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

Yet Eliade’s literary works began to be reprinted in Bucharest, and gradually some of his scholarly works appeared as well. Despite its author’s political past, and despite its title, The History of Religious Ideas was distributed in “atheistic” Communist Romania “through institutions” to a list of the “privileged” selected by Party officials. Eliade began to meet not only with Romanian writers, but also with Romanian “officials,” even with representatives of the Romanian government. Though Eliade’s political past was not to be discussed in Romania, his work was so respected and his personality so fascinating that his name gradually made its way into many publications and into the work of many intellectuals. It was taken up, too, by the noisy nationalism that had for some years appeared in several journals ( S pt mîna, Luceaf rul, Flac ra ), which, protected and even encouraged by repressive officialdom, practiced a genuine cultural and “patriotic” terrorism.

In 1982, a black year for Romanians under Ceau sescu’s leftist-rightist dictatorship, I saw Eliade’s play Iphigenia performed at the National Theater in Bucharest. The play had first been performed in 1941, another black year, and was published again in Romanian in 1951 by an expatriate right-wing press in Argentina. As in 1941, no doubt, the tension outside the theater, and the mood of the audience, its fear, disgust, exhaustion, and despair, combined with the play in a most unfortunate way, so that it seemed a kind of dark exaltation of “sublime” death for a glorious “cause.”

“There is a real campaign beginning in the West to unmask Mircea Eliade’s ties to the extreme right during the period between the Wars,” wrote the Romanian dissident Dan Petrescu in the final years before Ceau sescu’s fall, in an essay smuggled to the West. “This may at least lead, as it did for Heidegger, to increased popularity for his work.” Petrescu went on to exclaim, “If only the collaboration of Romanian intellectuals with the present regime — which is anything but leftist — can be discussed one day. Then we’ll see a show!” Indeed, Ceau sescu’s regime was anything but leftist, and the same was true of the members (about four million of them!) of the Communist Party, which had no decisive tradition in Romania. But that show is now running, and it has become grotesque. Everyone proclaims his own innocence, his own suffering. And some of the loudest of those are the former “intellectual” servants of the dictatorship.

Romania’s current problems with democratization must bring to mind the country’s complicated history: the old identity crises and the addiction to extreme solutions are working together again to prolong the post-totalitarian impasse. Still, some encouraging effects of the transition to democracy can be seen. The free press isn’t entirely nationalistic and provincial. It contains many voices that warn against the new dangers of political manipulation and against the old dangers of narrow-minded nostalgia and isolationism of the extreme right-wing ideology. Some esteemed intellectuals have created the Group for Social Dialogue, a critical forum that scrutinizes and debates the dismantling of the social-political institutions of the totalitarian state, and which follows and encourages the still timid phases of structuring a civil society. Although the old Nomenclature and the old-new secret police are smartly and efficiently using their network for enriching their comrades and building a shady alternative to democracy, the future cannot be, is not, the past.

Like other countries in the region, Romania will soon look to NATO and the European Community for help with her evolution, and the public discourse will certainly be influenced by this. Yet the way will be neither short nor easy. The country has to examine its history before starting a new future. There have been too many unhappy choices in the past and their consequences for the last half of a century, if not longer, cannot be ignored. The transition toward an open society will probably be marked by corruption and opportunism, greed, demagogy and manipulation, traditions that it will be difficult to override in this new, unstable and weak phase of democracy. But the darkness of dictatorship will surely still be vividly remembered, at least for a while, and that will help to energize hope. As Havel said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The potential for Romania’s renewal is there, it has to be stimulated and guided to its fulfillment.

The time may be coming when the fascist period, as well as the communist period, can be analyzed clearly. If today there can be open and lengthy discussion of great writers such as Mihail Sadoveanu, George C linescu, Tudor Arghezi, and Camil Petrescu, and of their compromises with the communist regime, would it not also be appropriate to analyze the voluntary involvement in the fascist movement, the “happy guilt” with all its consequences, of writers and intellectuals like Mircea Eliade? Instead, during the past year, the sacralization of the thinking of Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, with their lasting guilt, has proceeded apace in Romania’s largecirculation right-wing press (though a critical approach to that generation may be found in the new democratic press, as in the recent and important essays by Alexandru George, especially one called “White Bolshevism”).

All this is more important now that communism is no longer a real danger in Romania. In a sense, indeed, it never was: Ceau sescu’s Stalinism gradually became a camouflaged nationalist dictatorship. But the forces of totalitarianism in Romania still appear strong. The bankrupt collapse of the totalitarian “left” has much to teach the “right,” even if the nationalistic right seems not yet ready to learn the lesson. The Romanian Parliament’s recent rehabilitation of Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime dictator and ally of Hitler, is a scandalous and unprecedented event in postwar Europe and a dark warning about the political future of the country.

And yet Romania means more than just Ceau sescu or Codreanu or Antonescu, more than the green-shirted terrorists of the Legion or the miners of the Securitate.* There still lives in Romania, or so we must hope, a legacy of democratic thought. It was stifled for many decades by right-wing and left-wing dictators, but it retains a deep relationship with European culture. The new generation thirsts for freedom and prosperity. There is hope for Romania, but it can be nourished only by a clear commitment to democracy and an unambiguous transition to a civil society.

*In 1990 some ten thousand miners, manipulated by the old apparatchiks as political provocation, invaded Bucharest and terrorized the inhabitants.

Translated by Alexandra Bley-Vroman, 1991

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