Gregor von Rezzori: The Mask of Civilization
In the crepuscular Europe of the mid-20th century, shattered both morally and materially by war, a few voices emerged, not with declarations of absolution or renewal, but with curved mirrors—to refract, mock, question, and elegize. One such voice was that of Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998)—novelist, memoirist, and occasional poet—whose oeuvre often swam in the murky estuaries between belonging and alienation, identity and masquerade.
Born in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Ukraine, Rezzori’s life epitomized the disintegration of Mitteleuropa. He was raised among collapsing formalities, in an empire suddenly unmoored from its history. German was his mother tongue, but it was spoken with an accent by nearly everyone around him. Romanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish were heard just as often—each a strand in the jangling dialectic that surrounded his upbringing. In this mosaic of peoples and fractured loyalties, Rezzori developed what might be called a tragic cosmopolitanism: the worldview of a man whose home had been rendered fictitious by politics.
His masterpiece, for those who know him, is usually considered to be *The Snows of Yesteryear* (1989), a memoir cocooned in longing and sharpened by wit. Composed as a series of portraits—his mother, father, governess, sister, and nanny—Rezzori subtly dissects the anatomy of nostalgia itself, showing how memory operates not as repository but as mythopoetic forge. “Memories,” he notes, “do not fade away—they are only buried under the debris of time. Such burial is not oblivion, but petrification.”[^1]
Yet long before memoir, Rezzori built his early prestige on fiction—fiction so well chiseled that Thomas Mann once called him “an unsettling talent.” In *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite* (1979), a provocative, layered novel-in-stories, Rezzori dissects prejudice not as ideology but as ambience, inscribed within architectural niceties and social rituals. The title is misleadingly polemical: Rezzori does not advocate anti-Semitism; he anatomizes its insidious domesticity. The narrator, much like the author, becomes “an anti-Semite the way one winds up being a monarchist or a melancholic or a fool.”[^2] It is not conviction, Rezzori suggests, but cowardice and malaise that permit the worst in us to masquerade as the inevitable.
His world is peopled with aristocrats who speak like bureaucrats, with peasants who behave like prophets—a ragged theater of the grotesque carved out of Europe’s withering salons. In *An Ermine in Czernopol* (1958), a roman à clef set in a fictional city resembling his native Czernowitz, Rezzori offers one of the greatest unfashionable statements in all of fictional prose: that civilization may be a more subtle form of barbarism. The eponymous “ermine” is a military officer whose sense of honor is so absurd, it brings about his own undoing, not through tragedy, but through farce. “Dignity,” the narrator observes, “is a magnificent deception, provided no one asks too loudly what it really consists of.”
So what use is this decadent veil of gentility, these courtly pretenses that lead men to ruin in peacetime and—worse—compliance in war? The answer flickers in Rezzori’s stylized prose like candlelight on old damask. Morality, for him, is not universal, but performative. The characters in his fiction wear selves like clothes, donning and doffing identity depending on who is watching. If modernism aimed to strip away the illusions of bourgeois sincerity, then Rezzori’s work, coming decades after the modernist canon, reintroduces the illusions with gothic flair.
Academically, Rezzori continues to puzzle scholars. His reluctance to espouse any overt political program has made him an elusive figure, particularly in German literary studies, where politicization is often de rigueur. Yet recent scholarship, notably by Andre Postel in *Baroque Facades: Masks and Memory in Rezzori’s Austro-Hungarian Fictions* (University of Leiden Press, 2017), has begun to uncover the philosophical substrate that pulses beneath Rezzori’s wit. According to Postel, Rezzori is best understood not as a satirist, but as an ontologist of social persona—a thinker who intuits, through narrative, the emptiness of the self when divorced from community and rite.[^3]
Nowhere is this more lucidly articulated than in Rezzori’s lesser-cited short essay “The Other Side of Nostalgia,” published in 1993 in the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*. There, he writes: “We are not only homesick for places—we are homesick for conditions of being, ways of perceiving. Modern life has abolished both.” This line, gently buried in a newspaper essay, might be the Rosetta Stone to all his work. What Rezzori mourns is not the Empire, not even his lineage, but a tempo of soul that has become anachronistic—perhaps even outlawed by the utility of democratic flattening.
Such ideas, filtered through fiction, seem less political than metaphysical. They resemble more the Eastern Orthodox lamentations found in the work of Bulgakov or even Dostoevsky: a mourning for spirit beneath the tyranny of the real. It is here that Rezzori feels most necessary to contemporary readers, especially those who find themselves bruised in an age of digital platitudes and algorithmic identities. In a world where all authenticity is suspect, Rezzori allows us to wallow in the spectacle of selfhood—vain, contradictory, embattled—and thereby recovers a paradoxical honesty.
But the honesty Rezzori achieves is not derived from confession—it springs from candid theatricality. He does not trust sincerity, suspecting in it a new kind of pretense. Consider a passage from *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite*, where the narrator, after reminiscing over a youthful friendship, confesses: “I did not love him, not really. But I loved that part of myself which existed only in his presence.”[^4] This is perhaps the pivotal philosophical insight in his body of work: that we do not love others, so much as we love who we become in their gaze.
What then is civilization, under Rezzori’s scalpel? It is a masquerade, yes—but more nobly, perhaps, a conscious agreement to dance in mask, knowing we must otherwise stand defenseless in the void. We wear our traditions, our languages, our names and titles, as armor—not to attack, but to preserve the self against dissolution. Rezzori’s barbed nostalgia is not for a better time, but for a time when the poetry of appearances had not yet been reduced to the sterile prose of fact.
To read Gregor von Rezzori, then, is not merely to revisit a forgotten Europe; it is to examine our own selves under the low, flickering light of comedy—a comedy so ancient it casts shadows resembling truth. That is the peculiar flame he tends—flickering between laughter and mourning, mask and face, fiction and confession.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, Europe, identity
—
[^1]: Rezzori, Gregor von. *The Snows of Yesteryear*. New York Review Books, 1989.
[^2]: Rezzori, Gregor von. *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite*. NYRB Classics, 2007, p. 57.
[^3]: Postel, Andre. *Baroque Facades: Masks and Memory in Rezzori’s Austro-Hungarian Fictions*. University of Leiden Press, 2017.
[^4]: Rezzori, Gregor von. *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite*, p. 119.