Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori Page A

always addressing me with “ Sie ,” the polite form, even though Aunt Sophie rebuked him about this several times. Finally, Uncle Hubi could endure it no longer, and when he exclaimed, “You sound like a bunch of shop assistants!” Stiassny stopped. But then he switched to apostrophizing me in a respectful and impersonal tone—of course, no less ironic—with a general “one”: “One looks like a painting by Philipp Otto Runge this morning! Need I bother asking whether one has slept well?”
    I had no idea who Philipp Otto Runge was, but I could grasp the malice in the reference, even if it was just the malice of Stiassny’s knowing how incapable I was of puzzling it out. He was equally aware of how strictly I had been trained to display attentive cordiality toward adults. It was impossible for me not to answer or instantly parry his civility with even more eager civility. It thus came to out-and-out contests of amenities, which occasionally assumed grotesque forms—for instance, the classic situation of a door at which each of us wanted to let the other pass first. Ultimately, Uncle Hubi or Aunt Sophie had to terminate our rivalry with an irritated “Would you please cut out your ceremonies! It’s like blackcock-mating season!”
    The first time Stiassny saw me in my makeshift student getup, his pale eyes sparkled with amusement, but then instantly faded. He bowed servilely: “Oh, I see! One is reliving the prime of life of our venerable uncle, our mutual generous host. This is lovely—an act of true piety! The reenactment of collective high spirits—this is ethical in the finest sense. Passing on the banner from generation to generation—one feels German! Of course, with innate generosity, one will overlook the fact that the venerable Herr Uncle’s mother was Hungarian and Frau Aunt Sophie, a cousin of one’s mother—if I am not mistaken—has as much Irish as Rumanian blood in her veins; nay, on one’s father’s side, one would have to wend one’s way to Sicily to bare the roots of our Germanhood. But then who am I to bring up such things! We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American … but we lack political insight for that…. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better. For instance, the German yearning, the yearning for the Reich, the sunken Roman Empire of the German Nation, of Charlemagne, or Karl the Great, as he is known in German, the empire over which Emperor Barbarossa fell asleep so profoundly in the Kyffhäuser mountains that his beard grew through the stone tabletop he leaned on … to restore this Reich, to reunite it afresh, to revive it in all its mystical power and glory … yes indeed! That was what German-speaking youth wanted a century ago, and it is still their dream and longing, no matter where or what they may be today, this German-speaking, German-thinking, German-feeling youth—on the Rhein, from the days of Armin the Cheruskan and his Roman adversaries, perhaps of largely Nubian and Libyan blood; or in the territories east of the Elbe and of course especially in the nuclear states of Bismarck’s new edition of the Reich, mainly of Prussian and Finnish and Wendish blood; not to mention in the lands along the Nibelungen Danube, so close to one’s heart, of Slovenian and Bohemian blood…. No matter: it feels German, this German youth, Imperial German, Greater German, nicht wahr? Wistfully they dream of themselves under the grand rolling of the black, red, and golden flag—that most youthful of all