In mid-1930 he moved to
Bucharest, took up military service in the
Romanian Army, and made a living as an artist. In 1938 he moved to
Berlin, Germany, where he became active as a novelist, journalist, writer in radio broadcasting, and film production. Given his Romanian citizenship, von Rezzori was not drafted into the
Wehrmacht during
World War II. Until the mid-1950s, he worked as a writer at the broadcasting company
Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. He regularly published novels and stories, as well as working in film production as a screenplay author and actor (starring alongside actors such as
Brigitte Bardot,
Jeanne Moreau,
Anna Karina,
Marcello Mastroianni, and
Charles Aznavour). Beginning in the early 1960s, Rezzori lived between
Rome and
Paris, with sojourns in the United States, eventually settling in
Tuscany after his marriage in 1967. Other books, such as
The Death of My Brother Abel,
Oedipus at Stalingrad, or
The Snows of Yesteryear, recording the fading world at the time of the World Wars, have been celebrated for their powerful descriptive prose, nuance and style. Rezzori first came to the attention of English-speaking readers with the 1969 publication of the story
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite in
The New Yorker. The novel-length version of
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was published in Germany in 1979, with the English translation followed in 1981. It received enthusiastic reviews from
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and
Stanley Kaufmann when originally published. It was reissued by
New York Review Books in 2007, and
Christopher Hitchens wrote in a retrospective review, "Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock". Reissues of
The Snows of Yesteryear and
An Ermine in Czernopol followed in 2008 and 2012, respectively. In 2019 NYRB published
The Death of My Brother Abel and its sequel
Cain as a single volume. Elie Wiesel wrote of
The Death of My Brother Abel, "If a great novel can be recognized by its obsessions, its characters and, above all, its tone, then
The Death of My Brother Abel is unquestionably great. Rezzori addresses the major problems of our time, and his voice echoes with the disturbing and wonderful magic of the true storyteller." Rezzori's controversial description of
Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita as "the only convincing love story of our century" appeared on the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the novel. It was attributed simply to
Vanity Fair, the magazine which published Rezzori's original review of the book, and Rezzori was not often credited as the author of the quote. In his
Guide for Idiots through German Society, Von Rezzori also used his noted taste for satire. Although he was not unanimously perceived as a major author in the German-speaking area, his posthumous reception has arguably confirmed him among the most important modern German-language authors. ==Personal life==