Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

The infamous human experiment known as Nazism — with its hysterical propaganda, its arrogant brutality, its devastating warfare, its extermination camps — cannot be removed from the context in which it arose. In a period of economic, political, moral, and intellectual crisis, it offered a simplistic, violent, “radical” solution. Nazism did not at first mean the crematorium; it developed slowly, slyly, cruelly, to its sinister culmination. (At the opposite pole, or so it seemed, was communism, which derived its totalitarianism from the humanism of an egalitarian and rationalist utopia.) Still, there were those who saw from the start the horror of the totalitarian project, and they must not be forgotten as we strive to comprehend the collective or individual guilt, happy or otherwise, of all those who were “fellow travelers” with the missionaries of horror. There were some men and women who had real clarity of vision. We might cite, for example, one pre-Holocaust opinion, not a philosopher’s or a writer’s, but a journalist’s: the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was expelled from Germany by Hitler for her anti-Nazi writing, considered Nazism

a repudiation of the whole past of Western man. It is … a complete break with Reason, with Humanism, and with the Christian ethics that are at the basis of liberalism and democracy. … In its joyful destruction of all previous standards: in its wild affirmation of the “Drive of the Will”: in its Oriental acceptance of death as the fecundator of life and of the will to death as the true heroism, it is darkly nihilistic. Placing will above reason; the idea over reality; appealing, unremittingly, to totem and taboo: elevating tribal fetishes, subjugating and destroying the common sense that grows out of human experience: of an oceanic boundlessness. Nazism — that has my consistent conviction — is the enemy of whatever is sunny, reasonable, pragmatic, common-sense, freedom-loving, life-affirming, form-seeking, and conscious of tradition.

If we knew how Eliade would have responded to such a view during the years of his connections with the Romanian fascist movement — with its specific references to the Christian ethic, to the oriental vision of a heroic death, to the “Drive of the Will,” and to the tribal rituals of blind subjection to the Leader, all of which were so important to the Legionary movement — it would help to explain why so many of the eminent Romanian intellectuals of his generation chose this sinister affiliation. It would also help to explain how a stubborn conservative intellectual is transformed into a right-wing fanatic, in the way that a humanistic, “progressive” intellectual is transformed into a simplistic and militant communist. Does the fault lie simply with the confusion of a society in crisis, a society that could not consolidate its democracy or offer a coherent “faith” to those who were exposed to the temptation of these radicalisms?

Eliade always avoided a clear analysis of his militancy. About these potentially unpleasant matters, he preferred ambiguity and evasion. Even about less controversial matters, about scholarly questions on his view of the history of religions, he sidestepped direct confrontation or open, concrete debate. “From the articles which Ioan Culianu has dedicated to me, I understand, that in recent years the ‘methodological’ criticism brought against my conceptions of the history of religions have increased” (September 15, 1985). Eliade gives the impression that it was only by this indirect means that he learned of the objections to his method. “I’ve never replied to such criticism,” he says, “although I ought to have done so.” He promises himself that he will do so to explain “the confusions and errors,” but he knows that he will not, for “I’m afraid I’ll never have time.”

When he is called a Nazi or an anti-Semite, when he meets the stony weight of accusations that simplify the story of his life, Eliade’s tendency to withdraw is even more marked. To be sure, there is dignity in silence, and there is delicacy, not just cunning, in evasion: but in silence and in evasion there is also much that is reprehensible. To retract one’s former beliefs, to denounce the horrors, to disclose the mechanisms of mystification, to assume the burden of guilt — probably few are sufficiently clear-eyed and courageous for this. But it is precisely those few who do have the courage for such a confrontation with the past who justify the stature of the intellectual.

In order to be truly separated from the errors of the past, one must acknowledge them. Is not honesty, in the end, the mortal enemy of totalitarianism? And is not conscience the proof of one’s distance from the forces of corruption, from totalitarian ideology? In his Memoirs, Andrei Sakharov confessed without embarrassment his youthful admiration for Stalin. The honesty of that admission was precisely the honesty that enabled that great scientist and humanist to achieve a profound understanding of the nature of the communist system, and to become its unyielding critic.

When questions do not come from within, they come from without; but in the end they come. It is a matter of constant surprise, perhaps, that Eliade’s “enemies,” and not his admirers, posed the questions. Would it not have been more natural that his admirers should have been his most exacting judges? (On July 23, 1979: “C. Poghirc comes to see me …. He talks also about the campaign against me in Italy, provoked by F. Jesi. The aim: to eliminate me from among the favorites for the Nobel Prize.”) And why is it, we must also ask, that those who have borne honest witness to the totalitarian tragedy have emerged largely from the victims, and only rarely from the victimizers? After all, the latter are the ones who could definitively establish the essentials of the evil.

The recent collapse of the totalitarian communist system probably will not bring about a fundamental change in this sad pattern. People would always prefer to discuss innocent suffering rather than their own responsibility for it.

IV

“Between a tradition of thought and the ideology that inscribes itself, always abusively, within it, there is an abyss,” write Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their interesting book The Nazi Myth. Even if we may question such a categorical claim, their argument should be heeded:

Nazism is no more in Kant, in Fichte, in Hölderlin, or in Nietsche (all of whom were thinkers solicited by Nazism) — it is, at the extreme, no more even in the musician Wagner — than the Gulag is in Hegel or in Marx. Or the Terror, with all simplicity, in Rousseau. In the same way, and whatever its mediocrity (by whose measure its ignominy must however be weighed), Pétainism is not a sufficient reason to invalidate, for example, Maurice Barrés and Paul Claudel. Only to be condemned is the thought that puts itself deliberately (or confusedly, emotionally) at the service of an ideology behind which it hides, or from whose strength it profits: Heidegger during the first ten months of Nazism, Céline under the Occupation, and a good many others, at that time or since (and elsewhere).

“A good many others … and elsewhere” indeed. Romanian fascism may have been different from Hitler’s or Mussolini’s, but it retained the same principal characteristic: “an amalgam between rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas,” as Wilhelm Reich said.

The extremes of nationalism and religious militancy that gave rise to the Iron Guard (and to its earlier and later variations) could already be observed in the confusion following the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, when Greater Romania was created. The inclusion of the new provinces (Transylvania, Bucovina, Bessarabia) suddenly added to the country not only Romanians who formed the majority in those provinces, but also significant minority populations (Hungarians, Jews, Germans, and others). Thus it was not frustration over defeat, as for the Germans, or discouraged inertia, as for the Italians, that turned an old Romanian nationalism into a violent and fanatical extremism. Romanian extremism was the result of territorial success.