Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

besides, that would have been irrelevant in the case of his (former, second, Jewish) wife, for she was not typically Jewish in any respect, quite the contrary: truly the most goyish shikseh he had ever encountered: no Jewish upbringing whatsoever, of course, being the child of emancipated parents; as her father was an art historian, she had been surrounded from the start by reproductions of religious works of art, imbued with Catholic culture; she, in contrast to him, her husband, the alleged anti-Semite, had never seen the inside of a synagogue, had not the foggiest notion of Hebrew ritual; the mother was once a member of the Laban dance group and needless to say a devotee of some freethinking nature cult, sandals her religious belief, so to speak; she knew about Moses and David only because of Michelangelo; long before being made conscious of belonging to the Chosen People, she could reckon herself among the chosen few for whom the mosaics of Ravenna and the Baroque jubilation of Ottobeuren were as natural as shoe polish and toothpaste for other people; then, of course, she was made conscious of the other chosenness so emphatically that unconsciously she scorned it. In her schooldays, a teacher had summoned her to the front of the class and exclaimed, “Just have a good look at little Ruth, she belongs to the nation that crucified our Savior!”—of course without mentioning how much Christian art owed to that event. Unfortunately the Aryan self-awareness of the Third Reich was not exactly conducive to the creation of Jewish national pride; even with the hatred for her Aryan classmates which she inevitably developed, she could not help resenting being different from the others, to wish she too would be one of those blond grain-harvesters in trim white blouses, laborers participating in Germany’s renewal, marching along with them when they sang their dear songs; she herself, after all, as the Allgäu incident proved just a few years later, had perfect physical requirements, not to mention the willingness of conviction; and it was no coincidence that in her rebellion against his own lax relationship to truth, she fully concorded with his first, East Prussian wife, who could have been accused of anything but not being Aryan, having the purest Pruzzian blood ….

But then the ghastly thing had happened, which he called “invention of reality” and because of which he never for an instant doubted the correctness, the “Truth” of his own conception of truth (it was a frequent event in his dynamic life, an event he observed with the thrill of the uncanny, which refortified his bent for mystical notions): because they had started hating one another, they strove to know one another more clearly — after all, they had to give their hatred nourishment, reasons, arguments; and by seeing each other more and more sharply, more and more relentlessly, they invented each other in a new and more merciless shape — and that shape became reality. He had tried fully to comprehend the trauma of her childhood, adolescence, and youth as a pariah, a Jew in the Third Reich; he had tried at first out of love, in order to understand her all the more intimately, to identify with her all the more deeply; now he did it in order to find weapons against her, weapons she herself forged for him. He invented her as a Jew with the inevitable mental damage, and that is what she turned into, visibly turned into, more and more each day, each hour … it happened more and more often that one of his or her friends said to him, “You have to understand her: she’s got awful complexes — she has to have them, poor thing. If someone’s as Jewish as she is, it’s a miracle she survived!” And the voices accumulated, admitting to him, “Yes, you’re right, unfortunately. She’s awfully stupid. It’s too bad — she’s so beautiful. But when stupidity is added to the Jewish complex, then it’s really unbearable.” It was eerie: one could invent reality so that it became real; for example, one could invent Jews for oneself, in order to hate them ….

As for him, certain frosty responses of certain people, occasional irony, open baiting, and insolence made him notice more and more plainly that she had succeeded in depicting him as a disreputable personality with a shady background and an unreliable character; at times, he recognized with pale terror that her invention was visibly gaining reality: he caught himself telling fibs that were meant to give his background a brilliance that could scarcely lay claim to credibility; to correct this mistake, he took refuge in a flimsy self-irony that made him all the more suspect; incidentally, with his irregular income, he lived far beyond his means, often finding himself, shamefully, dunned by creditors, reacting in a cowardly way at times and a foolishly arrogant way at others — in short: he became the person he was taken for. One day, they ran into the prince — the prince in whose father’s castle they had met and fallen in love, under absurd circumstances, incidentally ….

He had encountered the prince’s father in a Munich hotel, it was long past midnight, he was sitting in his room, at the typewriter, almost naked because of the dreadful heat, expecting someone to knock on the wall because of the clatter — then someone really did knock, but on the door; when he said “Come in!” an incredibly tall, haggard figure appeared, exuding antiquated nobility like a half-ruined tower overgrown with ivy and fanned by jackdaw wings. The figure named an historic name going back to the age of the Stauffers. He covered himself as best he could, named his own name, asked in what way he could be of service, apologized that his typewriter clatter had disturbed His Highness’s rest — No, no, the old prince protested, sheer curiosity had prompted him to knock: “You see, I was walking along the corridor and I saw your shoes outside the door, they are the shoes of our kind. Then I heard the typewriter; now that is something which our kind cannot do, I mean type — so I had to see who it was staying here ….”

very flattering, to share a passion for custom-made shoes with someone from the first section of the Gotha Almanac of German Nobility, even though one risked being taken for a con man; but it turned out that there were other common features: the prince knew the Carpathians, had hunted there himself; they also found common ground by remembering that in the good old days when one could hunt to one’s heart’s content in the headwater region of the “swift” and “golden” Bistriţa River, the villages had teemed with Jews. The old prince did not regard the danger they posed as now entirely averted, despite the cleansing that had taken place there, too. His son, the heir apparent — endangered on his maternal side (the old prince took it for granted that one knew who the heir apparent’s mother was and what dubious legacy she had brought into the family: “Well, the Lützelburg line, as we know, has always had a proclivity for dangerous friendships, hence the unfortunate connection with the Hohenzollerns”) — the heir apparent was in the hands of a Jewish conspiracy, had allowed himself to be talked into investing his money (a great deal of money, by the way) in a film production, was going about with Jews, and had, incidentally, invited not only the Greek shipper Niarchos to go shooting but also the Baron de Rothschild; the old prince, who spoke fifteen languages, had indulged in the jest of addressing the shipper Niarchos in ancient Greek and the Baron de Rothschild in Hebrew: “The surprise was delightful, I have never seen such round eyes!” The old prince now went on in Rumanian, although not altogether intelligibly, since he had learned it, like most of his fifteen languages, from books, but nevertheless it sufficed to communicate what he had on his mind: “I am gaining the insight that you, writing film scripts here at midnight, are personally involved in the cinema business”—one could put it that way, yes, indeed — and the old prince went on in German for the sake of simplicity, “Well, would you be kind enough to come to our place in the next few days, to have a look at the crew my son is surrounding himself with? These people have been camping in the Gundlach Wing for weeks, and it can’t be locked, there are all sorts of valuable items in it, who knows? …”