Land Registers of Austrian Literature since 1945

GREGOR VON REZZORI, born in 1914 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary, died in 1998 in Reggello, Italy. Journalist, author, and film actor. From 1919 to 1940, he was a Romanian citizen, then stateless, and from 1984, an Austrian citizen. He attended high schools in Transylvania, Styria, and Vienna, studied in Leoben and Vienna, and then worked as a draftsman and decorator in Bucharest, moving to Berlin in 1938, and later to Silesia. His first novel publication: "Flame that Consumes Itself," 1940; after 1945 in Hamburg, he worked in radio, reporting among other things on the Nuremberg Trials. "Maghrebinische Geschichten" (Maghreb Stories) aired in the night program of NWDR, published as a book in 1953 with international success. He was a social journalist and author, including works such as "Männerfibel" (Men's Manual); "Adel" (Nobility); "Schickeria" (High Society), most recently for ORF and "Kurier." Several supplementary volumes to "Maghrebinische Geschichten." Other literary works include: "Oedipus Victorious at Stalingrad," 1954; "The Death of My Brother Abel," 1976; "Memoirs of an Antisemite," 1979/2004, foreword by Péter Nádas; "A Short Journey on a Long Path," 1986; "Old Men's Murmurs," 1994/2005, foreword by Péter Esterházy; "On My Trail," 1997.

About the book: "What is – cannot be desecrated?" the eunuchs cry out in shock in Gregor von Rezzori's Maghrebinische Geschichten. Their exclamation is emblematic of the pendulum swing between comedy, profundity, and cultural provocation that characterizes the loosely woven episodes. With his incomparable blend of memory and fiction, Rezzori satirically undermines hardened societal and moral concepts and shapes a multifaceted tableau from historical upheavals. His language art, interwoven with irony and melancholy, asserts a distinctly idiosyncratic position in German-language literature, particularly in Austrian literature of the 20th century – Rezzori became de facto an Austrian citizen in 1984 after decades of statelessness. (J. Wilm)