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Chapters (21)
  1. Cover
  2. Biographical Notes
  3. Other Books by Gregor von Rezzori
  4. Title Page
  5. INTRODUCTION
  6. THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL
  7. Dedication
  8. Chapter 1
  9. Chapter 2
  10. A
  11. Chapter 3
  12. Chapter 4
  13. B
  14. Chapter 5
  15. CAIN
  16. EDITOR’S FOREWORD
  17. INTENDED AS A PREFACE
  18. Folder C
  19. THE ICE AGE, 1947
  20. SCHWAB
  21. GISELA

Even his bad conscience is ambivalent. On the one hand, he welcomes his relationship with Gisela as a liberation from the erotic obligation that binds him to the standoffish Christa, leaving him unhappy; on the other hand, he is sorry to see what he’s destroying. He’s also stung by the fact that he has to pay Gisela for every copulation. He tells himself he’s encroaching on Christa, taking it from her already meager housekeeping account, so to speak. But then again, the idea of taking some sort of revenge is a satisfying feeling. His relationship with Gisela punishes Christa for the coldness with which she responded to his passionate courtship. With pure schadenfreude, he now sees that Christa has gotten wind of his infidelity; the fact that it’s with a girl from Whores’ Alley on the Reeperbahn is beyond anything she could imagine, not to mention that his relationship to that kind of rival could have become so intimate that he goes clothes shopping with her. All that flatters his sense of irony, but smacks unpleasantly of bourgeois complications: he cannot help calling it—with Stella and John—“the fucking problems of the bloody middle class.” In his heart of hearts he tells himself that the Hamburg milieu is beginning to rub off on him. From a nonbourgeois perspective, his marriage to Christa is a banal misunderstanding on which any emotion is wasted, while his deep-frozen but intellectually fiery relationship with Gisela is a pleasurable adventure. (Two different aesthetics. Muddied when morality puts in a word).

Perhaps superfluous. Hard to connect it with more important questions. Interesting, of course, from a psychological point of view. Gives A’s figure more profile. But—you need to know things like that, but you don’t need to say them.

•  •  •

“The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.”

—SPINOZA

NOVEMBER 1949

Cultural event: Debut of the film star Astrid von Bürger (gloriously denazified but still deeply controversial) in A Woman Plays Foul, her first postwar role (screenplay by Nagel). Producer: Horst-Jürgen Stoffel, her spouse (production company: STELLA FILMS). Location: the Anglo-German Club on the Alster (following the screening in the Holsten Theater).