1 - After Empire: “Postcolonial” Bukovina in Gregor von Rezzori's Blumen im Schnee (1989)

Summary

ANY CONCEPT OF NATIONAL IDENTITY collapses when confronted with Gregor von Rezzori's multiethnic, multicultural, and multinational background. He was born in 1914 in the Habsburg Empire, lived in Romania until 1937, experienced the Anschluß in Vienna, and lived in Berlin during the war and then in Hamburg. He spent the last part of his life in Italy and New York. He was married three times: first to a German, then to a Jewish woman, and last to an Italian aristocrat; in addition, he had a muchpublicized affair with a French model while in Paris. Despite the fact that his first language was German and that he wrote almost exclusively in German, Rezzori never considered himself a German writer: “Ich schreibe (unter anderem, aber hauptsächlich) auf deutsch, weil das die Sprache ist, die ich liebe und am besten beherrsche. Ich weiß, daß ich mich ihrer bediene wie einer Fremdsprache. Meine Mentalität ist undeutsch. Aus mir wird niemals ein populärer deutscher Autor werden.” He never felt at home in Germany. On the contrary, Rezzori regarded Romania as his first homeland and Italy as his second. After being stateless for forty years, however, Rezzori chose Austrian citizenship for practical purposes.

Rezzori liked to call himself an anachronism engaged in a continuous “Epochenverschleppung.” Born into an empire ready to dissolve and a crown land soon to disappear from the European map, he lived in a bygone world nostalgically remembered by his parents, former Habsburg aristocrats.