Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Aunt Sophie, who may have noticed Stiassny’s unveiled malice against Uncle Hubi, came to her husband’s aid as usual by employing the intellectual method of indirect allusion — or, to put it in artillery terms, an auxiliary target. “I don’t think it’s right of you to confuse the boy with things he can’t possibly know,” she said resolutely. “He’s like us. He shouldn’t have so much muddled stuff in his head, like you. The boy should keep acting on his unspoiled feelings; then everything will be all right.”

The last sentence was both an encouragement for me and a tender admonition for Uncle Hubi not to let the sentimental remnants of his nationalistically inspired past move him to object to my friendship with young Goldmann, which, needless to say, was by now common knowledge in the house. But Uncle Hubi, accustomed to far heftier allusions to the extravagances of his formative years, would not be jolted so easily out of his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed good mood, especially since, after all, most of his mockers ultimately agreed with him when it came to anti-Semitism. He gleefully said, “Oh, if old Goldmann had lived to see this — too funny, really too funny!”

This launched a conversation to which everyone at the table had something to contribute because the topic was local events and the old local gossip, a conversation that explained my relatives’ aloofness from Wolf’s family but that also quite extraordinarily complicated my image of Germanhood.

“Old Goldmann,” grandfather of my friend Wolf and father of the physician Dr. Bear Goldmann, came from Galicia, in what had once been Russia. Tradition had it that he was the black sheep among the offspring of one of the erudite and extremely God-fearing rebbes who had their courts there. “Administrators of justice in all moral and religious issues,” said Stiassny, “akin to the Holy Sheikh of Sufism, who, incomprehensibly, is studied by so many religious scholars and blue-stockinged countesses seeking the experience of God — indeed studied far more intensively than these troubadours of God, who are much closer to us and more germane to our own thinking and feeling.”

Old Goldmann did not seem to have mustered the proper esteem for the rebbes’ faithful ardor and visionary rapture. He had not observed the ancient custom of following in the footsteps of his father, who stood in the odor of sanctity; instead, he rebelliously declared himself a freethinker and moved to Germany, where, highly musical himself, he had been entranced to the point of ecstasy by Richard Wagner’s music. On the side, he made a fortune (piquantly enough, in slaughterhouses), with which fortune (“Like many of his people — far more than anyone would care to presume or willingly admit,” said Stiassny) he had helped to subsidize Bismarck’s founding of the Reich. “Being both self-sacrificing and profit-making, I dare say,” Uncle Hubi threw in, and he was seconded by Aunt Sophie: “Well, Hubi’s right in this point. If there’s one thing the Jews know how to do it’s make money!”

There was uncertainty about when old Goldmann had come to the village to settle down at cattle-dealing, in an agriculturally prosperous region, and to build his “ridiculous show-off villa.” Stiassny claimed he had come only when, in stormy allegiance to Nietzsche, he defected from Wagner; disillusioned by Bismarckian autocratism, he had turned his back on Germany. But this was contradicted by the flagrantly pro-German style of his house, a style which, appearing in a Habsburg crownland and introduced by a Jew, was bound to look rather curious. It was certain, in any event, that this had not met with the approval of Uncle Hubi’s father, an ultraconservative Old Austrian who was almost religiously faithful to Kaiser Franz Josef and who, in the aura of his monarch’s divine right, played the role of a patriarch here, outstripping Bismarck’s autocratism by many laps. A Jew carrying on like a German nationalist must have struck the Old Austrian as an absurd blend of two incompatible, albeit equally repulsive, antitheses, a monstrosity so provoking that it would be best to ignore it altogether, simply to deny it out of the world so as not to be challenged by it. “Poor Papa did have his grief with me over that,” Uncle Hubi had to confess, shamefacedly — although once again he got instant protective help from Aunt Sophie, who said, “But you were very young at that time, Hubi — just when was it?! Around 1889, 1890, or so, before we even met. You could hardly expect to do anything sensible at that time. Why, you’d just turned eighteen, since you’re going on fifty-eight today.”

Despite certain references made by my father, I had, in those days, only very nebulous ideas about Nietzsche, Bismarck’s founding of the Reich and his antiliberal tendencies, and the repugnance felt by ultramontane Old Austrians toward German nationalists. Still, I realized there was an odd to-and-fro of pros and cons here, a bizarre exchangeability of contrasting attitudes and positions, with the hostilities becoming sharpest whenever one side took over dogmas from the other. Old Goldmann must have experienced this too closely for comfort. He had sent his son, Wolf’s father, to Vienna and Prague to study what he himself had been unable to study thoroughly: the humanities, which, in his opinion, led to the spiritual liberation of a man and thereby to the freedom of all mankind. This son, so favored by destiny, had come back a dry-as-dust physician. The only other thing he had brought home from those old and venerable universities was a hate-filled distaste for his father’s gushy Teutomania. He proclaimed himself a Zionist, a stubborn advocate of a Jewish national state in the Promised Land; and, to support this enthusiasm, he began to collect documents about the persecutions of Jews. All this to the bitter sorrow of old Goldmann, who had ardently striven all his life for the complete assimilation of the Jews in an enlightened world of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the name of humanity, therefore, he wanted them to withdraw from all political, national, or religious fanaticism. This withdrawal, he felt, must be the goal of those especially who for two thousand years had been the victims of such fanaticism.

Stiassny became so animated that he completely dropped his usual disgusting servility, showing the best traits of his character. His face aglow with beauty, he proceeded with his explanation of the progressive views which old Goldmann, repelled by the iron-devouring nationalism of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich, had wanted to bring into this heartland of ethnic and religious diversity. Goldmann had hoped to find fertile soil for his civilizing gospel here, in the atmosphere of an old imperial administration whose aim and goal should have been to keep a variety of creeds, languages, national characters, and ethnological habits in peaceful togetherness. But when Stiassny added that one might in fact try to understand the Bismarckian romanticism of Goldmann’s mansion in these terms, he relapsed into his ironical “But-who-am-I.” With faded eyes and the smile of a man who has eaten ashes, he explained that Goldmann’s house could not be regarded purely and simply as an expression of Jewish presumption, the insolence of a go-getter who had grown rich much too quickly and by devious means. It was not the arrogance of a Jewish upstart, he insisted, using newly acquired wealth to don the robes of patrician respectability. No, indeed; those turrets and balconies, those pennons and weathercocks, actually expressed a yearning for universal chivalrous justice, which the people who might have passed it on from generation to generation had long since traded in for flat-footed bourgeois philistinism.

In his freshly ventilated good mood, Uncle Hubert was immune to this jibe too. Modest by nature, he never put himself forward in conversation even if he had something to say; on the contrary, he had to be prodded by Aunt Sophie with a “Well, Hubi, why don’t you tell us what you think!” But once he began to talk, he did so with a dry humor that testified to his acute powers of observation and was far more effective than Stiassny’s curling, abstract arabesques. And this time too, Uncle Hubert’s sense of humor had its effect.