Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I see her at table, our meals a silent ceremonial. She holds herself stiffly erect and eats automatically, without visible enjoyment, the eyes either downcast to the plate or directed unseeingly straight ahead, apparently indifferent to what happens around her. She herself — or her soul, her fantasy or whatever; in any case, her true life — is miles away, beyond the dining room walls. All the more persistently she insists on the ceremony of the meals, on our table manners, on a letter-perfect service; she devises sophisticated menus, watches over our nutrition by serving us foods that promote our health, appetite and digestion, and punishes us excessively if, overfed and sated, we reject it. She requires sound corporeality to convince her of our physical reality. We have to prove that we actually exist, by means of thriving health, growth, appetite, regular bowel movements, red cheeks and bubbling exuberance as much as by unconditional submission to her unending instructions, prescriptions and proscriptions. What she understands to be maternal love clutches at the visible and the tangible. Intellectual development is by tradition left to professionals, hired employees: governesses, tutors, teachers. But the supervision of our weal and woe devolves upon her alone and it turns into a rankling obsession. She holds on to it desperately, as if it were her only support in the whirlwind of the times.

And it is true that that whirlwind was exceptionally violent. One no longer realizes today the extent of the changes that the 1914–1918 war wrought in the world in general and Europe in particular, though it did not bring so much destruction as its continuation in the even fiercer 1939–1945 war. Only the regions of the embattled fronts lay in ruins; the hinterland was largely spared. There was not the terror of aerial bombardments night after night, nor the horror of flattened cities across the continent, nor the misery of their ruins and the wretchedness of swarms and mobs of bombed-out populations and refugees. On the surface, the world seemed unchanged, but it was all the more spooky for that. In the first installment of the worldwide war which had come only to a temporary halt in 1918 and broke out all the more fiercely two decades later, an order had been destroyed in which, up to then, everybody had put faith. Critical voices had not been lacking: the world before 1914 no longer considered itself the best of all possible ones. But it was a world in which culture still rated high. The meat grinders of Ypres and Tannenberg, the hellish barrages of Verdun and the Isonzo shattered all illusions. A species of men arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained. A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins to come.

For the class to which my parents belonged, this meant a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation, hopelessness and squalor. What today is designated by the collective noun bourgeoisie lived with an imperturbable faith in what Robert Musil’s Count Leinsdorff called “property and learning.” All the trust in life that these two pillars had supported collapsed together with them. The resulting changes in reality were so sudden, unpredicted and incomprehensible that at first they seemed more like a monstrous nightmare. The desire to wake from the bad dream gave rise to the Utopia of the 1920s, one of the worst by-products of which was to be the Third Reich. But most people remained stunned and paralyzed: sleepwalkers in an alienated present.

My mother, born in 1890, was almost thirty years old when the First World War ended and had — as she used to say—“hardly lived at all, in fact.” She had been raised in a golden mist of expectations about the future, which in the imagination of a young girl of her generation were nourished by ambiences and impulses, lights, colors and sounds, an intoxicating vision of an enchanted, permanently celebratory existence: the “grand life” in the style of Madame Bovary. Seen in this light, her first married years, in a hated house which she had fled for the daffodil meadows of Montreux and the palm shades of Luxor, were indeed a time devoid of meaning. Those years of refugee subsistence in the remoteness of a small villa near Trieste and in a cowherd hamlet in Lower Austria must have seemed even more estranged from what she thought of as the “true” life. She had borne two children and had assumed the role of a conscientious mother, but the dream of her life had remained unrealized. For this she blamed mainly my father, but also in part the country we lived in.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Bukovina became part of Romania. While in Austrian times its linguistically and sartorially kaleidoscopic mixture of people had given an attractive touch of color to the placid and mannered everyday life of a flourishing crown land, the opposite now occurred: a thin foil of civilization appeared to have been superimposed on an untidily assorted ethnic conglomerate from which it could be peeled off all too readily. Neither my father nor my mother belonged to the indigenous population. Each in his or her own way lived in a kind of exile: they had both ended up in a colony deserted by its colonial masters. Hardly anything remained of the former social world they had inhabited — however confined and provincial it must have been here under the double-headed eagle — and that had been composed of more or less high-ranking government officials, owners of landed estates, officers of the garrison, university professors and like representatives of the so-called educated classes. Those who remained in Romania and did not return to the shrunken remains of the Austrian republic or emigrate elsewhere split into groups determined by nationality. The Romanians holding important government posts established themselves as the new masters under the aegis of the Romanian military establishment, which flaunted the brassy glitter of its fresh victory, and they remained largely isolated from those who spoke other languages and now were the new minorities. The so-called Bukovina Swabians — settlers who had established themselves in the region in the times of Emperor Joseph the Second — segregated themselves in a flag-waving Greater Germany clannishness, casting nostalgic sidelong glances at Bismarck’s Second Reich. The Ruthenians refused to have anything to do with either former Austrians, who they felt had treated them as second-degree citizens, or the Romanians, who cold-shouldered them in return. Poles, Russians and Armenians had always congregated in small splinter groups and now more than ever kept to themselves. All of these despised the Jews, notwithstanding that Jews not only played an economically decisive role but, in cultural matters, were the group who nurtured traditional values as well as newly developing ones. But one simply did not associate with Jews — and thus obviated the danger of undermining credulously cherished ideologies or “bolshevizing” so-called healthy artistic canons through an encounter with what was regarded as too radically original and modern. We, as declared (and declasse) former Austrians, were counted willy-nilly with the so-called ethnic Germans.

In a town that at the time had a population of some hundred fifty thousand inhabitants, it would have been possible, of course, to find a dozen or so like-minded persons to associate with. But this would hardly have allowed for the intoxicating illusion of a “grand life” (which in other parts, incidentally, had meanwhile also become tainted), certainly not in the company of the ladies and gentlemen of the ethnic-German singing societies at their summer solstice celebrations, with fiery pyres over which black-red-and-gold banners swirled in the wind while full-throated choir bellowed into the flying sparks: “Tshermany, o Tshermany, my lohvely faderland…” The person who saw through all this from the very beginning was my father, and he cared all the less for it since he was indifferent to anything that was not in some way connected to hunting. Mother thus was left all by herself. Her efforts to escape her growing isolation were pathetically touching; ultimately she became resigned and almost completely isolated herself and her children in the hermetic solitude of our house and garden.