Note: This review has now been copied to the new version of A Common Reader. To read it in its updated form, click here
I have recently discovered the books of Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1988) and feel that I have stumbled upon a layer of gold down in the deeper mines of 20th century literature. Its just surprising that at this point in time that publishers of such authors as Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass etc, aren't falling over themselves trying to get out a unified edition of Rezzori's works, and I'm sure its only a matter of time before von Rezzori is well-known as a classic writer of 20th century mid-Europe.
I've filed this post under "Austrian fiction" on the basis that von Rezzori took on Austrian nationality after World War II, when his home region of Bukovina, originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had passed through the hands of Russia, Romania and Ukraine. Truly, von Rezzori was highly qualified to chronicle the maelstrom of mid-Europe in those tumultuous years, and as I read his books I find a unique voice which is quite impossible to pin-down as German, Romanian, Russian or Austrian.
von Rezzori is primarily a writer of novels. Even where the writing seems to be autobiographical, the reader is never too sure how authentic the memoirs are. In an interview with Bruce Wolmer, when asked about the conflation between the first-person narrator of his books with himself, von Rezzori replies, "this is such an old discussion: To what extent are books autobiographic? Its ridiculous. You can't eliminate yourself totally unless you're Shakespeare". And yet, in von Rezzori, we find completely authentic voices, whether its "Gregor" in Confessions of an Anti-Semite, or Baron Peter in Oedipus in Stalingrad, von Rezzori's characters have a convincing, if unappealing world-view. Von Rezzori understood these people, he knew where they were coming from, and he was unashamed to tell their stories without the need for constant corrective commentary - their words alone are their judge.
I've been collecting everything I can find by von Rezzori and basically I think I'm lucky that this author is so little known. This fine hardback first edition of the first English translation of Oedipus in Stalingrad, cost me £0.99 on ebay. Quite a find I would think, particularly with each chapter starting with a little drawing by von-Rezzori to set the scene.
The book is set in Berlin in 1938 and 1939, and concerns Traugott von Jassilowski, who is the son of an undistinguished family in East Prussia. Traugott is a social climber and on arrival in Berlin somehow assumes the title "Baron" despite living in a boarding house along with other middle-class single men, all trying to make their mark in the bustling city. Traugott soon discovers Charley's Bar, a place of inventive cocktails and a clientele either rising or falling but definitely "just passing through".
Charley's Bar? Its just gone all to hell now . . . I can still tell you the exact position of every nail in the place: the bar here, Charley behind it (drunk of course) together with Tom (the Mixer, not Tom Mix), the gallery of grand playboys hanging on the brown-panelled wall behind them . . . the regulars' table with the witty doctor and the blonde thoroughbred.
If this all seems a little like a Chicago Speakeasy, then maybe the similarities are there, but this is Berlin, and the whiff of imminent disaster from Allied bombers is never too far away. But Charley's clients prefer to keep their head in the sand. Politics hardly enters this book. Apart from the occasional greeting "Heil", these people are just not involved with what's going on around them. Kristallnacht has passed them by, and as for imprisoned and executed Jews, Social Democrats and Communists, there is just no mention, for at Charley's Bar the party just goes on and on. How very different to, for example, Hans Fallada's novel, Alone in Berlin, where the problems of living with Nazi ideology infest every page.
Traugott Jassilowski is employed as a features-writer for the Gentlemans' Gazette, a job that seems to leave him plenty of time for philandering and drinking, and before long, he hitches up with the "blonde thoroughbred" (we never get to know her name) and they marry and live in a small apartment in Berlin. The blonde thoroughbred is incredibly beautiful but also totally relaxed about her effect on men. She truly loves Traugott, but finds it hard to stop loving other men too. Her shapeliness and blonde mane of hair, cascading over her shoulders just seem to attract too much attention, and before long, her marriage to the rather difficult Traugott leads to marital problems which are just too much to ignore. By that time, von Rezzori has begun to interleaves Traugott's troubled Oedipal mental history into the relationship, something the blonde thoroughbred finds too complicated to cope with.
The bare bones of the story utterly fail to describe the experience of reading this book. Von Rezzori shows signs of being a post-modernist writer, interrupting his story whenever it suits him to enter into dialogue with his readers. He is very concerned with the impossibility of a human being finding the truth behind what he sees:
I've often thought of the phenomenon of lying: not philosophically of course, not in any basic terms, but quite literally: after all one does have something like imagination . . . And admit it: what would life be like, this one-times-one, without the differentials, and integrals of the lies we tell? What would it come to, this world, this marvellous misunderstanding, this adventure, without them. It occurs to me that we exist in an entirely different environment than we think. Not one of the creatures that crawl here on earth nor even the ones that fly in the air resemble in any way the images of our inner world; . . . . . the jellyfish cloud of lies with which we transform the cold, unlit deep-sea landscape of naked truth into the incredible realms of inner life.
For von Rezzori, the difficulty is not that human beings lie, but rather that they don't even know they are doing it. They merely describe what they see inside themselves and interpret everything through the lenses of their inner vision so that the concept of an accurate witness to events is a fading chimera, a monstrous creature made of the parts of multiple animals.
This is just one of many examples of von Rezzori's unique world-view. He writes just after World War II, when confusion reigned in Central Europe, and there was a massive rush to move on from the terrible past. I wonder whether his lack of confidence in people's ability to tell the truth was anything to do with his belief that the Nuremburg war-trials (on which he reported for the Hamburg press) were a sham? In the interview with Bruce Walmer, von Rezzori argues that,
They were a failure and therefore a great delusion. This was not due to, say, moral failing or any manipulations behind the scenes, it was due to my great enemy, stupidity, overwhelming collective stupidity. Or the impossibility, even on the part of intelligent people, to cope with things established by stupidity.
Objective truth as such is an impossibility because,
Whatever we do is not only led by our individual fullness but by trends in the zeitgeist, by things that are far out of the reach of our control. We don’t know what happens to us. I mean the simple proof is that if you take a German newspaper of, say, 1934 and read an article written by Dr. Goebbels, you wouldn’t believe your eyes. The crap he has said. And—I know, I lived through it—people read it as if it were the Bible. Intelligent people, but totally blinded at the time.
Despite the deeply philosophical statements which occur in this book, it is also a fantastic story. These people lived on the edge of total annhilation, and von Rezzori treats us at the end of his book to a "what happened afterwards" glimpse into the fate of his characters,
Endings! Endings! Dear friends, you wanted an ending for your story, and here it is, effortlessly unraveled, and ending without truly being one, just as in those fairy tales that finish, "And they all lived happily ever after, and if they haven't died, they still are alive today".
The ending is in fact somewhat equivocal and slightly unspecific - our hero Traugott
is no longer among the living, but neither did he die. He was taken from us.
But this as it should be, for von Rezzori has described a class and a place which really had no future in the post-war reconstruction. These lives just came to an end. They disappeared, and to dwell too long on the specifics of their demise would be pointless.
In the interview mentioned above, von Rezzori says, "I cannot read ten lines of Robert Musil and keep on writing, I stop for a week at least". And in some ways, this book follows on well from A Man Without Qualities, for Musil also documented the end of a social class, with incisive insight into its failings and inadequacies.
The translation from the German is superb, a tumbling cascade of words, in which the author worked with H F Broch Rothermann (son of Hermann Broch, a Vienna associate of Robert Musil). In his 1982 interview, von Rezzori claimed that,
It can’t really be translated, because it’s written in sort of German slang as if Ernst Junger were a drunken Prussian officer telling a story in a bar. It’s about German snobbism, about somebody who comes to Berlin in ‘38 in order to conquer the world, a sort of Berlin Rastignac. It pokes fun in a most atrocious way.
However, I found that the spirit of this language is carried over in the translation, but into immensely stylish English, far-removed from the slang, bar-talk described by the author.
I now have three other von Rezzori books on my To Be Read pile and can hardly wait to crack on with them. But on the other hand, I don't want to rush them, for these are books to be savoured and pondered over.
