Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Well, go on with your biography. Jump a decade forward, or backward if you please. Examine at random this or that possibility of yourself: you always come across someone you would be embarrassed (or even outright ashamed) to identify with, someone you’d refuse to frequent if you weren’t forced to live with, because he happens to be yourself ….

yes, but there’s always another dimension, another possibility ….

this “yes, but” which allows you to admit that all these dubious characters were you — or, in any case, possibilities of yourself — that all these faces (including the face in your shaving mirror) were undeniably yours, what else is this “yes, but” but a bullfighter’s slight, elegant, perfidious twist of the capa that makes the bull’s horns miss him by a hairbreadth? … “yes, but” the boy in the Carpathians was brought up in a peculiar, anachronistic world, a feudal world, a strictly traditional education that used the lust for killing — shall we call it, less emotionally, the pleasure of hunting — as a way of strengthening the heart for equally exciting and far nobler feelings, all rooted in the rules of chivalry, such as one’s duty to defend the oppressed, the feeble, and the poor, the readiness to die for the sake of troth and flag or for one’s lady — infantile notions, you’d call them, yes, but notions on which our civilization is based … and as for the creature who, out of sick jealousy, welcomes the assassination of a small and very noble people by the power-drunk followers of a lunatic: well, “yes, but” consider the utter violence of the love that led to such sick jealousy, a love in which all that pent-up romanticism broke loose; at last, after a childhood, an adolescence, of craving to be a good knight, at last he could realize an unconditional commitment to a flag, a cause — his lady … mind you, fanaticism was in the air at the time; supposing instead of falling so violently in love, he had committed himself to the SS? (though, strangely enough, their view on Poland didn’t differ much from his) … “yes, but” take the same face a few years later, in Berlin in 1943: that look of cynicism is but the fruit of suffering, he is sick with hatred, hatred not only for the Nazis but for everyone and everything, for the Germans as a whole and in particular the remnants of their old high society, now apathetically attending their Götterdämmerung; equally, however, he hates the British for their hypocrisy and shortsightedness, the French for their rêverie of lost glory, the Italians for their greed and vanity, and most of all the Americans for their devious self-righteousness — did all these imbeciles not see that their glorious war was not for or against a man called Hitler, or a nation, or an ideology, or a political system, but against themselves? couldn’t they admit that this was the class war they were bound to lose, that would destroy the very things they pretended to fight for: ideals, holy traditions, values handed down from generation to generation; couldn’t they understand that every bomb that gutted a house — here, there, on this side or that side of a front line (a front line that in reality ran through the social structure of each of their countries) — that every one of those bombs simply opened the cellars and set the rats free, the profiteers, the greedy, the uncivilized, the illiterates, the oppressed and offended who wanted their share of the cake no matter how — perhaps through revolution that would, conceivably, bear fruit in the future …

“yes, but” is it worth the price of a destroyed civilization? I don’t give a damn for the future! Fuck the future! I live for today and will not live long enough to see those liberated rats produce a civilization of what they think to be social justice …

and that’s why the man in the half-ruined house in the icy Munich of winter 1947 does not give a fuck whether his wife (whom he has married the year before, whom he has promised to take in his arms and carry from the misery of postwar Germany into the dream world of Argentina or some such place of sparkling, starlit nights, of whispering palm trees, of mild air pulsating with cha-cha-cha and tango rhythms) slowly but steadily starves herself to death while her blue frozen fingers stuff a pipe with tobacco extracted from butts of cigarettes already made of cigarette butts, while he, her husband, just lies there on their bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep: isn’t that a shameful, cowardly, self-pitying attitude from someone brought up to be a good knight? … “yes, but” even the very best knight has moments of despair, think of Perceval or Tristan the fool; you are likely to lose faith in yourself and in mankind when you see the survivors of the cataclysm trying to build up a new world by building into it all the same structures that have led to the decomposition of the old; he, at least, would have no part in it, he was not guilty of helping bourgeois capitalism to revive and find its most fertile soil in bomb-cratered Germany; his hands were clean: his son — had he survived, the poor little thing — could nowadays consider papa a pioneer, an evangelist of dropouts, long before the idea of criticising the consumer society was dreamed of …

anyhow, what counts is not the moments, the days, perhaps the weeks and months when you are downhearted or defeated and want to give in for good (those moments of cowardice that did count for his first, East Prussian wife, that so shattered her confidence in him that he could never, never regain it); what really counts is what you salvage from your defeats ….

What, indeed? the career of a screenwriter for the most mediocre directors on the tattiest productions of Cinecittà? … “yes, but” a writer who dreams himself a genius of motion pictures, someone who would use images as the greatest writers use words — for words are no longer adequate for today’s reality, words are for awe, for beauty and veneration, for noble and refined feelings, for precise and differentiated thought, for minds sensitive like seismographs, for ears used to silence; today’s barbarians can’t cope with words, in their mouths words seem too big, they choke on them with too many pretentions; yet on the other hand they are too small, too narrow to hold the rapidly increasing, hybrid growth of their meaning: try to put the horror of a discothèque into words — a glimpse of a rock’n’roll-drunk teenager’s face does it; try to describe a concentration camp — how many thousand words would you need? — the photograph of a man hanging electrocuted in the barbed wire needs no comment; or try to explain the possibility of the various metamorphoses of a man’s character, the changes of his beliefs, convictions, points of view the while he feels no loss of identity — well, take his pictures as a boy, a young man, a grownup, a man shortly before and shortly after his midlife crises and have a close look at them, you’ll see it all there clear enough to give you goose bumps ….

in short, with all his yes, buts, he told himself, he did not lie to himself more than anyone else. Parallel to the way he was dreaming himself ran his feeling of guilt — and that was what made him feel I through all the changes. It was no personal guilt but a sort of collective guilt, a guilt shared by everyone belonging to so-called Western Civilization, a guilt that was immanent in the epoch, in this civilization’s present, particular state and shape. To be conscious of it, as if it were a personal guilt, was his dark privilege. I could not possibly act in a way other than to become guilty by it — yet I was responsible for it. That was his heavy keel. With that it didn’t matter what sails he set to what winds. The others believed in being strong characters, formed once and forever. Their identities (assuming they believed they had them) had, at best, grown over their faces like iron masks. He shed his own identity at will, studied it, put it away, put on another one, in which he studied himself again, as watchful as ever, always finding himself guilty in one way or other. His identities were forged not from the iron of a steadfast lifetime but from extremely light, virtually experimental and interchangeable materials, and they had not become second nature to him; although they were merely hypothetical, like molecular models scientists construct, he would find himself in each of them. Every one was undeniably I to him. In other words, with all his yes, buts, he knew he was lying to himself. But he also knew why he was lying to himself. And by knowing it, the better he knew it, he lied to himself no more.