The twilight of a Habsburg idyll: Portraits of privilege in Gregor von Rezzori’s The Snows of Yesteryear

Abstract

Born in imperial Czernowitz, the noted German-language author and man of letters Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1918) was acclaimed for his fictionalised depictions of post-Habsburg Romanian Bukovina in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. As the second child and only son of parents who were part of the former Ger-man-speaking Habsburg social and economic elite, von Rezzori’s 1989 autobiograph-ical memoir The Snows of Yesteryear (originally published in German as Blumen im Schnee) chronicles his childhood recollections as a member of this once-privileged group. After providing the requisite historical and sociocultural context, this article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore portrayals of privilege in the book. This is done through selecting, presenting, and examining various events, observa-tions, and personalities which are contained within the work as a whole. Subsequent-ly, these are interpreted from the perspective of elite sociology, employing the notion of elite resource areas and institutions outlined by the American scholar Shamus Khan as an analytical framework of reference. In doing so, this study offers literary and historical perspectives on the upper echelons of a vanished world, providing insights into the last vestiges of the once-privileged Habsburg elite in the new and evolving post-Habsburg reality of the interwar Kingdom of Romania.