Syndicate: Norman Manea - The New Republic 1

[geert@xs4all.nl]

Copyright 1998 The New Republic, Inc.
The New Republic, APRIL 20, 1998

Norman Manea: Romania, the Holocaust, and a rediscovered writer.

In the rough transition to democracy, the countries of Eastern Europe are
going simultaneously forward and backward. The "forward" movement concerns
their contract with the future: their adaptation to the social and
economic requirements of the capitalist world, and the international
accreditation that this will bring them. The "backward" movement is owed
to their fragmented and incomplete evaluation of their history before and
during the era of communism, a history that was manipulated and falsified
by the ideology and the interests of the single Party of the totalitarian
state.  Since 1989, this tension has often made itself felt in the
everyday life of Eastern Europe. In Romania, the question of nato
membership for excommunist countries found almost the entire political
spectrum of the country taking a pro-nato position. Suddenly the promise
of a stable, integrated future within the European Community appeared to
offer a cure for the country's traumatic past, which was seen as resulting
more from the aggressiveness of the neighbor to the East (and from
betrayal by the West) than from any shortcomings in the public life of the
country itself. And then, at the same euphoric moment a book appeared to
complicate matters. A glimpse of a new Romanian future coincided with a
glimpse of its past, with the publication, in 1996, of Jurnal, 1935-1944
(Journal, 1935-1944), by the Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian. 
This chronicle of the dark years of Nazism reignited the great debate
about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Romania. These are subjects that
some would have preferred to ignore. Sebastian's important book--it is
appearing in a number of European countries, and it deserves to be
published in the United States as well--exposes the deformities of a
decade in which "everyone was a little wheel in the huge anti-Semitic
factory of the Romanian State." In the writer's journals of those days,
the banal regularity of his daily life--with its bookreading, its love
affairs, its poverty, its meetings with friends--sets the brutality and
the fear in sharp relief. In Sebastian's world, however, the quotidian is
ready at any moment to kindle to vast reserves of ferocity.  In this
respect, Sebastian's Journal resembles Victor Klemperer's massive journal
of the years 1933 to 1945, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I
Will Testify to the Bitter End), whose publication in Germany in 1995 also
had a powerful impact. The much-delayed publication of these books in
Eastern Europe, where the Nazi period was frozen in the cliches of the
Communist period, gives witness to the everyday lives of "assimilated"
Jews awaiting death from the world to which they thought they belonged.
But Sebastian was an elegant stylist, who moved from theme to theme with
admirable ease, and his book is a greater literary achievement than
Klemperer's. It offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and
social life, a Jew's journal, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's diary.
Above all, it is an account of the "rhinocerization" of certain major
Romanian intellectuals whom Sebastian counted among his friends, including
Mircea Eliade, E.M. Cioran, Constantin Noica, and Camil Petrescu, writers
and thinkers who were mesmerized by the nationalism of the extreme right
and the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's " reactionary revolution." 
Rhinocerization? The odd term derives from Eugene Ionesco's play
Rhinoceros, a farcical allegory of the incubation and the birth of
fanaticism, or "the birth of a totalitarianism that grows, propagates,
conquers, transforms a whole world and, naturally, being totalitarian,
transforms it totally." The playwright described his play as the story of
"an ideological contagion." Ionesco is one of the few admirable characters
to emerge from Sebastian's journal, a friend with whom Sebastian saw eye
to eye in rejecting the totalitarian temptations of the left and the
right. Ionesco has himself given a memorable description of the atmosphere
in Bucharest at that time. " University professors, students,
intellectuals were turning Nazi, Iron Guard, one after another," he wrote.
"From time to time, one of our friends would say: Of course I don't agree
with them at all, but on certain points, for example the Jews, I must
admit....' And this was symptomatic. Three weeks later, the same man would
become a Nazi. He was caught up in the machinery, he accepted everything,
he became a rhinoceros."  In poignant sequences that are not easily
forgotten, Sebastian dwells on the gradations of this "machinery" of
brutalization, and on the historical context in which it developed. Today,
more than half a century after it was written, this journal stands as one
of the most important human and literary documents of the pre-Holocaust
climate in Romania and Eastern Europe, of the conditions in which the
Judeocide could be unleashed.  Mihail Sebastian (this was the pen name of
Joseph Hechter) was born in 1907, to a middle-class Jewish family, in the
Danube port of BrAila, a town that he always loved; and he died in an
accident in the spring of 1945, less than a year after Soviet troops
entered Romania. (He was rushing to give the opening lecture on Balzac at
the newly opened Popular (Free) University in Bucharest, and was run over
by a truck.  Recently, some people have tried to connect the accident to
Sebastian's resignation from the Communist paper Romania LiberA, for which
he wrote briefly in 1944.) During the interwar period, Sebastian was well
known for his lyrical and ironic plays (Star Without a Name, Let's Play
Vacation, and The Last Hour), as well as for urbane psychological novels
tinged with melancholy (Women, The Town with Acacia Trees, The Accident),
and his extraordinary literary essays.  Sebastian's activity as a
journalist centered on the conservative paper Cuvintul, which was edited
by Nae Ionescu (no relation of the playwright), and this often set him at
loggerheads with both the left-wing press and the Jewish press. Nae
Ionescu was a lively minor thinker preoccupied with metaphysics, logic,
and religion. He never wrote an important work. He was, rather, a
charismatic figure--a kind of guru--for young Romanian intellectuals
between 1922 and 1940. He ended up as a supporter of the extremely
right-wing, extremely nationalistic "Christian-orthodox" Iron Guard
movement. Many years later, in 1967, Mircea Eliade bizarrely included Nae
Ionescu in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and wrote this about his
mentor: " God, for Nae Ionescu, is present in history through the
Incarnation ... man's mode of being is completely fulfilled only through
death, death is above all transcendent." A Romanian reader will recognize
in Eliade's words more than a strictly academic evaluation.  Sebastian's
Journal begins in 1935, when Nazi Germany was flexing its muscles, and
anti-Semitism was brimming with energy, and the danger of war was growing
more acute. Indeed, a year earlier Sebastian had provoked a hue and cry
with his novel De douA mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years). Written in the
form of a pseudo-diary, and somewhat in the style of Andre Gide, the novel
portrays the identity crisis of its protagonist, a young Jewish
intellectual in Romania, in a period when the country itself is also
undergoing the crisis of modernity. The first-person, nameless narrator,
an architect by profession, records not only his apprenticeship years of
friendship, love, and culture, but also the shock of his encounter with
Romanian anti-Semitism.  Sebastian's characters include the mesmerizing
professor Ghita Blidaru, a sharp and passionate critic of modern values
(modelled on Nae Ionescu), the nihilist Parlea (modelled on Cioran), the
"Europeanist"  architect Vieru, the Zionist Sami Winkler, the Jewish
Marxist S.T. Haim (modelled on Bellu Zilber, a peculiar member of the
then-illegal Romanian Communist Party), the Yiddishist Abraham Sulitzer,
the British businessman Ralph T. Rice. The last lines of the novel express
the protagonist's breakthrough into a feeling of resignation. Is he a
Romanian? Is he a Jew? Who, precisely, is he? As he gazes at the villa
that he designed and built for his "native Romanian" mentor Blidaru, he no
longer seems to care about the search for roots. He experiences a moment
of serene separation. He accepts with equanimity the two-thousand-year-old
heritage of the outsider. The house is what its wanderer-builder always
wished himself to be: "simple, clean, and calm, with an even heart, opened
to all seasons."  Sebastian's novel is set against the background of an
anti-Semitism that had not yet taken the extreme form of the "Final
Solution." But the catastrophe was rooted in what preceded it, as was
suggested by Ionescu's preface to Sebastian's novel. Sebastian had asked
Nae Ionescu to write the preface in 1931, when he started work on the
book. Ionescu had guided Sebastian's early steps in journalism. As a
professor of philosophy of religion and a scholar of the Old Testament, he
had a good knowledge of Judaism. Though Ionescu was politically committed
to the Right, he had a few years earlier rejected "the theory of the
national state" with all its " police-type absurdities."  By the time
Sebastian finished his novel, however, Europe had already lurched
violently to the right. In Romania it was not just an "anti-Semitic" year,
it was, as Sebastian put it, a "hooligan year." And in keeping with the
political weather, Nae Ionescu had become one of the ideologues of the
Iron Guard, also known as the Legion, the right-wing extremist
organization that deployed anti-Semitism as a major political weapon
within a kind of terroristic Orthodox Christian fundamentalism.  In 1934,
still believing in his old friend's loyalty of "conscience,"  Sebastian
gallantly repeated his request for Ionescu's endorsement of his book; and
his former mentor, now a "Legionary Socrates," respected the promise he
had made. He wrote the preface. And the words with which Sebastian
expressed his shock on reading the preface have been conveyed by Eliade in
his memoirs: "Nae gave me the preface. A tragedy, a real death sentence!"
This was no exaggeration.  Nae Ionescu's preface argued that Jewish and
Christian values are essentially irreconcilable. The really virulent
language comes at the end, when the JewishChristian conflict is seen as
soluble only through the disappearance of its cause, the Jews. The Iron
Guard ideologue provided a definition of Romanian identity: "We are
Orthodox Christian because we are Romanian, and Romanian because we are
Orthodox." This was not a new definition; prestigious intellectuals had
already espoused it.  What was especially dramatic, and especially
dangerous, was the historical context in which these inflammatory
pronouncements now appeared.  Especially hard to forget was the part of
Nae Ionescu's preface in which "  Judah," having "refused to recognize
Christ the Messiah," was declared an essential, irreducible enemy, a
"dissolver of Christian values." The indictment was total, unconditional:
"Judah suffers because it gave birth to Christ, beheld him and did not
believe.... Judah suffers because it is Judah.... Iosif Hechter, you are
sick. You are sick to the core because all you can do is suffer.... The
Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter, and you have had no knowledge of him....
Or you have not seen, because pride put scales over your eyes.... Iosif
Hechter, do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?" The
writer of the novel that was being introduced was not referred to as
Sebastian, but as Hechter, as "Judah."  Thus the hooligan year 1934 was
given a hooligan scandal. At the time, it seemed to some commentators that
Sebastian's willingness to allow this incitement to genocide to appear at
the front of his "Jewish" novel was perverse and cowardly. Assailed by
fascists and Marxists, Christians and Jews, liberals and extremists,
Sebastian replied with an essay, "How I Became a Hooligan," which appeared
in 1935, the year in which his Journal begins. He wrote that
anti-Semitism, which "channels toward Jews the hate-filled distractions of
organisms in crisis," was nonetheless "on the periphery of Jewish
suffering." In 1935, he still had a certain condescension toward external
adversity, seeing it as minor or rudimentary in comparison with the ardent
"internal adversity" that besets the Jews.  Despite the dangers closing in
from all sides, Sebastian continued to dwell romantically on the
"spiritual autonomy" that Jewish suffering conferred upon the Jews.
Judaism was a strict and tragic position in the face of existence. " No
people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one
has kept stricter watch on himself or punished himself more severely. The
biblical prophets are the fieriest voices ever to have sounded on earth."
Sebastian locates the "open wound" of Judaism, its "tragic nerve," in the
tension between "a tumultuous sensitivity and a ruthlessly critical
sense," between "intelligence in its coldest forms and passion in its most
untrammelled forms."  Sebastian liked to refer to himself as a "Danube
Jew," and defined his identity as follows: "I am not a supporter, but
always a dissident. I have confidence only in the single individual, but
in him I have a great deal of confidence." He was adamantly opposed to the
idea (it was all around him) that the collective has priority. "The death
of the individual is the death of the critical spirit," and ultimately
"the death of man." Sebastian's enemy is man in uniform: "Is it religion
you want? Here's a membership card. Or a metaphysic? Here's an anthem. Or
a commitment? Here's a leader." He thirsts for dialogue and friendship,
but he clings to his faith in solitude: "We can never pay too high a price
for the right to be alone, without half-memories, without half-loves,
without half-truths."  As for the country that he never ceased to love for
its paradoxes, its contradictions, and its eccentricities, Sebastian was
not inclined to flatter it. "Nothing is serious, nothing is grave, nothing
is true in this culture of smiling lampooners. Above all, nothing is
incompatible.... Compromise is the blossom of violence. We therefore have
a culture of brutality and horse-trading." The formulation profoundly
describes a time when collusion and compromise were preparing a future of
violence. Sebastian recalls the surprise that a Frenchman visiting
Bucharest in 1933 felt at the intellectual "cohabitation"  prevalent in
the country. A notorious Iron Guardist, "caught in the act of intellectual
tenderness" with a notorious Marxist, explained that "we are just
friends--which doesn't involve commitment." Just friends: this, for
Sebastian, is a "summing up of Bucharest psychology," a psychology of
stupefying melanges and metamorphoses. "Incompatibility: a concept
completely lacking at every level of our public life." The formulation
recurs in the Journal: "Incompatibility is something unknown on the
Danube."  This and other statements appeared even more prophetic as the
situation in Romania became more and more extreme. In 1937 the Iron Guard
(supported by Sebastian's friend Eliade) scored a major success at the
polls. Finally there were no illusions. "All is lost," Sebastian noted on
February 21. The anti-Semitic government led by the poet Octavian Goga
introduced into official discourse the evil "energy" of a language attuned
to new imperatives: jidan (kike), jidAnime (a horde of kikes).  The
official review of Jewish citizenship, and the elimination of Jews from
the bar and the press, was followed by further restrictions and
humiliations.  The danger grew. Officially inspired anti-Semitism
gradually became a cheap entertainment within the reach of more and more
people. The Iron Guard " rebellion" in January 1941 unleashed the
predictable horrors in a city terrorized by armed street clashes and
murderers chanting religious hymns. "A large number of Jews have been
killed in BAneasa Forest and thrown there (most of them naked)," Sebastian
noted on January 29. "But it seems that another lot have been executed at
the slaughterhouse, at StrAulesti." A few days later, when he was reading
about anti-Semitic persecutions in the Middle Ages in Simon Dubnow's
History of the Jews, he turned again to what had happened."What stuns you
most about the Bucharest massacre is the absolutely bestial ferocity with
which things were done. . .the Jews slaughtered at StrAulesti were hung up
on abattoir hooks, in the place of split-open cattle. Stuck to each corpse
was a piece of paper with the words: kosher meat'.... I cannot find more
terrible events in Dubnow."  The worst fears were coming true. Even before
the horrors, Sebastian had recorded premonitions. "An uneasy
evening--without my realizing why. I feel obscure threats: as if the door
isn't shut properly, as if the window shutters are transparent, as if the
walls themselves are becoming translucent.Everywhere, at any moment, it is
possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside--dangers I
know to have always been there.... You feel like shouting for help--but
from whom?"  This was written, as if in a state of siege, on January 14,
1941.  Many of Sebastian's friends were now in the enemy camp. The failure
of the Iron Guard revolt infuriated and embittered them. "The Legion wipes
its ass with this country," said Cioran immediately after the Iron Guard
was defeated.Eliade expressed the same reaction more professorially: 
"Romania doesn't deserve a legionary movement." In 1941, General Ion
Antonescu, a former ally of the Legion who was obsessed with "law and
order," established a military dictatorship with the support of the
Fuhrer. This did not put a stop to anti-Semitic murders. The summer of
1941 brought not only Romania's entry into the war, but also a fresh round
of atrocities. Massacres took place at Ia,si; and long before the Nazi gas
chambers were established--also in Ia,si--the sinister experiment of a
"death train" killed hundreds and thousands of Jews by asphyxiation in
sealed wagons on a journey heading nowhere.  "A simple account of what is
reported about the Jews killed in Ia,si or transported by train ... is
beyond any words, feelings or attitudes. A bleak, pitch-black, crazy
nightmare." Thus Sebastian in his diary on July 12, 1941. A few months
earlier, in April 1941, the military dictator Antonescu told his
ministers: "I'll retreat into my fortress and let the crowd massacre the
Jews.After the massacre, I'll make order." And in September 1941, after
the Ia,si massacre, and after Romania entered the war on Germany's side,
Antonescu explained that the fight was not against the Slavs, it was
against the Jews. " It's a mortal combat. Either we win and the world will
be purified, or they win and we become their slaves."  In the autumn of
1941, the Jewish population of Bukovina began to be deported to
Transnistria. On October 20, Sebastian writes: "An anti-Semitic dementia
that nobody can stop. Nowhere are there any restraints, any reason... . I
see pallor and fear on Jewish faces. Their smile, their atavistic optimism
freeze up. Their old consoling irony dwindles away." The Journal goes on
to record the census of residents with "Jewish blood," the "carnage in
Bukovina and Bessarabia," the obligation of Jews to give clothing to the
state and of the Jewish community to pay a huge sum of money to the
authorities, the ban on Jews selling goods in markets, the confiscation of
skis and bicycles from Jews. "There is something diabolical in
anti-Semitism," we read in the entry on November 12, 1941. "When we are
not drowning in blood, we are wading through muck." For a rationalist such
as Sebastian to use the word "diabolical" is a measure of the bestiality
provoked by the "  vulgar" anti-Semitism of his time.  As Sebastian's
journal proceeds between the blood and the filth, the "  atavistic
optimism" and the "consoling irony" grow dim. And the "internal adversity"
of the Jews, with its selfcriticism and its "spiritual autonomy"?The
Journal itself illustrates the awful truth that those are the natural
assumptions, the necessary assumptions, of the human condition, and in no
way the self-consuming aberration of a particular people. Even when
external hostility is everywhere, and internal adversity appears to be a
forbidden or trifling luxury, critical introspection survives, and it
becomes the instrument of the spirit's survival.  As the individual
becomes just an anonymous member of a threatened community, the solitude
by which Sebastian defined himself changes, even if its substance does not
alter. "We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone": for
a besieged man, surely, this sounds like a frivolous understatement. For
what is the "price" of the solitude of a whole community, a whole people?
It defies any normal parameter of suffering. For this reason, the tone of
the Journal is really remarkable. The intimate exchange between solitude
and solidarity slowly gives way to a mournful compassion. The "old"
private solitude allows itself to be welcomed by the new isolation of the
persecuted group, in a wounded, coerced joining.  Under the pressure of
hatred and horror, Sebastian's writing maintains the "  grace" of its
intelligence, which evil does not succeed in destroying.  Marked now by
the star of the captive minority to which he has been returned, the writer
attempts to enliven the emptiness of waiting. He listens to music; he
reads; he writes; he sees friends. A large and moving part of the Journal
focuses on friendship, especially on his friendship with Mircea Eliade,
the " first and last friend."  After the "death sentence" handed down to
him by Nae Ionescu, the "hooligan" Hechter-Sebastian no longer claimed
anything but the right to perfect solitude, "without half-memories,
without half-loves, without half-truths." In the sharply worse conditions
of the following years, however, he proved to be still in the painful grip
of Eliade, persisting in a friendship of halves of memory, love, and
truth. The crisis of Sebastian's friendship with Eliade grew steadily
worse. As early as 1936, it was no longer possible for Sebastian to ignore
Eliade's political affiliations. "I would like to remove any political
references from our discussion. But is that possible?" The answer is not
long in coming: "The street reaches up to us whether we like it or not,
and in the most trivial reflection I can feel the ever wider gulf between
us.... There are awkward silences between us ... the disappointments keep
piling up--one of them being his involvement with the anti-Semitic
Vremea." (Vremea was a rather liberal weekly until the mid-1930s, when it
started to "evolve" according to the spirit of the time.)