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

Violently anti-Semitic Romanian fascism, calling itself “Christian” and “moral,” took advantage of a fragile parliamentary democracy and sought its electoral base among the peasants, who were neglected and frustrated at a time when Romania was embarking on industrialization and modernization. The movement was responding to the same appeals that Hitler’s National Socialism made: to find an identity and to construct a mythology. Today we would call the fascism that developed in Romania — which ritualized a death cult and Christian sacrifice, violently excluded all “foreigners,” idealized the rural life, rejected democracy, individuality, and modern Western civilization — a Christian Orthodox fundamentalism with a terrorist structure.

Many of these ideas could be found in the traditions of conservative Romanian thought. And important Romanian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had expressed a similar vision in journalism and philosophy. From the national poet Mihai Eminescu through B. P. Hasdeu, Nicolae Iorga and Octavian Goga, Eliade and his friend, the thinker and writer Constantin Noica, the fact that leading names in Romanian culture could be claimed as standard bearers for right-wing extremist movements is a deep and unfortunate measure of Romanian public opinion and Romanian political choices. The political writings of these figures did not directly incite their readers to murder (though their intolerant and hate-filled language reaches unbearable levels of violence in some of their nationalistic texts), but they certainly pushed in the darkest directions.

“Mac Ricketts has come for three days … Two evenings we dined together. He keeps asking me questions. There are periods still only partially understood: for example, the accusation and allusions to my ‘Nazism’ (anti-Semitism) in the years 1938 and 1939. I try to explain for him certain articles, conversations, and events of those years.” This is an entry for March 1984. Ricketts, a former student of Eliade’s at the University of Chicago, has devoted to his mentor two massive volumes of thorough documentation. He does not always grasp the implications of the byzantine political atmosphere of the time and the place, or all the historical ramifications of nationalism in its Eastern Orthodox variant, but he has provided a large quantity of carefully researched material, and has tried to draw fair and balanced conclusions.

Ricketts is careful to list precisely the occasions on which Eliade dissociated himself from certain violent actions based on narrow concepts or fanatical strategies, but in the end he accepts the truth of the documents he has so passionately studied. “Many of the ideals for the Legion were identical to those Eliade had long been advocating.” “Returning to one of his favorite themes, the mission of Romania, he finds it embodied in the Legion’s Program.” “In his new found enthusiasm for the Legion, which for years he had classed as just another right-wing political extremist group, Eliade lost his sense of perspective and overlooked the flaws in its doctrines and practices.” “Eliade wrote about the ‘new aristocracy’ being constituted by the Legion.” “The longest pro-Legionary article bearing Eliade’s name is one that he has denied writing … Actually the pseudonymous piece probably contains nothing Eliade would not have agreed to at that time; it appears, in fact, to have been based very closely on articles he had written in recent years. There can be no doubt that, at this time, he did hope and believe in the triumph of the Legionary Movement.” Finally, Ricketts summarizes Eliade’s view this way:

Democracy has been unable to inspire in the people a spirit of fervent nationalism — to make of them a strong, virile, optimistic nation, imbued with a sense of mission and destiny. Being a foreign import, democracy is concerned with matters that are not specifically Romanian concerns: with “abstractions” such as individual rights, rights of minorities, and freedom of political consciousness — and these, Eliade says, do not strike at the heart of “Romania’s problem.”

Ricketts also provides the English reader with significant quotations from Eliade’s journalism. Some examples:

To me, then, it is entirely immaterial what will happen to Romania after the liquidation of democracy. If, by leaving democracy behind, Romania becomes a strong State, armed, conscious of its power and destiny — history will take account of this deed.

The Legion member is a new man, who has discovered his own will, his own destiny. Discipline and obedience have given him a new dignity, and unlimited confidence in himself, the Chief, and the greater destiny of the nation.

There are a great many revolutionary impulses that have been waiting for thousands of years to be put into practice. That is why the Son of Man descended: to teach us permanent revolution.

There are still other pieces, not included by Ricketts, that Eliade published in the Romanian press of the time that could have been cited, such as this comment, which appeared in the newspaper Vremea on December 18, 1936, in an article called “Democracy and the Romanian Problem”:

In the name of this Romania that began many thousands of years ago and will not end until the apocalypse, social reforms will be enacted with considerable brutality, every corner of the provinces now overrun with foreigners will be recolonized, all traitors will be punished, the myth of our State will extend all across the country, and the news of our strength will stretch beyond its borders.

Or this one, from an article called “Eulogy for Transilvania,” which appeared in Vremea on November 29, 1936:

From those who have suffered so much and been humbled for centuries by the Hungarians — after the Bulgarians the most imbecilic people ever to have existed — from these political leaders of heroic martyred Transylvania, we have expected a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous, ruthless and vengeful.

Even more citations from Eliade’s writings of the 1930s can be adduced, about the “terrifying murders” of which the weak, corrupt, powerless, and still youthful Romanian democracy was guilty; about “the advance of the Slavic element from the Danubian and Bessarabian regions,” or the fact that “Jews have overrun the villages of Maramures and Bucovina, and have achieved an absolute majority in all the cities of Bessarabia.”

In sum, there are countless such pronouncements, some even more ridiculous and even more disgusting. Today these phrases sound absurd, infantile and aggressive, but we must not forget that such “irrationality” was made legitimate in its time by a summary and deviant “logic” that furnished instant “solutions” to longunresolved social conflicts. It is no coincidence that, in the confused and oppressive period before the war in Europe, when even long-established democracies were tottering, this kind of extremist impulse turned up in one form or another even among many intellectuals. Rebellious spirits, and those with a reactionary social vision, were especially vulnerable to this kind of messianic and simplistic solution. The unhappy spectacle of the fragile democracy in Romania, paralyzed by internal contradiction and by the complicated situation abroad, added to the dilemmas of a long and troubled national history, in which identity crises and easy identifications with a utopian and totalitarian ideal have together worked much harm.

Mircea Eliade was a writer and a scholar. That is why his “case” deserves our special attention. It is certainly true that the work of the writer and scholar exists in a separate domain from that of the militant reactionary journalist of the interwar period. Again, “Nazism is no more in Kant, in Fichte, in Hölderlin, or in Nietzsche (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.” Eliade’s literary work is extensive and uneven. His scholarly work is written for specialists. To draw a connection between his scholarship and his “fascist” period, to cast an inquisitorial eye on “suspect” details in his many learned studies, would be to provide a perfect example of totalitarian methodology.