crown and defended the world of Christendom against another storm from Asia: the Turks. Under the house of Habsburg most of the nations of southeastern Europe had united in that noble task. That’s how we, as Italians, had become Austrians, though we had neither come to Austria in the time of Charlemagne nor come in order, as true defenders of Christendom, to fight the Turks, but arrived only in the middle of the eighteenth century as bureaucrats from Sicily. But never mind. Nobody asked you where you were born. They asked only how you were born, and whether you were brave and just and faithful to your liege lord’s flag. If you had been brave and just and faithful to your liege lord’s flag, you got a coat of arms that obliged you to be even more brave and just and faithful to your flag. As the son of a knight who had his coat of arms—and we had had one already in Sicily, before we came to Austria—you first served as a page, preferably of a queen. Later, you became a squire and ran next to the horse of a knight, carrying his shield. Then you became a knight yourself, and when you weren’t fighting for your liege lord and for chivalry in general, you went hunting and shooting. Now, as there were very few queens whom you could serve as a page, and even fewer knights whose shield you could carry as a squire, you were brought up to become a nobleman just by hunting and shooting, and the only way you could fight for chivalry was to stay where you were and at least see that the Jews did not get hunting grounds everywhere, even in the Bukovina. So, in spite of the fact that we were Austrians—though of Italian origin and subjects of Rumania—and my father’s father had done his share, as an architect, to give Vienna its lovely neoclassic, and neo-Gothic, and neo-Renaissance appearance, my father never again set foot in Austria, where he had no hunting ground to defend.

  But it was agreed that I should be brought up in Austria, and this I resented very much, because I loved the Bukovina. It seems to be the lot of every good childhood to be lonesome, and I was lonesome in both places. In Vienna I was lonesome as a little boy who came from a now remote country of the Balkans and lived with old people and fools. At home, in the Bukovina, I was lonesome as the little snob with a foreign education who tried to avoid contact with others of his age. As a matter of fact, this was not at all my intention. It was the logical consequence of the isolation into which the monomania of my father and the nostalgia of my mother had maneuvered us.

  My mother too felt the Bukovina as a sort of exile, but simply as a woman who, with an unloved husband, lives far from those she loves. As my father’s monomaniacal passion for shooting estranged him more and more from family life, my mother’s various unfulfilled desires found an outlet in a no less monomaniacal love for me, her child. She watched over every step I took and every breath I drew. Between her terror that I would get pneumonia from running too fast and the suspicion that a contact with the gardener’s children could give me lice, or that through the friendliness of a Rumanian officer who had put me in the saddle of his horse I would get syphilis, I did not develop into a very social youngster. In wintertime, on the big public skating rink, I found myself lonely in a corner, cutting my circles and loops into the ice, an enormous woolen shawl wrapped six times around my neck, while all around a whirl of hilarious liveliness filled the sparkling winter day.

  The majority of the young skaters were Jews. Among them were some extremely pretty girls, with whom, one by one, I clandestinely fell in love, suffering not only from the overprotectiveness of my mother but from guilt. My mother came to fetch me every day and, in spite of my violent protests, had me wrapped in blankets and furs in order to protect my frail health after the exhausting exercise. My departure became a public amusement so humiliating that I did not dare to look the Jewish girls in the eye even when my mother had not yet turned up. At the same time I felt guilty because my tender feelings were a betrayal of everything that in the geography of my inner world formed the moral massifs, the mountainous backbone, so to speak—the Carpathians, without which that inner landscape would have had no character. Of course, there were some people who, with a dirty smirk, would say, “A Jewess is no Jew.” But those were swine. For our kind it was impossible to fall in love with a Jewish girl. It meant being unfaithful to our flag. Love makes you long for intimacy, it leads to the most direct of all human relationships, and it was unthinkable to get into a human relationship with Jews. Jews were human beings, too; that could not be denied. But we did not have intimate relationships with other people, either, just because they were human beings. My father would not have anything to do with Rumanians, because they considered him part of a minority more or less equal with the Jews; not with Poles, because they usually hated Austrians; nor would he have anything to do with other former Austrians who had stayed on in the Bukovina for mere personal interests, and not for a noble purpose like his, and who therefore had been unfaithful to their flag. That did not mean that we wouldn’t regard them as human beings and behave like educated people when we came in contact with them. We answered every greeting more or less politely, with the same mixture of joviality and distance with which my grandmother in Vienna greeted the Raubitscheks, and, when it was inevitable, even shook hands with them, and, should the occasion have demanded it, we would presumably have done the same with the Jews of the Bukovina, the Polish Jews, unless they pretended they could come shooting with us. But that did not mean that we wishe
d to enjoy a closer relationship either with them or with the Jews in general. As a matter of fact, it was not really true that we hated Jews. It was more a façon de parler. Hatred, too, is a direct human relationship. If there had been a real hatred for the Jews, it would have been just as much as loving them. No, Jews were simply people of another star—the star of David and Zion. It might be a shining star, but for us, unfortunately, it shone under the horizon. Therefore, falling in love with a Jewish girl could not be considered a pardonable perversion, like, for instance, that of a sodomite. It was the incomprehensible, a sudden gap in one’s mind, worse than treason and breach of troth. I had good reason to be ashamed.

  I would soon have some more, and better, reasons. Thanks to a few lessons from a skating teacher at the Wiener Eislaufverein, my circles and loops had very much improved. I was even capable of doing a few jumps. Home again in the Bukovina, I performed them in my corner of the skating rink. This aroused the curiosity of a group of sturdy youngsters—Jews, of course—who had formed a sort of wild hockey team. One day I found myself encircled by them. I felt a trifle uncomfortable, for they were tough and I did not know what they wanted. So I pretended not to notice their nearness and continued to perform a tidy eight with a Dutch jump at the conclusion of each circle. This went on for a while, till finally the biggest of them said, “Not bad, what you’re doing. How about playing on our team?”

  “No, thank you very much,” I said.

  “Why not? Because we’re Jews?”