Ants Whom Events Are About to Crush : Is it possible to write a novel about people you despise? : OEDIPUS AT STALINGRAD, <i> By Gregor von Rezzori (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $25; 289 pp.)</i>

In “Oedipus at Stalingrad,” the superb octogenarian novelist Gregor von Rezzori--surely the last active writer born in the Austro-Hungarian empire--takes a shot at a hoary literary problem: Is it possible to write a successful novel about people you despise?

Originally published in German in 1954, “Oedipus” is the story of Traugott von Jassilkowski, a phony East Prussian baron on the make in Berlin in the late ‘30s. This dandy writes a men’s fashion column, a fitting task for what Rezzori dubs “the century of the closet.” The Baron likes dancing, chasing women and hunting game too, but most of all it’s a fortune he’s after.

Though the Anschluss with Austria is imminent and war with Poland around the corner, Baron Traugott’s Berlin still has more of the feel of Weimar than wartime, “the days floating like loose balloons in a summer sky.” The Fuhrer’s anti-communism and anti- Semitism get high marks all around, but on the whole he barely penetrates the lives of these aristocrats intent on their bridge games and hunts. Soon Baron Traugott meets an elegant if unimaginative daughter of the industrial classes with “Merovingian locks,” a “Marlene Dietrich mouth though fuller,” and a long amorous history. No name is offered; she is simply “the thoroughbred.”

Swayed by the “lofty goals of eugenics” and the lure of hard cash, the Baron weds her. “It’s child’s play to succeed in a blossoming society . . . but in times of expectation . . . go and try to graft yourself onto the priceless patinated embellishments of a closed caste,” Rezzori explains with false sympathy for the Baron. In fact what “Oedipus” demonstrates is the reverse: In a time of pervasive criminality, small scoundrels do well too.

Soon the Baron signs up with a socially prestigious regiment, a regiment that will fight nobly in France and literally disintegrate amid the carnage of Stalingrad. The thoroughbred will have a baby. But this is all in the future. First the Baron must discover his beloved’s moneybags are empty; she must find his claim of aristocracy exaggerated. Rezzori charts the movements of these ants whom events are about to crush without sympathy or warmth.

Consider the date of this novel though: Stalingrad was more than a decade past, the Nuremberg trials nearly as distant. Rezzori himself came from a Carpathian province that had changed hands four times in 40 years, mostly thanks to German militarism. But Rezzori’s target is not militarism. When “Oedipus” was published, Germans were in a state of massive confusion about their own good luck. What had they done to justify the economic miracle that had sprung up like some perverse payoff for their past sins? “Oedipus at Stalingrad” was Rezzori’s attempt to fend off rising complacency, to prevent Germans from taking their sudden prosperity as their due. And post-war Germany devoured this poison-pen novel, an odd act of masochism.

Since that time, though, 40 more years have passed. Rezzori would grow as a writer, developing a prose style at once ironic, clever and sexy, which would find fullest expression in the celebrated 1981 novel “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.” Alongside such work “Oedipus at Stalingrad” seems thin. It is more biting, cynical satire than fully realized novel and as such suffers from satire’s modest shelf life.

It was after all the German reader of 1954 not Baron Traugott and “the thoroughbred” Rezzori cared about, as he makes clear in “Oedipus’s” final pages. “1938--you’re not by any chance wrinkling your nose at my mention of the date?” The narrator teases his reader: “Behold! Here you sit . . . pondering the meaning of my story. I told you all along: it has no meaning at all. . . . You are used to having one, is that it? Everything has its purpose, right?--and after all you’ve spent your valuable postwar reconstruction time (measured in Deutschemarks) listening to this, you’d hate to think it was wasted. You’d like a little moral to take home with you.”

No moral is forthcoming. Instead, in the hope that he can prevent the past from becoming prologue yet again, Rezzori concludes by presenting future generations, scions of a nation so fatally fond of pomp, with a plaque dedicated to Professor Sigmund Freud. Had Traugott and his kind been a little more self-aware, we might have had peace in our time.