Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

“Poldi will explain it to you. We’re having dinner with him. You just listen to what he has to say.”

Poldi was the fat journalist from Prague, who, as a theater critic, went regularly not only to Vienna but also to Berlin. He had lost a lot of weight and was not half so amusing as he used to be. What irritated me most of all was the self-complacent way he treated me — and I could not rise to the occasion, because he resolutely kept aiming at my cultural gaps. “I understand that we have sworn off allegiance to the ancestor of the Carolingians,” he greeted me, “even though the mustache is downright Merovingian.” And when I shook my head uncomprehendingly, he went on, “I mean, we are no longer calling ourselves Arnulf, now, but Gregor. Good, very good. Gregory the Great, as we all know, was a protector of the Jews.”

I dryly answered that this was certainly not the reason I had been given this name, and he threw in, “Very well, let’s stay with the Carolingians. We are then not far from Bishop Agobard, and we can look forward to a new De insolentia Judaeorum or, even worse, a new De Judaicis superstitionibus with a few blood libels. Today, you see, there are two schools of thought — two camps, I must involuntarily say: one outside and one inside the concentration camps. And uncomfortable as the latter may be, it is, still and all, the only one for decent people.”

“And I would rather end up there myself than let Brommy get in,” said Minka. “But just tell him seriously how things look politically. He’s straight out of the Middle Ages, you know. That’s where his father lives, in the Carpathians.”

Now I realized that Poldi’s irony was put on in order to conceal an enormous fear. Most of the things he told us, in a whisper, looking around to make sure he wasn’t overheard, did not make much sense to me. In the landscape of my mind, politics had not figured prominently. As a subject of Rumania — that is, of His Majesty King Carol II–I knew, and was expected to know, that he was the sovereign of a constitutional monarchy, and that in Bucharest there was a parliament where deputies represented the party of the peasants and the party of the liberals and whatnot, and that they were a bunch of crooks who did nothing but steal the money of the state. There were also some Jews, who were Communists, and therefore, rightly, were treated as such — that is, as Russian spies and agents provocateurs . But fortunately there were also some young Rumanians who, under their leader, a certain Mr. Cuza — which was a good and noble name, though only adopted by that gentleman — beat up those Jews from time to time, thus keeping them in a hell of a fright, and preventing them from spreading more Communist propaganda and provocation. I knew, too, that in Austria there were many socialists, called Reds, who were beaten up by or beat up the Heimwehr, which was a national guard defending the ethical values — such as the cleanliness of mind guaranteed by the fresh mountain air, and the love for shooting goats and plucking edelweiss — of Styria, Tirol, Carinthia, and others of the old Austrian lands. With the help of the Heimwehr, Chancellor Dollfuss had cannonaded the Reds, only to be shot down later by a Nazi. Nazis, in Austria, were rowdies who dynamited telephone booths, but that was not necessarily true of German Nazis, who, after all, had done very well. They had built up a state of order, and justice, and genuine social welfare, in spite of the fact that Adolf Hitler was a frightful proletarian, as my father said, and looked exactly like a Bohemian footman my grandmother had once employed, against his advice. The footman turned out to be a thief and stole my father’s cuff links and some other items, including a very nice hunting knife. Only people like my mother’s family could be wrong about somebody with such a face, my father said.

The Reds were bad because they were proletarians and wanted to do away with people of our kind, as had happened in Russia. Jews had a fatal inclination for Reds; therefore they ought to be kept in a hell of a fright, so they would keep quiet. Nazis were also proletarians, but they had some very sound ideas, like the theory of breeding, and some exemplary laws about hunting only in season, which gave the game the chance to regenerate and even improve in number as well as in size. And on the whole they were against Jews and Reds, so it was quite obvious that we had to stick with them. I really did not think there was much more to the subject, and I got rather bored with Poldi’s Cassandra-like whispering, so I proposed that we go to the Kärntnerbar for a whiskey. If, as Poldi said, the Germans wanted to conquer Austria, so much the better. The German-speaking peoples would be united again, as they had been in the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. And if the Jews were frightened, it served them right. It would keep them from becoming Russian spies and propagandists of Communism and also make them behave a little more decently at the Salzburg Festival. As for the reaction of the English and French and so on, they should mind their own business. I did not see any reason to start a war just because the German-speaking peoples did what the Czechs and Poles and Rumanians had been encouraged to do by the very same French and English. Of course, I did not say any of this to Poldi and Minka, because they were friends and it would have hurt their feelings. So we went to the Kärntnerbar.

When Minka went to the Kärntnerbar, it was the crest of the wave. We let her down to the ladies’ room by a rope and pulled her up again, and Poldi became his old self and was highly amusing. At three o’clock in the morning, we found ourselves in the beer cellar of the Paulanerbräu, sitting between a stone-drunk chap — who shouted in a loud voice that he was a former cavalry officer with a golden decoration for bravery and the official title of the Hero of Zaleszczyki — and a shy little tart I knew fairly well from midnight strolls on the Kärntnerstrasse. We had hardly had a spoonful of our gulash soup and a sip of beer when a huge, rather shabby-looking young man roared in our faces, “ Juden raus! ” “Jews out!”

The former cavalry officer got up in stiff dignity and said that he felt offended by having been called a Jew, and would the gentleman instantly follow him to the men’s room in the basement in order to fix the place and conditions of the duel. Poldi pushed him back on his stool. The rowdy then, surprisingly, sat down on the other side of the little tart and stared with a dull expression at the wooden table. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me. “Don’t you remember me, you swine?” he roared. “Arnulf! I’m Oskar. Oskar Koloman.”

I could scarcely believe my eyes. He was one of the boys at the boarding school in Styria, a good deal older than I but in the same class. “Where the hell have you come from?” I asked.

He rose to his full height and volume. “You really want to know?” He nearly fell over the table in the attempt to grasp my shoulder. “Come with me to the men’s room in the basement. I’ll tell you where I’ve come from.”

“I think you’d better go,” Minka said, in a low voice. “It’ll give Poldi and me a chance to disappear.”

I followed my schoolmate past a row of gentlemen standing against a tarred wall, showing us their backs, till he found a gap where we could stand next to one another. He had that very day been released from Steinhausen, the Austrian concentration camp for Nazis under the regime of Chancellor Schuschnigg. As one of a group of Nazi students, he had blown up a telephone booth in Graz and had been caught doing it. He had spent three years in the camp. “For a cigarette butt no bigger than this,” he howled into my face, showing as well as he could with his thick fingers how small, “for such a tiny little butt, they made me clean the latrines for a week!” Then, hammering his fists against the tarred wall, “They have forsaken us! They have betrayed us — our brethren of the Reich! They left us in the mire while they became great and mighty. Now they will come and take over here, too!” He leaned his forehead against the wall and wept.