Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (39 page)

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” BistriÅ£a 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? …”

He then visited the historic castle, three hundred rooms, more than fifty alone in the Gundlach Wing, to meet the heir apparent—tall, blond, round-faced, slightly jittery head movements, but merrily sparkling eyes, a keen sense of humor, a malicious, black humor—and to meet the Jewish conspirators: a movie weasel, very imaginative, eccentric, plucked as a child in Buchenwald from the breast of his mother, who had starved to death, brought to an orphanage in Reims, outstanding pupil at the
lycée
, then the École Normale, assistant director to all the kingpins of the
nouvelle vague
, now production head of a new, evidently serious company; yes, and she, first impression of her wonderfully free, radiantly happy laughter (“I can be so happy when I'm happy!” she once said about herself rapturously)—

the luncheon with the prince's father in the Loitpurg Wing; behind the thronelike seat of the old prince a gigantic canvas darkened like smoked meerschaum: a knight in armor lying in a landscape full of mountains, castles, cities, hamlets, a landscape filled with huntable creatures; growing from his genitals like a weathered oak the family tree of the princely house, the coat of arms clustered like cherries, hanging in the branches, row for row, generation for generation, heavenward … the old prince speaking only with him, the new guest, the heir apparent quite openly amused at the movie weasel's deliciously unabashed, occasionally even insolent behavior toward his father, at times it gets critical, he expects the old prince to order the whipper-snapper to leave the table, but an iron upbringing keeps the situation under control even in the most precarious moments, only the old prince for his part becomes quite bluntly suggestive: after speaking in detail of family history, he shifts to the Holy Roman Empire, pointing out the catastrophic influence, which historians have as yet inadequately recognized and which is still to be investigated, that the emancipation of the Jews exerted upon the decay of the Reich: the Austrian Tolerance Edict of 1782 was suicidal, one need go only a bit further to see how the Jews profited from the dissolution of the old Empire, the further recognition of their civil rights step by step—1808, under King Jerome (“Well, typical!”) of Westphalia; 1814, in Prussia; and by 1850 complete equality there (“Krauts, it stands to reason!”); then the foul play of Bismarck's founding of the German Empire under Jewish patronage: “According to the Imperial Law of 1869, all still extant limitations of civil and civic rights are hereby declared null and void ….”

he knows all this, has known it by heart since childhood: if he shuts his eyes, he might think he was at home; even the voices, the diction, the unembarrassed smacking of lips while eating are the same … and he is ashamed when the heir apparent takes up the threat with merrily sparkling eyes and explains the family tree on the wall to him and to the movie weasel, to his personal guests, and begins a simple arithmetical calculation:

“Now every last one of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on,
nicht wahr?
As a child, I once figured out that since our family tree goes back thirty-five generations, that would make quite a number of forebears: a total of thirty-three billion, five hundred thirty-six million, five hundred thirty-eight thousand, one hundred sixty-eight people—the very opposite of this painting, where we all spring from one single man and spread out into an oak tree. If we keep counting back, let's say sixty generations—which would reach all the way back to the birth of Christ, then the number of ancestors would run into the trillions. But until the eighteenth century, the population of Europe totaled hardly more than some hundred fifty million—am I wrong, Papi? Please correct me if I'm not making sense!—So every single one of them must be our ancestor, thousands of times over. And the Jews of Heidelberg were exempted from persecution by the Inquisition because they could prove by their tombstones that they had not been in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, they had already been in Heidelberg at that time, they had come with the Romans—
nicht wahr
, Papi?—so our veins must be carrying at least the blood of all the Jews who were living in Europe back then ….”

he envies this son for his courage, his independence, his freedom toward his father: he himself would never have had the nerve as a young man. He admires the young prince's hardness against himself: the young prince drags one leg, the result of childhood polio; the physician, having little hope of saving him without serious paralysis and atrophy, suggested a transfusion of his own blood, which, because of his constant dealings with polio victims, had presumably developed good antitoxins and would therefore strengthen the child's blood against the pathogens, but the prince's mother strenuously protested: commoner's blood in her son's veins, and a Jewish commoner's to boot—she would not suffer it even with the risk of seeing her child crippled ….

he becomes a friend of the young prince, lives in the Gundlach Wing; in the evenings, they drink very heavily, the movie weasel the most, but holds his drinks badly, reels through the vaults of the arsenal, and flaps his arms in a kind of bat dance, singing, “They see their death in us, the princes and the dukes and counts! The descendants of the knights fear us—We are the worm in their family tree—Ha, I am the angel of death for the master caste, the master race, the death of all masters—I am the Malakhamoves of the self-styled masters ….”

and
she
laughs her beautifully free laugh, throws back her head with its chestnut-red curls—he does not know what she is doing here, what function she has in the film project they are tinkering with—anyhow eighty percent of all film projects are cloud-cuckoo-land—she might be the costume designer—anyway she is very beautiful, no better reason for her presence ….

and the heir apparent, who makes a point of drinking his guests under the table, lets his wicked eyes sparkle and says to him, “Congratulations. You have charmed my father completely” (they are using the familiar form by now, have begun their third bottle of whiskey); “Poor Papi is totally isolated: he's had a falling-out with the family, he can't stand other aristocrats, he can't go about with the philistines, as he calls them; what he lacks are perfect toadies, he must be very grateful to you ….”