Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The diploma of a Gymnasium is a poor substitute for the rites of initiation with which primitive societies make a young male understand that he has become a man; yet in my youth nobody hesitated to take it as such. When I went back to Vienna, in order to follow in the footsteps of my late grandpapa and study architecture, I was merely a boy of seventeen, but I enjoyed all the liberties of a grown man, with none of the responsibilities. I could go to bed when and with whom I pleased, drink liquor to my heart’s content and the revolt of my intestines, and spend my money and time as economically or wastefully as I felt like. My parents were not rich; my father’s passion for hunting was expensive and soon devoured what the war had left of a former certain opulence. Yet, in the Bukovina, my monthly allowance would have sufficed to keep a Jewish family of seven from urgent need. Anyhow, I was not forced to begin my studies under the mental pressure of lack of time. But all this did not alter my solitude, which by now had become not only a habit but a deliberate, proud attitude. I did not have a single friend, and I did not long for one. With girls I was extremely clumsy and shy. Besides, my mother, fearing that I would abuse my new status and fall into debauchery, had arranged that I again live with my grandmother. Though my mother knew very well that the old lady was too much of a recluse to keep an eye on a young man, she counted on my aunts, whose theosophical preoccupations and love for dogs were evidence of a high morality that would perhaps keep me from immediately getting lost in a swamp of vices.

It was at this time I learned that we had done Mr. Malik an injustice by calling him a Jew. On the contrary, he was a man of high moral standards. A very important free and yet not reborn soul who had followed his invitation and slipped into the emptied vessel of the body of his sister, Miss Weingruber, a highly gifted medium, revealed to the esoteric community that great things were in preparation. The universe was a big system of perpetual perfection. Everything in it had but the sole wish to dematerialize more and more and finally become pure spirit and unite with God. Materia was the contrary of God. It was a burden given as a curse to the fallen angels, a curse put upon their souls, which were longing to be light and free again. Death did not mean you would be freed. When you died, your soul was suspended for a while outside the dimension perceivable to us and, in a sort of metaphysical extra course, was taught what was good and what was evil, and particularly to understand what it had done that was good or bad in the existence it had just left. If, in the former life, it had done much good, it was allowed to slip into a new existence less burdened with materia . If it had done a medium amount of good or evil, it had to come back to the same world in another existence and carry the same amount of materia and live again, trying to do better. If, on the other hand, it had done a great deal of wrong, it was condemned to a lower form of existence, even more burdened with materia , and slipped into a body that was not just flesh and bones, like ours, but — let us say — of stone or iron. Your soul, doing better and better each time, finally dematerialized into pure spirit and united with God.

Not only human souls were under the curse of materia but also your pet dog’s, as a slightly lower form, and everything else — even the cobblestones on which Minka Raubitschek had broken her hip. And each creature or inanimate object was given the chance of doing good or evil and of dematerializing or materializing accordingly. And, of course, the stars and the planets on which you lived too had their chance, and when all the beings of a lower-grade star had done very well, the star itself potentialized and became a star of a higher category, with thinner materia and better souls on it. And this was going to happen to our globe.

My aunts were full of joy and expectation telling me about all this. By the good behavior of those who lived for the spirit, they said, our world had slowly potentialized and dematerialized and was now on the verge of potentializing into a nearly butterfly-like world. For there were very high-class souls — people like Buddha, Plato, and Jesus Christ — who deliberately took on the burden of materia in order to teach the others what was good or evil. Each of them was announced by some soul of a high category materialized for this very purpose. And as Jesus Christ had been announced by John the Baptist, Mr. Malik had come to announce the arrival of another dematerializer. His name was Adolf Hitler, and one could already see what enthusiasm he had created in Germany by spiritualizing the Germans and cleansing Germany of the low, materialistic Jews. Mr. Malik was no Jew, in spite of the fact that he had changed his name (as had Mr. Hitler, whose real name was Schicklgruber — and he certainly was no Jew, either); he had done this for a different reason, for Malik was the name given to him in the outer world — the name of his spirit. The name given to his material burden, which he had voluntarily undertaken to carry, was Weingruber. He and his sister were actually one high-category soul divided in two and inhabiting two bodies.

The potentialization of the world could already be felt in my grandmother’s home by the fact that it, too, had to a certain extent been cleansed of Jews. No longer were the séances of the esoteric community accompanied by the chamber music of the Raubitscheks, for on the same day both Professor Raubitschek and his wife died of Spanish flu — a typical Jewish extravagance, as my grandmother said, because there was no epidemic, as in 1918, when many people died of it; therefore there was no cause to do it out of season, so to speak. Anyhow, they both died and left their daughter alone, and — alas! — what had been gained by their disappearance was largely spoiled by the scandalous behavior of Minka Raubitschek. Not only did she have an official lover, whose roadster often stood parked in front of the house all night, but other gentlemen were seen going into the Raubitschek apartment and coming out the morning after. Instead of chamber music on Wednesday evenings, one could hear the noises of carousing nearly every night.

I rather liked Minka. She was friendly when we met on the staircase. Her voice was full and warm, and her smile beautiful. She looked Spanish, with her shining black hair and large black eyes. Her skin was lovely, and she used a lipstick of a most provokingly vivid red. She dressed well, and even her slight limping had a certain charm; she did not try to hide it but limped ahead courageously and decidedly. On Sunday mornings, I was invited by my grandmother to breakfast in her room. From the window I could follow the spectacle of Minka’s being called for by her official lover, a tall, fair, athletic chap, for their weekend outing. He was obviously an ice-hockey player. Sometimes he got into his roadster wearing his hockey uniform, vividly striped in red and white and yellow. Minka carried his sticks, knee pads, and shoulder pads. It all looked very smart and gay, and made me feel my isolation.

The courses in architecture at the Technische Hochschule bored me to tears. Instead of giving me a taste for harmony, the instructors tortured me with the theory of statics of rigid bodies, equations, the use of vectors, and so on, and I have always been a hopeless mathematician. Very soon I began to cut classes, and finally I did not go there for months at a time. I was too ignorant to enjoy either a concert or the theater. With the exception, perhaps, of a few operettas starring Fritzi Massary, I saw nothing of the good theater in Vienna of that time. My grandmother still kept a seat at the opera and never went there herself, so I drowsed through Rheingold and La Traviata , wondering why people sometimes sighed with delight and sometimes expressed their disapproval. But I walked a lot. I crisscrossed Vienna from one end to the other, sometimes walking as far as from Döbling to Hietzing, and then taking the tramway back. I walked, preferably at night, through the inner city, watching the swarms of whores on the Kärntnerstrasse. During the day, it was the most elegant of all Viennese streets, and at night it turned into something like the Canebière in Marseille. Or I would stand and marvel at the beauty of the empty Josefsplatz and Fischer von Erlach’s National-Bibliothek, wondering why my grandfather had never achieved this perfection. Nobody cared that I came home at four o’clock in the morning, and old Marie had long since given up trying to wake me, knowing that I usually slept till noon.