by Ruthie Blum, THE JERUSALEM POST , 26 April 2007
During the 15-minute drive between west Jerusalem and Al-Quds University in Beit Hanina, the landscape changes so dramatically that the distance between the two points feels as great as the cultural chasm that separates them.
It is a divide that philosophy professor and president Sari Nusseibeh has been acclaimed, mainly by Jewish peaceniks, for trying to bridge. Indeed, the 58-year-old Damascus-born son of wealthy and politically influential Muslims from pre-state Palestine is well-known among Israelis for his having joined forces with former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head and current Labor Party leadership candidate Ami Ayalon to establish "The People's Voice" - a civil initiative aiming to advance Palestinian-Israeli coexistence.
From today's vantage point, with civil war raging - and anarchy reigning - in Gaza, this goal might sound as far-fetched as the flock of sheep grazing on the grass of the Al-Quds campus, oblivious to the students passing by on the way to their classes.
And Nusseibeh's faith in finding a solution which "is totally acceptable and beneficial to us both" might seem like a pipe dream, at best. Particularly when one considers that the Oxford- and Harvard-educated intellectual-turned-activist was a close adviser to Yasser Arafat and served as the PLO's chief representative in Jerusalem in 2001-2.
Still, he insists in articulate, Arabic-lilted English, "What Arafat did - sign the Oslo Accords - was historic... The fact that he was able ideologically to bring everybody behind him to be prepared to make peace with Israel was very, very important."
Is this a case a of wishful thinking on the part of a self-described lover of myths and fairy tales, or the result of the hope and faith instilled in him by his father, who used to tell him that "rubble often makes the best building material"?
Nusseibeh addresses these and other related questions in his recently released autobiography, Once upon a Country: a Palestinian Life (written with Anthony David; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux publishers; New York).
In an hour-long interview to discuss the book and the ideas that shaped it, Nusseibeh is as congenial as his attire is casual. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, he looks more like an American graduate student than an Arab educator who presides over a 5,000-plus student body. The only giveaway to his roots is the string of worry beads he removes from the pocket of his jeans and fondles throughout our conversation. Whether this is a function of ill ease at being forced to spell out subtle positions in too short a time, or due to his having quit smoking, is not clear. Perhaps it is some combination of the two.
Or maybe my inability to assess his actions is a minor example of precisely what Nusseibeh sees as the source of the Palestinian-Israel conflict: mistaken interpretations.
The impression one gets from your book is that you view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a kind of Greek tragedy - in which there are two "protagonists" who have deeply ensconced difficulty developing empathy for one another, which is at the root of their mutual inability to share this land peacefully. Is this, indeed, your interpretation of the situation?
Almost. One of the things that makes a tragedy a tragedy is the hero's being an average person. If a hero appears to be too off one way or the other, chances are that the audience will not be able to identify with him.
The Israelis - the Jewish people - are not ordinary. And the Palestinians, as a result of the conflict, developed into a special kind of people.
On the whole, both peoples - not their leaders, because one can never be sure of what leaders are up to - do not see eye-to-eye, because they misinterpret each other's intentions. Much of the conflict is based on misunderstandings and on fantasies about each other and about each other's history. This is another aspect of a tragedy - that conflicts build up as a result of mistaken interpretation.
The violence that broke out after [former prime minister Ariel] Sharon's 2000 visit to the Temple Mount is a good example of a tragedy. He came to visit - he wanted to create a controversy, but he didn't want to create what came afterward - and there was a reaction. The Palestinians said, "What is he up to? Let's go and defend ourselves."
But at first they didn't go, in spite of all the calls on [Palestinian Authority] television and radio for them to rally there, most of them did not. So, there you have - what? - 30-40 Arab Muslims and Sharon and the police.
Now, imagine you're sitting in Yemen or Morocco or Malaysia and following the news. Suddenly you say, "My God, it's true; the Israelis defile Islam."
Meanwhile, here, there are the ordinary people who feel guilty because not many of them [went to the Temple Mount to protest]. They didn't come on Wednesday or Thursday, so they prepare to come on Friday, when they go to pray anyway. So, of course, the Israeli police get worried, because they're also working on the same kind of wavelength.
You could actually sense the electrified atmosphere in the city that day. And when the atmosphere is electrified, the tiniest thing sparks things off.
Two arguments can be made in response to your version of events: The first is that Sharon received permission from [former PA Preventive Security Service chief] Jibril Rajoub to go up to the Temple Mount that day. The second is that, according to Palestinian Media Watch research, the Palestinian leadership had been planning a second "intifada" for nearly a year prior to Sharon's visit.
Whether or not you agree with these arguments, one point you seem to overlook when you describe the conflict as one of mutual "misunderstanding": After Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, it was not only Palestinians who berated him for it.
The Israeli elite, the media - and even much of the public - accused Sharon of having provoked the violence that ensued. How often do the Palestinians criticize their own leaders?
I disagree with the first part. As for the second, here you're talking about something different. I was basically taking the position that regardless of what people's intentions are at the level of leadership, if one looks at the ordinary people, on the whole, I would suggest that events unfold not as the result of conspiracy, but of a series of misunderstandings - which is what a tragedy is.
But now, you're telling me, "Look, we Israelis are different from you Palestinians."
It's true. You are. Nobody disagrees. One of the characteristics of the Jewish or the Israeli population is that they are capable of making judgments that are a little bit self-critical. They don't necessarily fall into the trap of building up a certain stereotype of the other side. They're prepared to stand back and judge. The fact that they have a major Peace Now movement - the fact that they can be critical of their government - illustrates this. The Palestinians, on the other hand, don't seem to be able to this.
Why?
One of the reasons may be that you Israelis are far more evolved, in terms of your internal political system, economic productivity and experience. You have concerts, and you have artists, and you have gays coming out to demonstrate for gay rights.
We don't have that.
Is there something in the difference you describe that stems from religion? Talmudic discourse is based on a form of argumentation - of challenging rabbis, and even God. Is Islam more inherently submissive to Allah and to religious leaders than Judaism?
I'm not a scholar of Judaism or of Islam, but it depends on what sort of mind-set you start out with. If you already have a submissive mind-set, you will take what comes from your religion to reinforce it. But if you have developed the ability to be self-critical and free in your mind, you will also address yours and other religions in the same way.
It also has to do with various political factors, among them the fact that the Palestinians are under occupation. I am not saying this is the reason why we don't seem to be as self-critical or as democratic as Israelis. But it definitely plays a role. The fact that we feel worried and concerned. The fear. The suspicion. When one feels he is under fire, part of his fear spills into being suspicious of what other people are saying.
You say that Israelis "have concerts and artists and gays coming out to demonstrate for gay rights." Are these not the fruits of democratic state-building?
And of time.
The Zionists began the endeavor of institution-building even before the State of Israel was established in 1948. Would the Arabs in Palestine have been building similar institutions had the Jewish state not been established?Are you asking whether we, by ourselves, would have developed the notion of Palestinian identity - and therefore pursued the aim of establishing a state in which we could express this national identity in the same way that the Jews did?
We, as a people, were not born with an identity.
Most peoples - the Jews are an exception, so let's put them aside for a moment - develop their national identities and then begin to look upon themselves as nations needing to be embodied in the form of a state. We Palestinians are no different. And one of the things that helped us forge our sense of identity as a nation was the fact that the Jews - the people we confronted in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - were a community or a group wishing to have a state with their own identity.
You know, I have a great-great-great-great-great grandfather who is buried in a mausoleum in [the Jerusalem neighborhood of] Mamilla. If you had asked him, "Are you a Palestinian?" he would probably have answered, "What do you mean, a Palestinian? No, I belong to the Muslim nation."
But you see, what I believe you Israelis might actually be doing in asking that question is drawing the conclusion - the wrong one, in my opinion - that because we were not born one or five or six thousand years ago with an identity, we do not have an identity, or even rights.
On the contrary. Let's assume it makes no difference what gives the Palestinians a sense of national identity or how recently they acquired that sense. Let's say it's totally legitimate. Then let's imagine that we remove the proclaimed obstacle - namely "occupation" - to independent Palestinian statehood. The question is: Would the Palestinians be building highways and concert halls and art galleries?
As a state, you mean? Presumably, yes. But suppose, for instance, that we did have our own state, and suppose this state had been created when Israel was created...
If the Arabs had agreed to partition, you mean?
Yes. And suppose we and Israel had nothing to do with one another. We probably would have developed just the way that the rest of the Arab world developed. We probably would have been just as backward as the rest of the Arab states. We would have produced a state with all of the problems that Arab states have.
But, everything seems to have a positive as well as a negative side. Our interaction with Israel has had a major negative impact on us, without question. But what Palestinians don't realize is that it has also had a positive impact. Although we came to suffer as a result of this interaction with Israelis and the Jewish people, we learned a lot. We learned a lot from you; we learned a lot about you; and we learned a lot through you about the rest of the world. And that's very important, and a major source of power, as far as we are concerned.
In other words, seeing Israel not in the sense that is normally depicted - namely, as a dagger in the heart of the Arab world - but as a bridge to the rest of the world is something the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab peoples are in need of. We need this bridge between ourselves and the rest of the world. This is something one should be aware of as one looks to the future.
Has the Arab world treated the Palestinian people fairly?
There are governments and there are people. The Arab people in general have been extremely supportive and have identified themselves with the Palestinians. The governments have not.
What about private individuals? If you use the Zionist endeavor as an example, you can see there are many Jews abroad giving a great deal of money to help. You don't see that phenomenon in the Arab world, do you?
That's almost a rhetorical question. Everybody knows that, as far as the Arab-Muslim world is concerned, the tradition and culture of individuals like [American-Jewish businessman well-known for buying up properties in east Jerusalem for settler groups] Irwin Moskowitz is not mirrored in the Arab or Muslim tradition. You might have the odd charity here or there, but not this sort of fervor or appreciation of the needs that people have here.
As the president of an Arab institution of higher learning, do you agree with the frequently stated claim that the Palestinians are the most educated population in the Arab world?
I've heard it, but I doubt it - from looking around. It is quite possible that statistically Palestinians have more degrees - that more of them finish high school, and that among them there are more females attending school. But education goes much deeper than that. It has to do with what you learn and how you're taught, not merely whether you go to school. In that respect, I think we're more backward [than other Arabs] in many ways.
So, though I'm not sure about the level of Palestinian education, I am aware of the fact that we boast about ourselves a lot [he laughs]. It's extremely depressing, given all the boasting; given the hopes that we therefore have about being able to build up our own state; and given the fact that we went to the Gulf and helped others build their states, yet when it came to our own, we proved to be total failures.
In the prologue of your book, you say that one of the reasons you wrote this memoir had to do with your father, who was eternally hopeful. You quote him saying that "rubble often makes the best building material."
There's a difference between hope and faith. Hope is something that the Palestinians can't afford to have, because hope is often a reflection of reason - you know, you look at things objectively, list the pros and cons and then reach a kind of rational conclusion.
Faith is different. It is with faith that you can "build out of rubble" - that you can do magic. Transform. Take control of your life and your environment. In that sense, I have faith that, sooner or later, somehow or another - I'm not sure how - Jews and Arabs will find a way to live together that is totally acceptable and beneficial to us both. In doing this, we can also impact the region around us and, further afield, the world around us.
If you and Ami Ayalon, with whom you launched "The People's Voice" peace campaign - or you and [renowned author] Amos Oz, who you say in your book was raised "no more than a 100 feet away" from you, yet with whom you only became familiar decades later at peace rallies - could create an ideal region here, what would it look like?
I don't really know how to answer this. But the most important thing is for each side of [the Palestinian-Israeli conflict] to have total respect for one another's dignity and space. If you start out with that, you can work miracles - whether the political structure ends up being two states or one state or a confederation between states or a conglomeration of city states, or I don't know what. But you have to have...
Acceptance?
Not acceptance in the sense of "OK, we accept you because we have to." That's not accepting, right? You have to accept in the deeper sense of the word.
I've come across many people in my life - whether Israelis, Palestinians, Americans or others - with whom, if you sit with them and begin to have a conversation, you feel there's mutual respect. And then there are people with whom you feel there's no mutual respect. I know from experience that with the latter, you will not be able to establish the kind of political agreement that is required here.
If you go back to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations: We have people on our side who are very clever, and people on the Israeli side who are very clever, but who might, when they sit at the table, not come to an agreement because of the absence of this basic requirement - one which needn't exist when negotiating a business transaction. But you do need it when you're negotiating peace, because what you're creating is made up of human beings. And the human element has to be incorporated into every step taken along the way.
How would you rate [former prime minister] Ehud Barak on this score? Among Israelis, there are two views of his performance at Camp David: one that he genuinely tried to make a deal with [PA chairman Yasser] Arafat, and the other that he was trying to show up Arafat's bluff. What's your view?
I can't give you an answer about this particular controversy, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that Barak really wanted a deal. I wouldn't necessarily assume that it was a ploy. But it's not enough to want to reach an agreement. You also have to have the right psychological attitude toward the other person - in how you deal with, listen and make him sense your respect for him. I don't think Barak was good at that.
And Arafat? Didn't he make it impossible for anybody to trust him?
My own personal feeling about Arafat is that he really did want to make peace with Israel. But he didn't know how to go about doing it.
What he did - sign the Oslo Accords - was historic. Nobody should minimize the importance of that. The fact that he was able ideologically to bring everybody behind him to be prepared to make peace with Israel was very, very important. Unfortunately, neither side dealt with that the way we should have. I've often likened Oslo to a baby given birth by both parties. But then, after giving birth to it, the two sides did not look after it, and allowed it to die. Still, the fact that they gave birth to it is of historical importance.
Is the global war between radical Islam and the West that erupted - or became apparent - after 9/11 a reflection of what is going on between Israel and the Palestinians or a result of it? Do you believe that the Palestinian struggle is the root cause of outside unrest - or is it the other way around?
There are two schools of thought about this. Let's hope that one of the major sources of the overall global problems is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Why should we hope that?
Because it's a very focused conflict and we can solve it. If doing so then solves the global conflict, we'd all be very happy. Whereas, if we assume that we have to solve the global conflict first, we're going to have a long wait [he laughs].
But I'm not sure how things work, to tell you the truth. And I'm not sure that there's an answer that makes sense. But, regardless of what the real answer is, we should focus on our own problems, tend to our own garden.
We have a common garden, and we can grow it together. It's not impossible. We almost did it at Oslo, and we can do it again. If, as a result, there are positive influences on the rest of the world, so much the better. But we don't have to think about that. We Israelis and Palestinians need to think only about our own garden. We live in the same neighborhood, so to speak, and it is our responsibility, duty and in our interest to try to create a neighborhood that's livable for both peoples.
Is your book being published in Arabic and Hebrew, as well?
I hope the publisher will find a local Arab publisher to handle it. I believe they've found someone for the Hebrew edition, because there's a Hebrew publisher which handled my last book [No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Hill & Wand, 1991]. But I wrote that book with [Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies'] Mark Heller, and at the time, the Arab publishers thought it wasn't kosher to have an Israeli writer on the cover. That was in 1990-91. I think, today, they'll be able to find an [Arab] publisher.
You received glowing reviews in the American press. No doubt the Hebrew press will be equally positive. In the event that the book comes out in Arabic, what kind of review could you expect from [the official PA daily] Al-Hayat al-Jedida?
On the whole, people in my own community have been openly critical in the past. That's when they expressed any intellectual enthusiasm. If they wanted to be generous, they were mainly silent. Every now and again, you will find the odd positive article in newspapers like the one you mentioned. But I don't think people will come out on my side, saying, "Wow, how great!" I think mostly they will be silent, but I'm not sure.
So, a book like this is greeted warmly in the West, but the best you can hope for among your own people is silence? What does that tell you about the chances for your message of reconciliation taking hold in your community? And why, then, are you creating a kind of parity between the two peoples?
I started out by saying there's no parity. We are totally different societies, with different values, different concerns and different cultural traditions. But look, in my own society - regardless of what kind of reviews I get - I know that I'm very respected and liked, among my students, for instance, which is much more important. But these are normal people. The reticence lies at the level of the reviewers and the intellectuals.
Are the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs part of the same people?
Well, yes, they are and they aren't. The Israeli Arabs are Palestinians in one sense, but they're very much Israeli in another. They look upon themselves as Israelis; they see themselves as part of Israel, which is peculiar. For instance, if you went to an Israeli Arab - Muslim or Christian - and said, "Look, in a future agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, we are going to be able to include where you're living in a Palestinian state," he'd probably say, "No thank you; go away." [he laughs]
If you were to ask him why, he'd say, "This [Israel] is my country. This is my state. I've grown up here. I like it here. And I look at you over there, and I don't like what I see."
And, you know, I don't blame them. We Palestinians have not succeeded in creating something of which we can be proud, or which can be attractive. So, why should anybody wish to come and live here?
An Israeli Arab - regardless of everything else that he might feel - feels that [in Israel] the law protects him. That he has rights as an individual. Come what may, it's a system; it's a state; it has elections; democracy; protects the women.
We on the Palestinian side haven't been able to create anything like that. Come to think of it, if I were to be asked what I need a state for, I would say that it is primarily to see ways in which the needs and rights of the individual are addressed. I didn't fight for a Palestinian state for anything else. If a Palestinian state doesn't provide me with this, I don't want it. This may be one basic difference between me and the Jews, who might want a state for other reasons. I want a state that will give me respect; that will recognize my dignity, make me feel equal; to develop; to grow; to feel that I'm able to practice and develop my abilities.
Are you saying this is not the reason that Jews created a state?
They had many reasons for creating a state, and one of them was that. But they had other reasons, as well: the problem of anti-Semitism and what it led to in Europe. There are also religious components to the whole exercise.
I, as a Palestinian, don't have all those things I mentioned, which is why I don't call myself a fervent nationalist.
Is it possible that behind the Palestinians' inability to create a state of the kind you describe is an emphasis on victimhood, rather than on personal responsibility for improving their own lives?
I agree that we complain a lot and that we are not exercising control of our lives in a rational way. I think we have reached a point where we can translate the problem we are complaining about into something that's soluble and go ahead and solve it with our own hands.
Do you see any resolution in sight to the civil war that's going on between Fatah and Hamas?
That's hard to say. The question is: What does Hamas stand for? What does Fatah stand for? In other words, they could end up coming to an agreement on the radical aspects of their ideologies.
Is there an option for a third entity arising to replace both of them?
This is like the chicken and the egg. Let's hypothesize that the Israeli government comes to the Palestinians and makes an offer. And let's say the offer is the Ayalon-Nusseibeh agreement [based on Israel's withdrawal to the '67 borders, Jerusalem as a shared capital and no right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel].
But Israel will not sign such an agreement just like that. It needs to know that the Palestinians really want it. In which case, they have to have a representative government or party that will do it.
Now, in that context, I think a Palestinian party could arise which is prepared to represent the people for that particular agreement - and which is prepared to run for elections on that platform. I even think such a party would win the elections.
Do you actually believe that a Palestinian running on a platform of peace with Israel and no right of return would win an election in the PA?
Yes, if there is an Israeli offer. The trouble so far has been that Fatah hasn't been clear, which hasn't been good either for the Palestinians or the Israelis.
And you actually believe that in such an event, terrorism and warfare would be kept at bay?
Absolutely.
So, you don't think the problem, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, is the very existence of the State of Israel?
No.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Hitler's image maker
* Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl By Steven BachKnopf, 400 pages; $30
* Leni Riefenstahl: A Life By Jurgen Trimborn, translated from german by Edna McCown, Faber and Faber, 368 pages; $26
by Meir Ronnen, THE JERUSALEM POST, 12/04/2007
I have always found it monstrous that the two most self-serving sycophants of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, should have escaped justice.
True, Speer spent 20 years in Spandau Prison, from which he smuggled out the diaries that helped make him wealthy; much later he died in bed with a young Nazi groupie in a London hotel, the ultimate last laugh.
Speer eventually admitted that he sold his soul to Hitler because it furthered his ambitions as an architect. In 1942 Hitler appointed him armaments minister, and as the second most powerful man in the Third Reich he prolonged the war and his powerful position in it by encouraging Hitler to believe that he was performing production miracles and the war might yet be won. He was directly responsible for causing the needless loss of millions of lives, apart from the lives of the countless slave laborers he worked to death.
Speer, plausible and gentlemanly, saved his neck by convincing the Nuremberg judges that he was one of their class. Leni Riefenstahl, equally good-looking and plausible, saved her neck by pleading that she admired Hitler the man, without ever looking at what he stood for. Yet she had made the brilliant propaganda films that glorified her F hrer as the transcendent apotheosis of Nazism, beloved of his people. She died at the age of 103, after a postwar career as a maker of documentaries in Africa, still insistent that she had never espoused Nazism.
More than anyone else, it was Speer and Riefenstahl who created the image of Hitler as Germanicus ascendant. Speer stage-managed the settings of the early Nazi mega-rallies, inventing among other things the ring of hundreds of searchlights that formed a dome of light. Riefenstahl recorded these events with innovative cutting techniques and superb coordination of music and cutting, conducting the music herself to fit the tempo of her images. Hitler was delighted with both of them, and their quite separate careers flourished because of their direct access to him and the budgets he always approved.
WITH THE curious serendipity of publishing, two new biographies of Riefenstahl have just been published. Are they justified? Well, for one thing, Riefenstahl's documentary adulations of Hitler and his Reich now serve to show young Germans, among others, just what the road to war and mass murder was like.
Speer and Riefenstahl were early converts. Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and Riefenstahl breathlessly read Mein Kampf after hearing Hitler speak in 1932. She immediately wrote him asking for a meeting.
Hitler, who had admired her looks, acting and the first film she directed, The Blue Light, replied at once and took her for a walk at the seaside. "When we are in power," he said, "you must make my movies." He made a tentative move to take her in his arms and, not getting a reaction, turned aside saying that he was wedded only to Germany's destiny. She told him she did not like his racism. As with so many Riefenstahl stories, the only source for all this is Riefenstahl's corrective and constantly adjusted memoirs. The idea of her challenging Hitler is incredible; all her letters and notes to him are sycophantic in the extreme.
Although she was thrilled by her reading of Mein Kampf, Riefenstahl owed much to early assistance from several of her Jewish lovers. One was Harry Sokal, who was soon to flee Germany and who had taken a risk to help finance The Blue Light. Another Jew, the brilliant Bela Balazs, had reworked the scenario and script, before leaving Germany. The film was rereleased by the Nazis only after his name had been taken off the credits. The first time round, it had been trashed by all the film critics, most of whom were Jews. Things will be different when Hitler takes over, Riefenstahl promised Harry Sokal. Not incidentally, Riefenstahl was a good friend of the ravening anti-Semite Julius Streicher, but later denied it. She used Streicher to avoid paying Balazs his fee.
In her masterly Triumph of the Will, filmed mostly on the zeppelin field at the Nuremberg rally, Riefenstahl created the new face of Germany and its F hrer. Later, following her short militarist film on the newly loyal Wehrmacht (which had replaced the SA after the murder of Ernst Rohm), the athletic Riefenstahl in 1935 secured the commission to make the film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was the pinnacle of her career, thanks to the help of a huge crew headed by two brilliant cameramen who were both former lovers. The budget came from Hitler, securing her against any interference from Goebbels. Riefenstahl managed to seduce the American star, Glenn Morris. In her memoirs, he leaps upon her from the winner's podium, kissing her breasts in midfield.
Riefenstahl created her films in the cutting room. She had 250 hours of raw Olympic material out of which, over nearly two years, she put together a film that was praised around the world (and protested by anti-Nazis, as she refused to edit Hitler out of what she insisted were his games). She appeared with Olympia in 19 foreign capitals, all at Nazi expense, and had been anyway handsomely paid as producer-director. Hitler had made her rich. In 1938 Riefenstahl took Olympia to the United States, but her arrival was followed by the terrible pogroms of Kristallnacht. Hollywood's studios (with the exception of Nazi admirer Walt Disney) would not receive her and distributors would not screen Olympia.
When Hitler invaded Poland, Riefenstahl took a small and specially uniformed film unit to the front, where she was a horrified eyewitness to a massacre of Jews in Konskie at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Her version of the events is picked to pieces in both these books. She then happily joined the victorious Hitler in Danzig. During the war she spent years and Nazi millions working on a new feature film, Tiefland, playing the lead role as a gypsy girl and using gypsies and their children plucked from concentration camps as extras. She later withdrew her claim that she had encountered them all after the war, but the fact was that all but two lost their lives in Nazi camps.
As the Reich crumbled around her, Riefenstahl still insisted on completing the film. It was a failure and she herself realized that she was miscast as the young gypsy heroine. AS THE Reich began to collapse, so did Leni's world. The day Stauffenberg's bomb exploded in Hitler's conference room, her father died and her beloved younger brother Heinz was blown to unburiable bits on the Russian front. Her sole comfort was her marriage to a dashing Wehrmacht ski instructor, Major Peter Jacob. She had slept with innumerable young men but had avoided falling in love ever since she had been jilted by her ace cameraman, Heinz Schneeberger. But Jacob, though he loved her, was a serial cheat and broke her heart.
Riefenstahl broke down when she heard of Hitler's death; she could not believe he was a suicide. Speer had risked his life to fly into Berlin to take leave of his mentor. But with Hitler dead he wrote, "The scales fell from my eyes." Henceforth Speer would claim that he was guilty only of placing his trust in a mass murderer. Riefenstahl however, never repudiated her F hrer, not then and not later. He remained for her the greatest man of his time, if not of all time.
Then she was on the run and tried to follow her first great love Schneeberger and his half-Jewish wife Gisela into the mountains. But she was the last person they wanted to be caught with. She was stunned when Gisela called her a Nazi slut and threw her out.
Riefenstahl was captured in the French zone. Somehow she survived a series of arrests and interrogations by French officers and was eventually classed a "follower," the least invidious form of Nazi and allowed to go free. She fled to the American zone with the ever-helpful Jacob, no longer her husband but termed her handyman. The Americans were friendlier to her than the Germans. In newly anti-Nazi Germany and Austria, she was now a pariah. The Germans knew her better than anyone else.
The remains of her beautiful Berlin villa, built with the reichmarks she had received directly from Hitler, had been confiscated. She retrieved and sold it, using the money to finish and launch her only remaining asset, Tiefland, but by 1954 the film was just a mawkish, old-fashioned stylization - and a flop. The critics were scathing, just as the mostly Jewish ones had been of The Blue Light. Miscast as the young gypsy, Riefenstahl herself was dismayed by her appearance and never acted again.
After turning 71, Reifenstahl found some late life joy and recognition as a maker of documentaries in East Africa and the Sudan and beneath the surface of the Red Sea. Not all the critics liked them; one called the plotless underwater poem Triumph of the Gill. Riefenstahl admired the handsome Nuba tribe of the Upper Nile and distributed prints of herself joyously hugging very black infants. Africa was a long way from German ostracism, and I suspect that the black infants were also a way of showing that she really wasn't a racist.
In the last decades of her life, she found comfort in the tireless support of a young German Man Friday. Injured when her helicopter was shot down over Sudan, she died shortly afterward aged 103. Both of these generally similar books are relentlessly critical of Reifenstahl and her constant rewriting of her history, while refuting one self-serving lie after another.
Jurgen Trimborn is a German professor of film history. His book is the more concise and has received an excellent translation by Edna McCown. Steven Bach, who has written biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart and was once world production chief for United Artists, teaches at Harvard and Bennington. His book is replete with vivid details and further enlivened by many damning photographs.
* Leni Riefenstahl: A Life By Jurgen Trimborn, translated from german by Edna McCown, Faber and Faber, 368 pages; $26
by Meir Ronnen, THE JERUSALEM POST, 12/04/2007
I have always found it monstrous that the two most self-serving sycophants of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, should have escaped justice.
True, Speer spent 20 years in Spandau Prison, from which he smuggled out the diaries that helped make him wealthy; much later he died in bed with a young Nazi groupie in a London hotel, the ultimate last laugh.
Speer eventually admitted that he sold his soul to Hitler because it furthered his ambitions as an architect. In 1942 Hitler appointed him armaments minister, and as the second most powerful man in the Third Reich he prolonged the war and his powerful position in it by encouraging Hitler to believe that he was performing production miracles and the war might yet be won. He was directly responsible for causing the needless loss of millions of lives, apart from the lives of the countless slave laborers he worked to death.
Speer, plausible and gentlemanly, saved his neck by convincing the Nuremberg judges that he was one of their class. Leni Riefenstahl, equally good-looking and plausible, saved her neck by pleading that she admired Hitler the man, without ever looking at what he stood for. Yet she had made the brilliant propaganda films that glorified her F hrer as the transcendent apotheosis of Nazism, beloved of his people. She died at the age of 103, after a postwar career as a maker of documentaries in Africa, still insistent that she had never espoused Nazism.
More than anyone else, it was Speer and Riefenstahl who created the image of Hitler as Germanicus ascendant. Speer stage-managed the settings of the early Nazi mega-rallies, inventing among other things the ring of hundreds of searchlights that formed a dome of light. Riefenstahl recorded these events with innovative cutting techniques and superb coordination of music and cutting, conducting the music herself to fit the tempo of her images. Hitler was delighted with both of them, and their quite separate careers flourished because of their direct access to him and the budgets he always approved.
WITH THE curious serendipity of publishing, two new biographies of Riefenstahl have just been published. Are they justified? Well, for one thing, Riefenstahl's documentary adulations of Hitler and his Reich now serve to show young Germans, among others, just what the road to war and mass murder was like.
Speer and Riefenstahl were early converts. Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and Riefenstahl breathlessly read Mein Kampf after hearing Hitler speak in 1932. She immediately wrote him asking for a meeting.
Hitler, who had admired her looks, acting and the first film she directed, The Blue Light, replied at once and took her for a walk at the seaside. "When we are in power," he said, "you must make my movies." He made a tentative move to take her in his arms and, not getting a reaction, turned aside saying that he was wedded only to Germany's destiny. She told him she did not like his racism. As with so many Riefenstahl stories, the only source for all this is Riefenstahl's corrective and constantly adjusted memoirs. The idea of her challenging Hitler is incredible; all her letters and notes to him are sycophantic in the extreme.
Although she was thrilled by her reading of Mein Kampf, Riefenstahl owed much to early assistance from several of her Jewish lovers. One was Harry Sokal, who was soon to flee Germany and who had taken a risk to help finance The Blue Light. Another Jew, the brilliant Bela Balazs, had reworked the scenario and script, before leaving Germany. The film was rereleased by the Nazis only after his name had been taken off the credits. The first time round, it had been trashed by all the film critics, most of whom were Jews. Things will be different when Hitler takes over, Riefenstahl promised Harry Sokal. Not incidentally, Riefenstahl was a good friend of the ravening anti-Semite Julius Streicher, but later denied it. She used Streicher to avoid paying Balazs his fee.
In her masterly Triumph of the Will, filmed mostly on the zeppelin field at the Nuremberg rally, Riefenstahl created the new face of Germany and its F hrer. Later, following her short militarist film on the newly loyal Wehrmacht (which had replaced the SA after the murder of Ernst Rohm), the athletic Riefenstahl in 1935 secured the commission to make the film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was the pinnacle of her career, thanks to the help of a huge crew headed by two brilliant cameramen who were both former lovers. The budget came from Hitler, securing her against any interference from Goebbels. Riefenstahl managed to seduce the American star, Glenn Morris. In her memoirs, he leaps upon her from the winner's podium, kissing her breasts in midfield.
Riefenstahl created her films in the cutting room. She had 250 hours of raw Olympic material out of which, over nearly two years, she put together a film that was praised around the world (and protested by anti-Nazis, as she refused to edit Hitler out of what she insisted were his games). She appeared with Olympia in 19 foreign capitals, all at Nazi expense, and had been anyway handsomely paid as producer-director. Hitler had made her rich. In 1938 Riefenstahl took Olympia to the United States, but her arrival was followed by the terrible pogroms of Kristallnacht. Hollywood's studios (with the exception of Nazi admirer Walt Disney) would not receive her and distributors would not screen Olympia.
When Hitler invaded Poland, Riefenstahl took a small and specially uniformed film unit to the front, where she was a horrified eyewitness to a massacre of Jews in Konskie at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Her version of the events is picked to pieces in both these books. She then happily joined the victorious Hitler in Danzig. During the war she spent years and Nazi millions working on a new feature film, Tiefland, playing the lead role as a gypsy girl and using gypsies and their children plucked from concentration camps as extras. She later withdrew her claim that she had encountered them all after the war, but the fact was that all but two lost their lives in Nazi camps.
As the Reich crumbled around her, Riefenstahl still insisted on completing the film. It was a failure and she herself realized that she was miscast as the young gypsy heroine. AS THE Reich began to collapse, so did Leni's world. The day Stauffenberg's bomb exploded in Hitler's conference room, her father died and her beloved younger brother Heinz was blown to unburiable bits on the Russian front. Her sole comfort was her marriage to a dashing Wehrmacht ski instructor, Major Peter Jacob. She had slept with innumerable young men but had avoided falling in love ever since she had been jilted by her ace cameraman, Heinz Schneeberger. But Jacob, though he loved her, was a serial cheat and broke her heart.
Riefenstahl broke down when she heard of Hitler's death; she could not believe he was a suicide. Speer had risked his life to fly into Berlin to take leave of his mentor. But with Hitler dead he wrote, "The scales fell from my eyes." Henceforth Speer would claim that he was guilty only of placing his trust in a mass murderer. Riefenstahl however, never repudiated her F hrer, not then and not later. He remained for her the greatest man of his time, if not of all time.
Then she was on the run and tried to follow her first great love Schneeberger and his half-Jewish wife Gisela into the mountains. But she was the last person they wanted to be caught with. She was stunned when Gisela called her a Nazi slut and threw her out.
Riefenstahl was captured in the French zone. Somehow she survived a series of arrests and interrogations by French officers and was eventually classed a "follower," the least invidious form of Nazi and allowed to go free. She fled to the American zone with the ever-helpful Jacob, no longer her husband but termed her handyman. The Americans were friendlier to her than the Germans. In newly anti-Nazi Germany and Austria, she was now a pariah. The Germans knew her better than anyone else.
The remains of her beautiful Berlin villa, built with the reichmarks she had received directly from Hitler, had been confiscated. She retrieved and sold it, using the money to finish and launch her only remaining asset, Tiefland, but by 1954 the film was just a mawkish, old-fashioned stylization - and a flop. The critics were scathing, just as the mostly Jewish ones had been of The Blue Light. Miscast as the young gypsy, Riefenstahl herself was dismayed by her appearance and never acted again.
After turning 71, Reifenstahl found some late life joy and recognition as a maker of documentaries in East Africa and the Sudan and beneath the surface of the Red Sea. Not all the critics liked them; one called the plotless underwater poem Triumph of the Gill. Riefenstahl admired the handsome Nuba tribe of the Upper Nile and distributed prints of herself joyously hugging very black infants. Africa was a long way from German ostracism, and I suspect that the black infants were also a way of showing that she really wasn't a racist.
In the last decades of her life, she found comfort in the tireless support of a young German Man Friday. Injured when her helicopter was shot down over Sudan, she died shortly afterward aged 103. Both of these generally similar books are relentlessly critical of Reifenstahl and her constant rewriting of her history, while refuting one self-serving lie after another.
Jurgen Trimborn is a German professor of film history. His book is the more concise and has received an excellent translation by Edna McCown. Steven Bach, who has written biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart and was once world production chief for United Artists, teaches at Harvard and Bennington. His book is replete with vivid details and further enlivened by many damning photographs.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Thinkers and Liars by Joseph Frank
An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
By Marta Petreu
Translated by Bogdan Aldea
(Ivan R. Dee, 332 pp., $30)
I.
In the aftermath of World War II, there was a great influx of refugees into the United States. Most came from countries where populations had been uprooted by the course of battle, or were escaping from a past that they were lucky to have survived. Some, however, were trying to put behind them a different kind of past--one in which they had collaborated with, or expressed sympathy for, the Axis powers that had been defeated. A notable case of this kind was that of Paul de Man, the distinguished professor of comparative literature at Yale University; another eminent instance was Mircea Eliade, the much-admired historian of religion who was chairman of the department of religion at the University of Chicago from 1957 until his death in 1986. Eliade had been a strong supporter of the Iron Guard movement, the Romanian equivalent of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis, but he attempted throughout his later career to conceal and deny his affiliation with its ideas and his service in the pro-Axis Romanian government of Marshal Ion Antonescu during the war.
Although Eliade's history has attracted little attention in the United States, he appears, under a fictitious name, in Saul Bellow's novel Ravelstein. It is well known that the character Ravelstein is a fictional portrait of the late Allan Bloom, a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago and the author of the best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind. Another professor at the university is a Romanian-born historian of religion, Radu Grielescu, with an even greater international reputation than that of Ravelstein, and obviously based on Eliade. The narrator of the novel, who may be roughly identified with the author, is married to a Romanian woman. (One of Bellow's wives was in fact a Romanian mathematician--in the novel she is an astronomer--and his earlier novel The Dean's December is set in Bucharest.) The couple are flatteringly cultivated by the highly civilized Grielescu, and a minor motif of the book is the futile protest of Ravelstein against what he correctly divines as the efforts of Grielescu to ingratiate himself with the narrator.
Both Ravelstein and the narrator are Jewish, and the former has gotten wind that Grielescu, during the 1930s and 1940s, had been a fervent intellectual spokesman for the ferociously anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement. Indeed, he had "denounced the Jewish syphilis that had infected the high civilization of the Balkans." During the war he had served the pro-fascist Romanian government in its embassies in England and Portugal; and he lived in fear that his previous Iron Guard affiliations and sympathies would become known. "Grielescu is using you," Ravelstein tells the narrator. "In his own country he was a fascist, and he needs you to cover this up here." The narrator admits that he had never posed a direct question about his past to Grielescu, but refuses to believe that he could ever have been a genuine Jew-hater.
This episode in Bellow's novel is cited in a recent French study, which has not yet appeared in English, titled Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme, written by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, a historian of Eastern European history and culture. This revelatory book is an extremely erudite exploration of the careers of the three writers named in the title, based largely but far from exclusively on an analysis of the little-known (and, until fairly recently, mostly inaccessible) journalistic and periodical literature in Romanian of the 1930s and 1940s. All these men were natives of that relatively obscure and distant land, and all performed the astonishing feat of becoming world-famous figures.
Eliade's books on the history of religion elevated him to a commanding height in the field, and he attained fame as a novelist both in his own country and in France. E.M. Cioran was widely hailed for his brilliantly disillusioned reflections on history and culture, written first in Romanian and then in French, and he was praised as one of the greatest contemporary stylists in his adopted language. Eugène Ionesco pioneered the vogue of the theater of the absurd, and his comic but also symbolically tragic plays were performed everywhere; eventually he was elected to the Académie Française. All three had a past that they wished to hide (though Ionesco's concealments did not arise from any sympathy with the fascist tendency that the two others fervently championed). The aim of Laignel-Lavastine's book is to investigate the truth about this past so far as it can be ascertained from the surviving documents and the testimony of contemporaries. It has now been supplemented by the appearance in English of a work exclusively devoted to Cioran, An Infamous Past, by the Romanian scholar and poet Marta Petreu, which was originally published in 1999.
Laignel-Lavastine begins with a sweeping depiction of the political and cultural atmosphere of the late 1920s in Romania, the period during which the three men she deals with came to maturity. The ideological climate of the time was defined in a series of articles by the twenty-year-old Eliade called "A Spiritual Itinerary"--a work that quickly became the lodestar of the new generation and promoted the young Eliade to the position of its leader. Sweeping aside all the ideas of the past that had been destroyed in the carnage of World War I, Eliade wrote: "The myth of indefinite progress, the faith in the aptitude and power of science and technology to establish widespread peace and social justice, the primacy of rationalism and the prestige of agnosticism, all this has been shattered to pieces in every area in which it has been contested." This criticism of rationalism, materialism, and loss of religious faith was accompanied by praise of the "life-force," and of the most extreme irrational experiences, as providing the source of a new realm of values.
All three men attended the University of Bucharest, the center of Romania's cultural life, where they became acquainted and competed for attention in the animated discussions that took place in the cafés of the Calei Victorei, the main artery of the city. Every conversation there was a personal challenge, and in a volume of critical articles titled Non, Ionesco ironically depicts the various strategies employed to make an impression. A neophyte might imitate Cioran and speak "in response to everything or with complete irrelevance," or "in a trembling voice, in which the emotion and acute interior tension were expressed as the phrases interrupted each other, cite a passage from Unamuno or Berdyaev." Matters were not so intellectually effervescent, however, for others in the university, especially those of Jewish origin.
Of primary importance in this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian culture, which has deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard made life for Jewish students at the university a continual torment. They were assigned special seats, continually insulted verbally, and assaulted physically. Often it was necessary for police to be called in to protect them as they left the lecture halls. There is a moving passage in a novel from 1934 by Mihail Sebastian, also a playwright and for a time a member of Eliade's inner circle, in which the obviously autobiographical main character, who has been slapped in the face, remonstrates with himself: "Tell yourself that you are the son of a nation of martyrs ... dash your head against the walls, but if you wish to be able to look yourself in the face, if you don't wish to die of shame, do not weep."
The reigning academic figure at the university, or at least the figure who exercised the most influence on the writers we are concerned with, was a philosopher named Nae Ionescu. He possessed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich, and he was a charismatic orator capable of producing an almost hypnotic influence in his lectures to packed auditoriums. Depicted by Laignel-Lavastine as more or less an intellectual charlatan whose brilliant performances were cribbed and plagiarized from German philosophical sources, Ionescu nonetheless succeeded in obtaining an indelible grip on the finest minds of the younger generation. His lectures, according to Cioran, were only half prepared, so that "we were present face to face with the working out of his thought. He communicated this effort to us, the tension working in a reciprocal manner.... Such professors are rare."
What did students absorb from the teachings of this spellbinding professor? He traced the crisis of modern man, which culminated for him in the emergence of the ideology of democracy, to the fusion of the philosophical subjectivism of Descartes with the mathematical method and scientific uniformization imposed by the Renaissance. To this individualist perspective he opposed that of the submission of the individual to the national collectivity--not the legal nation, but the organic one, the community of blood and spirit, which was, according to him, the only living and creative reality. Up to 1933, such proto-fascist ideas, which formed the common coin of a good deal of the German philosophy of the time, were not given any political application by Ionescu, who had been in favor of the restoration of King Carol II in 1930. But in 1933 he went to Germany and was much impressed by Hitler's rise to power. On his return he protested, along with Eliade, the ban issued against the Iron Guard, one of whose members had recently assassinated the liberal prime minister. It was in 1933 that the philosopher also made personal contact for the first time with C.Z. Codreanu, the founder and leader of the Iron Guard, and apparently a powerfully impressive personality.
The Iron Guard was as vicious and brutal as other fascist formations--perhaps even more than some when it came to murderous violence against the Jews--but it differed from the others by containing, along with a strong nationalistic component, a religious one as well. It combined, according to Laignel-Lavastine, "the Führerprinzip [the cult of the Leader] with the Christian prototype of the apostle and the Balkan model of the haidouks, those who meted out justice on the highways, a type of Robin Hood of the Carpathians." Each member of the Iron Guard was supposed to submit himself to a discipline that would transform his character, and--at least in theory--the movement was closer to some sort of religious sect than to a customary political formation. This made it much simpler in later years for Eliade, in his extremely untrustworthy memoirs, to sanitize his close association with the Iron Guard by describing it as "having the structure and vocation of a mystical sect rather than of a political movement." In fact, the organization offered candidates for all the elections and participated in all the political campaigns. Still, as late as 1980, Eliade stressed the religious component of its ideology, which glorified terrorism and assassination as examples of personal self-sacrifice. The Iron Guard, he wrote, was "the sole Romanian political movement that took seriously Christianity and the church."
II.
After sketching in this background, Laignel-Lavastine moves on to follow the careers of her three protagonists during this period. Cioran was born of a clerical family in what had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as a lycée student was one of the few who took advantage of the well-stocked German library. As his notebooks show, he imbibed the very best of both old and new German philosophy, as well as Russians such as Dostoevsky and Shestov. In 1933, at the age of twenty-two, he began to publish articles in the anti-Semitic weekly Vremea, in which Eliade also regularly appeared. Cioran's contributions were distinguished by an extreme cultural and ethical pessimism derived from Schopenhauer, as well as by an anti-rationalism absorbed from Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler. Petreu stresses the influence of Spengler, to whose thoughts on the decline of the West, she argues, Cioran remained indebted all his life. His writings were also characterized by an anguished concern over the status of Romania on the world scene. By what means could his country succeed in raising itself above the mediocrity in which it seemed to stagnate? How could it "emerge from a thousand years of sub-historical vegetative life," as he wrote in 1936?
Like other students of Nae Ionescu, Cioran had begun to sympathize with the Iron Guard without accepting some of its ideological presuppositions; and he always refused to affiliate completely with a political movement. But a decisive moment in his life was a Humboldt fellowship to Germany in 1933, where he lived until the summer of 1935. He was tremendously impressed by the new dynamism that Hitler had imparted to German life, and compared it sadly to the inertia at home. "To tell the truth," he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving, "there are things here that please me, and I am convinced that a dictatorial regime would succeed in conquering our native morass." He admired Hitler more and more as time went on, and he expresses such admiration in no uncertain terms in the articles that he sent back for his Romanian readers. "There is no contemporary political figure," he wrote, "for whom I feel a greater sympathy and admiration than for Hitler," who had succeeded in infusing "a messianic inspiration to a domain of values that democratic rationalism had rendered banal and trivial." Along with many others, he attended the popular courses of the philosopher Ludwig Klages, an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, whom he compared to Ionescu, and placed on the same level as Heidegger. (Klages wrote a huge three-volume work to demonstrate that reason had always been a dissolving and corrupting force in human life.)
On returning home, Cioran performed his obligatory military service in the army, and then, starting in 1936, taught philosophy for a year in a lycée. During these years he published three books, two on religion and the third--the most scandalously provocative work that ever came from his pen--titled The Transfiguration of Romania. Here he raises the problem of the integration of minorities, and not only defends Romanian xenophobia but also attempts to develop a rigorously systematic and historical anti-Semitic argument to prove that the Jews are inassimilable. "The feeling of animosity toward strangers," he declares, "is so characteristic of Romanian national sentiment that the two are forever indissoluble.... We have lived for a thousand years under their domination [that of strangers], and not to hate them, not to get them out of the way, would be proof of a lack of national instinct."
As for the Jews, Cioran writes that "every time that a people becomes conscious of itself, it fatally enters into conflict with the Jews." One can learn to live with other minorities, such as the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, but this is impossible with the Jews "by reason of the particular structure of their mentality and of their inherent political orientations." Cioran repeats the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give them a logic and consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to essential characteristics of the Jewish mentality. (His book was written after Hitler had passed the Nuremberg laws in Germany.)
Most of Petreu's book is devoted to a very thorough and quite critical analysis of this work, the only purely political tract that Cioran ever produced. His anti-Semitism and xenophobia were commonplace in Romanian thought, but Petreu views his political ideas as quite independent in the context of a period dominated by a conflict between "occidentalism" and "autochthony" (a reliance on native traditions). Cioran rejected both: neither a capitalist transformation along European democratic lines nor a re-affirmation of the national values embodied in rural life met with his approval.
Instead, he was in favor of increased industrialization and expressed considerable admiration for Lenin and the Russian Revolution, though of course abhorring its materialist ideology. Moreover, the transformation of Romania could only be nationalist, and it was here that he coincided with the Iron Guard, proclaiming in 1937 his confidence in the group's "heroism which begins in brutality and ends in sacrifice." He met Codreanu several times, but wrote to Eliade in 1935 that "no political doctrine receives my ultimate approval." Cioran left Romania again in 1937, having applied for a study grant to Spain, the land of Unamuno. But the civil war made that impossible, and so he spent three years in France instead.
III.
Eliade, as already noted, found no difficulty at all in accepting the ideology of the Iron Guard, which he viewed in the light of his own preoccupation with religion and spirituality. The difference between him and Cioran, whose book The Transfiguration of Romania Eliade prepared for the press as a service to his friend, is clearly illustrated in a letter in which Eliade is full of praise for the section on the Jews and other minorities, but objects to Cioran's contemptuous remarks about the Romanian village as containing nothing but "a biological reserve." For Eliade, it was the source of national-religious values that had existed for centuries--and were again being revived by the Iron Guard. In a series of more than fifty articles between 1934 and 1938, he praised "the Captain," as Codreanu was called, for inspiring such a movement and urged young intellectuals to join the cause. "The significance of the revolution advanced by Corneliu Codreanu is so profoundly mystical," he declared, "that its success would designate the victory of the Christian spirit in Europe."
Eliade's adhesion to the cause, however, was by no means instantaneous. It was only in December 1935 that he decided that "the primacy of the spiritual does not imply the refusal of action." In 1936 he began openly to support the Iron Guard; but his aim was "to provide its ideology with a more solid philosophical foundation." One is reminded of Heidegger's attempt to provide Hitlerism with what the philosopher considered a worthier intellectual grounding. Eliade carries on a continual battle against the ideas of the Enlightenment and traces the degeneration of Romania to its attempt to adopt such alien notions: "Being a foreign importation, the democratic regime concerns itself with matters that are not specifically Romanian--abstractions like the rights of man, the rights of minorities, and the liberty of conscience." Far better a dictatorship like that of Mussolini, which is always preferable to a democracy because, if the latter goes to pieces, it will "inevitably slide toward the left" and thus toward communism.
An important event of these years for Eliade was the return of the coffins of two of his friends, both prominent Iron Guardists, killed fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. A huge semiofficial demonstration was organized to honor their remains, and Eliade wrote three articles, one published in the journal of the Iron Guard itself, to consecrate the glory of their sacrifice. As usual, he endows this event with his own pseudo-religious aura. "The voluntary death of Ion Mota and Vasile Marin," he wrote, "has a mystic significance: the sacrifice for Christianity." By this time he had become an active partisan of the Iron Guard; and when the Guard fell out of favor with the government in 1938, leading to the arrest of Codreanu and several hundred of his most prominent followers, Mircea Eliade was among them.
The conditions of their detention in a camp, once an agricultural school, were far from onerous, and courses were organized by Ionescu and Eliade, who also managed to write a novel there, called Marriage in Heaven . His wife's uncle was a general close to King Carol II, and since Eliade suffered from a tubercular condition, he was soon allowed to move to a mountain village and returned home early in December. Later that month Codreanu was killed, presumably while attempting to escape, and the Iron Guard movement was sternly repressed. Eliade had lost his university post, but he confided to Cioran that he "regretted nothing," and he wrote a play, Iphigenia, that exalted the ideas of sacrifice and death for one's country in words literally reproducing those he had used about the two Iron Guardists who had sacrificed themselves for Franco.
Life for Eliade in his native land was becoming difficult, and his correspondence reveals that he was seeking to go elsewhere. He made efforts in the direction of the United States and France with no success, and finally had to settle for a post as cultural attaché in London before Romania entered the war against the Allies. The English were quite well informed about his past, and classified him as "the most Nazified member of the legation," possibly a spy for Germany. When he was transferred to Portugal, there was some discussion as to whether he should be allowed to leave the country, and he was filled with indignation at being stripped and searched before his departure. He spent four years in Lisbon, where the dictatorship of Salazar, which he called "a Christian form of totalitarianism," was much closer to his political tastes than anything he could find elsewhere. While performing his tasks in the embassy, he also wrote a hagiographical but scholarly biography of Salazar, who deigned, much to his delight, to grant him an audience, and then entrusted him with a message to deliver to General Antonescu. Eliade's trip to Bucharest in July 1942 was the last time he was to see his native land.
IV.
The third member of the trio was Eugène Ionesco, and the jacket of Laignel-Lavastine's book contains a photograph taken in 1977 in Paris at the charming and peaceful little Place Furstenberg, just a few steps away from the swarming crowd at St.-Germain-des-Près. The picture captures the three exiles talking together in the friendliest fashion, and has aroused a good deal of criticism, because it would appear that all three were guilty in a similar fashion of the " oubli du fascisme," the forgetfulness about fascism, indicated by the book's title. The text makes clear, however, that Ionesco's politics had always been fiercely hostile to the fascist temptation. Indeed, his famous play Rhinoceros (1959) is based on his horrified fascination with what he saw taking place as the members of his generation each yielded to the fascist spell.
The play depicts a small provincial village where the inhabitants gradually become transformed into rhinoceroses that destroy everything in their path. Ionesco's journal records the process by which, as he wrote, "I saw how my brothers, my friends, gradually became strangers. I felt a new spirit germinating within them; how a new personality was substituted for theirs." These new personalities were those of "the ideologists and semi-intellectuals" who mutated into "rhinoceroses"; a character called "the Logician" in the play, presumably based on Nae Ionescu, precipitates this transformation.
But Ionesco, too, possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, though it was relatively anodyne compared with that of the other two. For one thing, there was the question of his family. Ionesco's father was a Romanian lawyer with a French doctorate, and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to be some question about her origins: she may not have been a French citizen at all, and was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco's autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian, whose friendship, unlike that of all the others, he continued to cultivate, and who comments that "I had long known that his mother was Jewish from hearsay." This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days after an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its slaughter, had taken place in Bucharest.
Ionesco taught French literature at the University of Bucharest, and became well known in the 1930s when his book Non was given a prestigious literary award. In it, he scathingly attacked the eminences of Romanian literature for their "ethno-linguistic nationalism and historicism." Meanwhile, he was keeping a journal that nourished much of his later work, in which we see him rejecting the collectivisms both of fascism and communism. In 1938 he received a grant to study in Paris from the director of the French Cultural Institute who, a few months earlier, had given one to Cioran; but though the two lived in the same section of Paris and had common Romanian friends, they carefully avoided each other's company.
At this time Ionesco was much influenced by Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the journal Esprit, and a liberal Catholic who attempted to steer a middle course between left and right and fathered a doctrine known as "personalism." It was anti-capitalist and highly critical of the weaknesses of liberal democracy, but it also stressed the importance of preserving the rights of the individual personality not as a political entity, but as a moral-spiritual one. Mounier has been sharply criticized for having contributed to the undermining of the respect for democracy that marked the prewar years in France; but what impressed Ionesco was his emphasis on safeguarding the moral responsibility of the individual. Both Cioran and Ionesco sent home articles describing their impressions of Paris: the former depicted the city and France itself as "a nation fatigued and worn-out, at the twilight of its history," while the latter spoke of them as "the ultimate refuge of humanity."
After the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Ionesco decided to return to Romania--a decision he bitterly regretted. He remained there until the summer of 1942, desperately trying to leave again without success. During this period the Romanian government was taken over by General Antonescu, who for five months shared power with the Iron Guard. They instituted a reign of terror "of an indescribable savagery," particularly against the Jews, but also massacring other opponents and kidnapping former members of the government and prominent intellectuals to be executed. Antonescu, disturbed by the chaos, finally suppressed the Iron Guard with the help of German troops. Meanwhile new laws against the Jews were added to those already in existence, and applied to "converts" of the past and present as well as those clinging to their faith; all were excluded from teaching, as well as from any other professional office or occupation, except those with special permission from the head of state. Ionesco became frantic, as his notebooks reveal; and after several futile efforts to obtain passports and visas, he appealed to friends in several ministries for help. As a last resort, they arranged for him to become press attaché at the Romanian embassy in Vichy (France by this time had been defeated). As he put it, "I am like an escaped prisoner who flees in the uniform of the jailer."
This is the second part of his Romanian past that Ionesco kept concealed: these Vichy years are never mentioned in his autobiographical writings. A full account of them is given in Laignel-Lavastine's book, using the documents now available from his dossier in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest and references in his letters of the time. It is quite clear, to cite the text, that this "was a strategy of survival"; and though he hated every moment of his duties, he performed them conscientiously enough to receive a promotion to cultural secretary in the spring of 1943.
Much of his time was given to encouraging the translation and publication of Romanian writers, and to maneuvering among French journals in the complicated maze created by the collaborationist, semi-collaborationist, and purely literary publications. Ionesco carefully avoided the first and preferred those that attempted to preserve a literary autonomy, even if it was necessarily limited. He also secretly employed as a translator, using a pseudonym, a Romanian-Jewish poet whose works had been illustrated by Brancusi and Victor Brauner. Very far from being lenient toward her subjects, Laignel-Lavastine does not omit other duties performed by Ionesco that might be considered "compromising"; but she concludes that his record is "in general quite honorable." Still, those were years that he wished to forget.
V.
Cioran was also in Paris at the outbreak of the war and decided to return to Bucharest in the autumn of 1940, though he, too, eliminated these months from accounts of his life. The reason is quite simple: he arrived when the Iron Guard had practically taken over the government; and on the very day that it was committing the atrocities already mentioned, he spoke on the radio with ecstatic praise for the "Legion" (as the movement was also called). "Codreanu," he said, had "instilled honor in a nation of slaves; he has given a sense of pride to a spineless herd." He also published several articles along the same lines and, preparing his return to France, obtained an appointment as cultural attaché to the Romanian embassy in Vichy. Cioran took up his new post in March 1941, but broke all records for the brevity of his service, which lasted only two and a half months. Meanwhile, he managed once again to obtain a study grant with the help of his former benefactor, now at the Collège de France, and returned to live and write in occupied Paris.
During these years, he spent a good deal of time with another ex-Romanian intellectual of Jewish origin, Benjamin Fondane (actually Vecsler), who had become a fairly well-known literary critic and poet through his works in French. In a letter to his parents in 1946, cited by Petreu, Cioran writes that "[Fondane] proved to be more gentle and more generous than all my 'Christian' friends taken together.... In the long run, all ideas are absurd and false; only the people are there, regardless of their origin or religion." When Fondane was finally denounced and arrested, Cioran went with Jean Paulhan to plead for his release. Surprisingly enough, they were successful in his case; but Fondane refused to leave without his sister, who had also been taken into custody, and they both perished in Auschwitz.
There can be little doubt that, as Laignel-Lavastine notes, "the arrest of Fondane shook Cioran profoundly," and left an indelible impression on his ideas and his values. He later wrote an admiring essay about his friend, and in addition helped Fondane's wife to re-edit his works after the war as well as to complete an important unfinished book on Baudelaire. He also wrote an article asking that Fondane's name be included among those deported writers whose names were inscribed in the Pantheon. Laignel-Lavastine criticizes him for having called Fondane "Moldavian" rather than Jewish (as if this were not understood), and because other phrases might be interpreted as containing traces of his own previous anti-Semitism. But actions, such as his intervention for his friend's release, speak louder even than such words; and this is not the only instance in which suspicion is cast on any genuine transformation of sentiment in Cioran.
No such problem arises with Eliade, because no transformation of any kind took place. Quite the contrary. Eliade kept a notebook throughout the war that is now deposited in the University of Chicago library, and which, since it was never intended for publication, he did not undertake to revise so as to blur and distort his opinions and actions. It is an astonishing document, revealing a self-adulation merging on megalomania and a fervent commitment to the triumph of Hitler, Mussolini, and Antonescu over the "Anglo-Bolsheviks." Comparing himself with Goethe, whose genius he admired, Eliade concludes: "My intellectual horizons are vaster." Despite the consolation of such reflections, he was terribly depressed by the course of the war. After the defeat of the Germans and their Romanian allies at Stalingrad (which he called "a tragedy"), followed by the invasion of North Africa and the British victory over Rommel, Eliade was upset to such an extent that he notes: "Insomnias, nightmares, depression."
For him, the triumph of the Allies meant "the abandonment of Europe to the Asiatic hordes." Even though Jews were being slaughtered right and left in his homeland, not to mention elsewhere--and Eliade's diplomatic position kept him perfectly well informed--not a word about any such events appears in his pages. As the handwriting on the wall became more and more legible, he resolved not to return home, but to take another tack. "I have decided to 'penetrate' Europe more deeply and with more determination than I have done until now," he writes. Several months later, he sees himself operating as "a Trojan horse within the scientific arena," whose aim was "scientifically to validate the metaphysical significance of prehistoric life." This is exactly how he behaved after Antonescu was overthrown and he was discharged from his position at the Romanian embassy. He had influential scholarly connections in Paris, particularly the cultural historian Georges Dumézil, and he used this influence as well as others to obtain temporary teaching appointments. He had begun to write his Treatise on the History of Religions in 1944 and his influential The Myth of the Eternal Return a year later; both appeared in French in the immediate postwar years, and launched Eliade on his way to international fame and a permanent post in Chicago.
VI.
The great value of Laignel-Lavastine's book is her thorough investigation of the Romanian background, and in a much larger framework than the one provided by Petreu. The chapters devoted to the postwar years of her three protagonists, though of great interest in themselves and barely touched on by Petreu, deal with more familiar and easily accessible material. A good deal of criticism has been leveled against her book, but none, to my knowledge, has really undermined the factual basis of her indictment, even though she may be faulted on matters of detail.
A different question arises when she discusses the issue of whether Eliade and Cioran ever underwent any sort of "true transformation" of their earlier views, or only engaged "in a secret game of projections, calculations, and concealments." This involves matters of interpretation on which opinions may differ. Such a question, as she concedes, applies only "very weakly" to Ionesco, who was more a victim of circumstances than of any ideological commitment he had reason to regret. In later years the picture on the book jacket of the three men engaged in friendly conversation could create a wrong impression, even though it approximates at least a modicum of the truth of what became their relation.
In the immediate postwar years, many of the Romanian intellectuals in Paris (not all, to be sure) clustered around Eliade, whose hotel room became "one of the principal rendezvous of the exile." Ionesco showed up at such gatherings, as he told a friend, only in order "to escape from [his] undermining solitude," while at the same time declaiming against this group as "an affair of Legionnaires [Iron Guardists] who have not repented." Moreover, aside from the need to overcome the "painful isolation" that he felt, the Romanian political situation had changed entirely, and he now found himself more or less partially in agreement with his ancient enemies. A communist government had taken over Romania in 1947, and Ionesco could join the others in deploring this imposition of the collectivism--of the right or the left--that he had always abhorred.
All through his later life he actively supported democratic causes, affixing his name to petitions to support the Prague Spring, the Afghan resistance against Russia, and the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, and joining movements such as Amnesty International. He was tireless in his support of Israel, thus bucking a strong current of French gauchiste opinion. He joined Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kolakowski, and Czeslaw Milosz, among others, in his anti-communism. He is depicted as thus "sliding to the right," but doing so in defense of the values in which he had always believed: the liberty of man, humanism. As more or less of a gauchiste herself, however, Laignel-Lavastine cannot resist a dig at "the rather reactionary side of the old academician, which sometimes brings on a smile or a reaction of annoyance" when "his anti-communism becomes in the end a little ridiculous." This is a nasty thrust that does her little credit.
Eliade's remarkable career illustrates his skill and success at playing "the secret game of projections, concealments and calculations." Reference already has been made to the falsification of the memoirs and journals that is illustrated all through the volume; but his Iron Guard past nonetheless caught up with him from time to time. His application for appointment to the French Center for Scientific Research, though sponsored by a formidable array of prominent scholars, was turned down because a renowned medieval historian of Romanian origin wrote a detailed letter about his early commitments. Similarly, safely installed in Chicago in 1973, Eliade was invited for a lecture in Israel by Gershom Scholem, whom he had met at colloquiums in Ascona, Switzerland, initially sponsored by Jung (whose political past is also very suspect). In 1972 a small Israeli journal of the Romanian emigration had published an article revealing part of Eliade's connection with the Iron Guard, but without citing any written sources. Scholem was troubled, but Eliade wrote a letter piling lie upon lie, indignantly denying that he had ever published a line in praise of the Iron Guard and relying on the inaccessibility of the Romanian material at that time.
The invitation to Hebrew University was withdrawn, though Scholem, presumably incapable of believing in such duplicity, urged Eliade to visit him personally and offered to arrange an interview with the author of the article to clear up matters of disagreement. But Eliade prudently cancelled the trip, and never visited Israel then or later. Part of Eliade's strategy was to cultivate friendships with prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals, as Ravelstein/Bloom had rightly charged. Saul Bellow spoke at his funeral in 1986. His novel indicates that he may have had some regrets at having done so.
Nothing blatantly anti-Semitic can be found in Eliade's postwar writings, but the prejudice is transposed into a much more scholarly key in his theory of religion. One of the cornerstones of his doctrine was that archaic man lived in a world of cyclical time, whose recurrences were marked by festivals of one kind or another in which "sacred time," the time of religious experience, was re-created. The modern world has largely lost this ability to relive "sacred time" because the Hebrews (as Eliade now calls them) broke with the cyclical time of "the eternal return" by linking God with linear time. "The Hebrews," he writes, "were the first to discover the significance of history as the epiphany of God," and this discovery of history ultimately led to all the ills of the modern world. Daniel Dubuisson, a French analyst of Eliade's views on mythology, concludes that this summary notion of history "especially invents a new accusation against the Jews, that of an ontological crime, a capital crime and without doubt unpardonable." Eliade thus remained true to himself in this erudite disguise during his later years, when his worldwide fame reached its apogee and his death was mourned with sanctimonious reverence.
The most complicated case of all was Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions, but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright in his correspondence and in private conversation. In a letter to a friend, Cioran declared in 1971 that "when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don't understand. What madness!" This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: "What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind."
There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind's certainties, including his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and controversial in Laignel-Lavastine's book. He is depicted as both evading any overt responsibility for his past and also, "unlike Eliade," weighed down by feelings "inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of diffuse guilt ... [an] 'oppressive sensation' with which he admits sometimes awakening in the morning, 'as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.'"
As in the case of Eliade, Cioran's past sometimes came back to haunt him. Paul Celan, the great German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp and who had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and translated one of Cioran's works, Précis de décomposition (A Short History of Decay), into German in 1953. The two saw each other from time to time, and Cioran came to the poet's aid when Celan was fighting off accusations of plagiarism. Yet when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the particulars of Cioran's past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with him. Despite this break, Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the poet's suicide. It is suggested that this relationship with a Jewish writer may also have been meant as the same sort of "cover" that Eliade exploited so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that, when Cioran was once asked whether he knew Céline, he mentioned Celan instead. One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair as possible in stressing Cioran's "ambivalence," Laignel-Lavastine is pushing matters too far.
The same problem arises when she comes to Cioran's attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new edition of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania, was published in Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be eliminated, along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the text: "I completely renounce a very large part [of the book] which stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain remarks about the Jews," he wrote to a friend. Nothing could be more explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on the Jews called "Un peuple de solitaires" ("A Solitary People") that was hailed as philo-Semitic. But Laignel-Lavastine believes this to be an illusion, because on comparing this text with what Cioran had written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their history is much the same as that provided earlier--except that what had been evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive spin. Moreover, Cioran continually identifies his own situation with that of the Jews, writing that "their drama [that of the Jews] is mine." In 1970 he mused that "I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to be Jewish."
This obsessive self-identification with the Jews is interpreted as "the reversed expression of the same psycho-pathological phenomenon" that had earlier led to Cioran's worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them surely indicates some sort of change. Also, the objection is made that while Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so except in general terms, without attempting to explain why they are now rejected. For Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran's tantalizingly ambiguous relation to his past is hardly a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the case with Eliade, he was merely "translating into an acceptable language ideological motifs and attitudes [that are] ideologically disqualified in the West." Petreu is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease: "From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: 'I ... am not ... an ... anti- ... Semite.'"
Let me add my personal testimony at this point. During my years in Paris I met Cioran and saw him on a number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate interest). Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive.
If there is a general criticism to be made of Laignel-Lavastine's excellent book, it is that Cioran is pursued too relentlessly, perhaps in an effort to counteract his devoted admirers in France and elsewhere--the late Susan Sontag, for example, who introduced him to the United States. A lack of knowledge of the Romanian background allowed him to be seen innocently and too exclusively in the light of his soaring philosophical speculations. But if these are now shadowed by the political commitments that he himself later found incomprehensible, the reliable evidence of his genuine struggle to cope with his past deserves more sympathy. In Cioran's case, compassion is not the enemy of truth.
Joseph Frank is professor emeritus of comparative literature and Slavic languages and literature at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet (Princeton University Press).
By Marta Petreu
Translated by Bogdan Aldea
(Ivan R. Dee, 332 pp., $30)
I.
In the aftermath of World War II, there was a great influx of refugees into the United States. Most came from countries where populations had been uprooted by the course of battle, or were escaping from a past that they were lucky to have survived. Some, however, were trying to put behind them a different kind of past--one in which they had collaborated with, or expressed sympathy for, the Axis powers that had been defeated. A notable case of this kind was that of Paul de Man, the distinguished professor of comparative literature at Yale University; another eminent instance was Mircea Eliade, the much-admired historian of religion who was chairman of the department of religion at the University of Chicago from 1957 until his death in 1986. Eliade had been a strong supporter of the Iron Guard movement, the Romanian equivalent of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis, but he attempted throughout his later career to conceal and deny his affiliation with its ideas and his service in the pro-Axis Romanian government of Marshal Ion Antonescu during the war.
Although Eliade's history has attracted little attention in the United States, he appears, under a fictitious name, in Saul Bellow's novel Ravelstein. It is well known that the character Ravelstein is a fictional portrait of the late Allan Bloom, a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago and the author of the best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind. Another professor at the university is a Romanian-born historian of religion, Radu Grielescu, with an even greater international reputation than that of Ravelstein, and obviously based on Eliade. The narrator of the novel, who may be roughly identified with the author, is married to a Romanian woman. (One of Bellow's wives was in fact a Romanian mathematician--in the novel she is an astronomer--and his earlier novel The Dean's December is set in Bucharest.) The couple are flatteringly cultivated by the highly civilized Grielescu, and a minor motif of the book is the futile protest of Ravelstein against what he correctly divines as the efforts of Grielescu to ingratiate himself with the narrator.
Both Ravelstein and the narrator are Jewish, and the former has gotten wind that Grielescu, during the 1930s and 1940s, had been a fervent intellectual spokesman for the ferociously anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement. Indeed, he had "denounced the Jewish syphilis that had infected the high civilization of the Balkans." During the war he had served the pro-fascist Romanian government in its embassies in England and Portugal; and he lived in fear that his previous Iron Guard affiliations and sympathies would become known. "Grielescu is using you," Ravelstein tells the narrator. "In his own country he was a fascist, and he needs you to cover this up here." The narrator admits that he had never posed a direct question about his past to Grielescu, but refuses to believe that he could ever have been a genuine Jew-hater.
This episode in Bellow's novel is cited in a recent French study, which has not yet appeared in English, titled Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme, written by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, a historian of Eastern European history and culture. This revelatory book is an extremely erudite exploration of the careers of the three writers named in the title, based largely but far from exclusively on an analysis of the little-known (and, until fairly recently, mostly inaccessible) journalistic and periodical literature in Romanian of the 1930s and 1940s. All these men were natives of that relatively obscure and distant land, and all performed the astonishing feat of becoming world-famous figures.
Eliade's books on the history of religion elevated him to a commanding height in the field, and he attained fame as a novelist both in his own country and in France. E.M. Cioran was widely hailed for his brilliantly disillusioned reflections on history and culture, written first in Romanian and then in French, and he was praised as one of the greatest contemporary stylists in his adopted language. Eugène Ionesco pioneered the vogue of the theater of the absurd, and his comic but also symbolically tragic plays were performed everywhere; eventually he was elected to the Académie Française. All three had a past that they wished to hide (though Ionesco's concealments did not arise from any sympathy with the fascist tendency that the two others fervently championed). The aim of Laignel-Lavastine's book is to investigate the truth about this past so far as it can be ascertained from the surviving documents and the testimony of contemporaries. It has now been supplemented by the appearance in English of a work exclusively devoted to Cioran, An Infamous Past, by the Romanian scholar and poet Marta Petreu, which was originally published in 1999.
Laignel-Lavastine begins with a sweeping depiction of the political and cultural atmosphere of the late 1920s in Romania, the period during which the three men she deals with came to maturity. The ideological climate of the time was defined in a series of articles by the twenty-year-old Eliade called "A Spiritual Itinerary"--a work that quickly became the lodestar of the new generation and promoted the young Eliade to the position of its leader. Sweeping aside all the ideas of the past that had been destroyed in the carnage of World War I, Eliade wrote: "The myth of indefinite progress, the faith in the aptitude and power of science and technology to establish widespread peace and social justice, the primacy of rationalism and the prestige of agnosticism, all this has been shattered to pieces in every area in which it has been contested." This criticism of rationalism, materialism, and loss of religious faith was accompanied by praise of the "life-force," and of the most extreme irrational experiences, as providing the source of a new realm of values.
All three men attended the University of Bucharest, the center of Romania's cultural life, where they became acquainted and competed for attention in the animated discussions that took place in the cafés of the Calei Victorei, the main artery of the city. Every conversation there was a personal challenge, and in a volume of critical articles titled Non, Ionesco ironically depicts the various strategies employed to make an impression. A neophyte might imitate Cioran and speak "in response to everything or with complete irrelevance," or "in a trembling voice, in which the emotion and acute interior tension were expressed as the phrases interrupted each other, cite a passage from Unamuno or Berdyaev." Matters were not so intellectually effervescent, however, for others in the university, especially those of Jewish origin.
Of primary importance in this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian culture, which has deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard made life for Jewish students at the university a continual torment. They were assigned special seats, continually insulted verbally, and assaulted physically. Often it was necessary for police to be called in to protect them as they left the lecture halls. There is a moving passage in a novel from 1934 by Mihail Sebastian, also a playwright and for a time a member of Eliade's inner circle, in which the obviously autobiographical main character, who has been slapped in the face, remonstrates with himself: "Tell yourself that you are the son of a nation of martyrs ... dash your head against the walls, but if you wish to be able to look yourself in the face, if you don't wish to die of shame, do not weep."
The reigning academic figure at the university, or at least the figure who exercised the most influence on the writers we are concerned with, was a philosopher named Nae Ionescu. He possessed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich, and he was a charismatic orator capable of producing an almost hypnotic influence in his lectures to packed auditoriums. Depicted by Laignel-Lavastine as more or less an intellectual charlatan whose brilliant performances were cribbed and plagiarized from German philosophical sources, Ionescu nonetheless succeeded in obtaining an indelible grip on the finest minds of the younger generation. His lectures, according to Cioran, were only half prepared, so that "we were present face to face with the working out of his thought. He communicated this effort to us, the tension working in a reciprocal manner.... Such professors are rare."
What did students absorb from the teachings of this spellbinding professor? He traced the crisis of modern man, which culminated for him in the emergence of the ideology of democracy, to the fusion of the philosophical subjectivism of Descartes with the mathematical method and scientific uniformization imposed by the Renaissance. To this individualist perspective he opposed that of the submission of the individual to the national collectivity--not the legal nation, but the organic one, the community of blood and spirit, which was, according to him, the only living and creative reality. Up to 1933, such proto-fascist ideas, which formed the common coin of a good deal of the German philosophy of the time, were not given any political application by Ionescu, who had been in favor of the restoration of King Carol II in 1930. But in 1933 he went to Germany and was much impressed by Hitler's rise to power. On his return he protested, along with Eliade, the ban issued against the Iron Guard, one of whose members had recently assassinated the liberal prime minister. It was in 1933 that the philosopher also made personal contact for the first time with C.Z. Codreanu, the founder and leader of the Iron Guard, and apparently a powerfully impressive personality.
The Iron Guard was as vicious and brutal as other fascist formations--perhaps even more than some when it came to murderous violence against the Jews--but it differed from the others by containing, along with a strong nationalistic component, a religious one as well. It combined, according to Laignel-Lavastine, "the Führerprinzip [the cult of the Leader] with the Christian prototype of the apostle and the Balkan model of the haidouks, those who meted out justice on the highways, a type of Robin Hood of the Carpathians." Each member of the Iron Guard was supposed to submit himself to a discipline that would transform his character, and--at least in theory--the movement was closer to some sort of religious sect than to a customary political formation. This made it much simpler in later years for Eliade, in his extremely untrustworthy memoirs, to sanitize his close association with the Iron Guard by describing it as "having the structure and vocation of a mystical sect rather than of a political movement." In fact, the organization offered candidates for all the elections and participated in all the political campaigns. Still, as late as 1980, Eliade stressed the religious component of its ideology, which glorified terrorism and assassination as examples of personal self-sacrifice. The Iron Guard, he wrote, was "the sole Romanian political movement that took seriously Christianity and the church."
II.
After sketching in this background, Laignel-Lavastine moves on to follow the careers of her three protagonists during this period. Cioran was born of a clerical family in what had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as a lycée student was one of the few who took advantage of the well-stocked German library. As his notebooks show, he imbibed the very best of both old and new German philosophy, as well as Russians such as Dostoevsky and Shestov. In 1933, at the age of twenty-two, he began to publish articles in the anti-Semitic weekly Vremea, in which Eliade also regularly appeared. Cioran's contributions were distinguished by an extreme cultural and ethical pessimism derived from Schopenhauer, as well as by an anti-rationalism absorbed from Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler. Petreu stresses the influence of Spengler, to whose thoughts on the decline of the West, she argues, Cioran remained indebted all his life. His writings were also characterized by an anguished concern over the status of Romania on the world scene. By what means could his country succeed in raising itself above the mediocrity in which it seemed to stagnate? How could it "emerge from a thousand years of sub-historical vegetative life," as he wrote in 1936?
Like other students of Nae Ionescu, Cioran had begun to sympathize with the Iron Guard without accepting some of its ideological presuppositions; and he always refused to affiliate completely with a political movement. But a decisive moment in his life was a Humboldt fellowship to Germany in 1933, where he lived until the summer of 1935. He was tremendously impressed by the new dynamism that Hitler had imparted to German life, and compared it sadly to the inertia at home. "To tell the truth," he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving, "there are things here that please me, and I am convinced that a dictatorial regime would succeed in conquering our native morass." He admired Hitler more and more as time went on, and he expresses such admiration in no uncertain terms in the articles that he sent back for his Romanian readers. "There is no contemporary political figure," he wrote, "for whom I feel a greater sympathy and admiration than for Hitler," who had succeeded in infusing "a messianic inspiration to a domain of values that democratic rationalism had rendered banal and trivial." Along with many others, he attended the popular courses of the philosopher Ludwig Klages, an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, whom he compared to Ionescu, and placed on the same level as Heidegger. (Klages wrote a huge three-volume work to demonstrate that reason had always been a dissolving and corrupting force in human life.)
On returning home, Cioran performed his obligatory military service in the army, and then, starting in 1936, taught philosophy for a year in a lycée. During these years he published three books, two on religion and the third--the most scandalously provocative work that ever came from his pen--titled The Transfiguration of Romania. Here he raises the problem of the integration of minorities, and not only defends Romanian xenophobia but also attempts to develop a rigorously systematic and historical anti-Semitic argument to prove that the Jews are inassimilable. "The feeling of animosity toward strangers," he declares, "is so characteristic of Romanian national sentiment that the two are forever indissoluble.... We have lived for a thousand years under their domination [that of strangers], and not to hate them, not to get them out of the way, would be proof of a lack of national instinct."
As for the Jews, Cioran writes that "every time that a people becomes conscious of itself, it fatally enters into conflict with the Jews." One can learn to live with other minorities, such as the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, but this is impossible with the Jews "by reason of the particular structure of their mentality and of their inherent political orientations." Cioran repeats the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give them a logic and consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to essential characteristics of the Jewish mentality. (His book was written after Hitler had passed the Nuremberg laws in Germany.)
Most of Petreu's book is devoted to a very thorough and quite critical analysis of this work, the only purely political tract that Cioran ever produced. His anti-Semitism and xenophobia were commonplace in Romanian thought, but Petreu views his political ideas as quite independent in the context of a period dominated by a conflict between "occidentalism" and "autochthony" (a reliance on native traditions). Cioran rejected both: neither a capitalist transformation along European democratic lines nor a re-affirmation of the national values embodied in rural life met with his approval.
Instead, he was in favor of increased industrialization and expressed considerable admiration for Lenin and the Russian Revolution, though of course abhorring its materialist ideology. Moreover, the transformation of Romania could only be nationalist, and it was here that he coincided with the Iron Guard, proclaiming in 1937 his confidence in the group's "heroism which begins in brutality and ends in sacrifice." He met Codreanu several times, but wrote to Eliade in 1935 that "no political doctrine receives my ultimate approval." Cioran left Romania again in 1937, having applied for a study grant to Spain, the land of Unamuno. But the civil war made that impossible, and so he spent three years in France instead.
III.
Eliade, as already noted, found no difficulty at all in accepting the ideology of the Iron Guard, which he viewed in the light of his own preoccupation with religion and spirituality. The difference between him and Cioran, whose book The Transfiguration of Romania Eliade prepared for the press as a service to his friend, is clearly illustrated in a letter in which Eliade is full of praise for the section on the Jews and other minorities, but objects to Cioran's contemptuous remarks about the Romanian village as containing nothing but "a biological reserve." For Eliade, it was the source of national-religious values that had existed for centuries--and were again being revived by the Iron Guard. In a series of more than fifty articles between 1934 and 1938, he praised "the Captain," as Codreanu was called, for inspiring such a movement and urged young intellectuals to join the cause. "The significance of the revolution advanced by Corneliu Codreanu is so profoundly mystical," he declared, "that its success would designate the victory of the Christian spirit in Europe."
Eliade's adhesion to the cause, however, was by no means instantaneous. It was only in December 1935 that he decided that "the primacy of the spiritual does not imply the refusal of action." In 1936 he began openly to support the Iron Guard; but his aim was "to provide its ideology with a more solid philosophical foundation." One is reminded of Heidegger's attempt to provide Hitlerism with what the philosopher considered a worthier intellectual grounding. Eliade carries on a continual battle against the ideas of the Enlightenment and traces the degeneration of Romania to its attempt to adopt such alien notions: "Being a foreign importation, the democratic regime concerns itself with matters that are not specifically Romanian--abstractions like the rights of man, the rights of minorities, and the liberty of conscience." Far better a dictatorship like that of Mussolini, which is always preferable to a democracy because, if the latter goes to pieces, it will "inevitably slide toward the left" and thus toward communism.
An important event of these years for Eliade was the return of the coffins of two of his friends, both prominent Iron Guardists, killed fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. A huge semiofficial demonstration was organized to honor their remains, and Eliade wrote three articles, one published in the journal of the Iron Guard itself, to consecrate the glory of their sacrifice. As usual, he endows this event with his own pseudo-religious aura. "The voluntary death of Ion Mota and Vasile Marin," he wrote, "has a mystic significance: the sacrifice for Christianity." By this time he had become an active partisan of the Iron Guard; and when the Guard fell out of favor with the government in 1938, leading to the arrest of Codreanu and several hundred of his most prominent followers, Mircea Eliade was among them.
The conditions of their detention in a camp, once an agricultural school, were far from onerous, and courses were organized by Ionescu and Eliade, who also managed to write a novel there, called Marriage in Heaven . His wife's uncle was a general close to King Carol II, and since Eliade suffered from a tubercular condition, he was soon allowed to move to a mountain village and returned home early in December. Later that month Codreanu was killed, presumably while attempting to escape, and the Iron Guard movement was sternly repressed. Eliade had lost his university post, but he confided to Cioran that he "regretted nothing," and he wrote a play, Iphigenia, that exalted the ideas of sacrifice and death for one's country in words literally reproducing those he had used about the two Iron Guardists who had sacrificed themselves for Franco.
Life for Eliade in his native land was becoming difficult, and his correspondence reveals that he was seeking to go elsewhere. He made efforts in the direction of the United States and France with no success, and finally had to settle for a post as cultural attaché in London before Romania entered the war against the Allies. The English were quite well informed about his past, and classified him as "the most Nazified member of the legation," possibly a spy for Germany. When he was transferred to Portugal, there was some discussion as to whether he should be allowed to leave the country, and he was filled with indignation at being stripped and searched before his departure. He spent four years in Lisbon, where the dictatorship of Salazar, which he called "a Christian form of totalitarianism," was much closer to his political tastes than anything he could find elsewhere. While performing his tasks in the embassy, he also wrote a hagiographical but scholarly biography of Salazar, who deigned, much to his delight, to grant him an audience, and then entrusted him with a message to deliver to General Antonescu. Eliade's trip to Bucharest in July 1942 was the last time he was to see his native land.
IV.
The third member of the trio was Eugène Ionesco, and the jacket of Laignel-Lavastine's book contains a photograph taken in 1977 in Paris at the charming and peaceful little Place Furstenberg, just a few steps away from the swarming crowd at St.-Germain-des-Près. The picture captures the three exiles talking together in the friendliest fashion, and has aroused a good deal of criticism, because it would appear that all three were guilty in a similar fashion of the " oubli du fascisme," the forgetfulness about fascism, indicated by the book's title. The text makes clear, however, that Ionesco's politics had always been fiercely hostile to the fascist temptation. Indeed, his famous play Rhinoceros (1959) is based on his horrified fascination with what he saw taking place as the members of his generation each yielded to the fascist spell.
The play depicts a small provincial village where the inhabitants gradually become transformed into rhinoceroses that destroy everything in their path. Ionesco's journal records the process by which, as he wrote, "I saw how my brothers, my friends, gradually became strangers. I felt a new spirit germinating within them; how a new personality was substituted for theirs." These new personalities were those of "the ideologists and semi-intellectuals" who mutated into "rhinoceroses"; a character called "the Logician" in the play, presumably based on Nae Ionescu, precipitates this transformation.
But Ionesco, too, possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, though it was relatively anodyne compared with that of the other two. For one thing, there was the question of his family. Ionesco's father was a Romanian lawyer with a French doctorate, and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to be some question about her origins: she may not have been a French citizen at all, and was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco's autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian, whose friendship, unlike that of all the others, he continued to cultivate, and who comments that "I had long known that his mother was Jewish from hearsay." This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days after an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its slaughter, had taken place in Bucharest.
Ionesco taught French literature at the University of Bucharest, and became well known in the 1930s when his book Non was given a prestigious literary award. In it, he scathingly attacked the eminences of Romanian literature for their "ethno-linguistic nationalism and historicism." Meanwhile, he was keeping a journal that nourished much of his later work, in which we see him rejecting the collectivisms both of fascism and communism. In 1938 he received a grant to study in Paris from the director of the French Cultural Institute who, a few months earlier, had given one to Cioran; but though the two lived in the same section of Paris and had common Romanian friends, they carefully avoided each other's company.
At this time Ionesco was much influenced by Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the journal Esprit, and a liberal Catholic who attempted to steer a middle course between left and right and fathered a doctrine known as "personalism." It was anti-capitalist and highly critical of the weaknesses of liberal democracy, but it also stressed the importance of preserving the rights of the individual personality not as a political entity, but as a moral-spiritual one. Mounier has been sharply criticized for having contributed to the undermining of the respect for democracy that marked the prewar years in France; but what impressed Ionesco was his emphasis on safeguarding the moral responsibility of the individual. Both Cioran and Ionesco sent home articles describing their impressions of Paris: the former depicted the city and France itself as "a nation fatigued and worn-out, at the twilight of its history," while the latter spoke of them as "the ultimate refuge of humanity."
After the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Ionesco decided to return to Romania--a decision he bitterly regretted. He remained there until the summer of 1942, desperately trying to leave again without success. During this period the Romanian government was taken over by General Antonescu, who for five months shared power with the Iron Guard. They instituted a reign of terror "of an indescribable savagery," particularly against the Jews, but also massacring other opponents and kidnapping former members of the government and prominent intellectuals to be executed. Antonescu, disturbed by the chaos, finally suppressed the Iron Guard with the help of German troops. Meanwhile new laws against the Jews were added to those already in existence, and applied to "converts" of the past and present as well as those clinging to their faith; all were excluded from teaching, as well as from any other professional office or occupation, except those with special permission from the head of state. Ionesco became frantic, as his notebooks reveal; and after several futile efforts to obtain passports and visas, he appealed to friends in several ministries for help. As a last resort, they arranged for him to become press attaché at the Romanian embassy in Vichy (France by this time had been defeated). As he put it, "I am like an escaped prisoner who flees in the uniform of the jailer."
This is the second part of his Romanian past that Ionesco kept concealed: these Vichy years are never mentioned in his autobiographical writings. A full account of them is given in Laignel-Lavastine's book, using the documents now available from his dossier in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest and references in his letters of the time. It is quite clear, to cite the text, that this "was a strategy of survival"; and though he hated every moment of his duties, he performed them conscientiously enough to receive a promotion to cultural secretary in the spring of 1943.
Much of his time was given to encouraging the translation and publication of Romanian writers, and to maneuvering among French journals in the complicated maze created by the collaborationist, semi-collaborationist, and purely literary publications. Ionesco carefully avoided the first and preferred those that attempted to preserve a literary autonomy, even if it was necessarily limited. He also secretly employed as a translator, using a pseudonym, a Romanian-Jewish poet whose works had been illustrated by Brancusi and Victor Brauner. Very far from being lenient toward her subjects, Laignel-Lavastine does not omit other duties performed by Ionesco that might be considered "compromising"; but she concludes that his record is "in general quite honorable." Still, those were years that he wished to forget.
V.
Cioran was also in Paris at the outbreak of the war and decided to return to Bucharest in the autumn of 1940, though he, too, eliminated these months from accounts of his life. The reason is quite simple: he arrived when the Iron Guard had practically taken over the government; and on the very day that it was committing the atrocities already mentioned, he spoke on the radio with ecstatic praise for the "Legion" (as the movement was also called). "Codreanu," he said, had "instilled honor in a nation of slaves; he has given a sense of pride to a spineless herd." He also published several articles along the same lines and, preparing his return to France, obtained an appointment as cultural attaché to the Romanian embassy in Vichy. Cioran took up his new post in March 1941, but broke all records for the brevity of his service, which lasted only two and a half months. Meanwhile, he managed once again to obtain a study grant with the help of his former benefactor, now at the Collège de France, and returned to live and write in occupied Paris.
During these years, he spent a good deal of time with another ex-Romanian intellectual of Jewish origin, Benjamin Fondane (actually Vecsler), who had become a fairly well-known literary critic and poet through his works in French. In a letter to his parents in 1946, cited by Petreu, Cioran writes that "[Fondane] proved to be more gentle and more generous than all my 'Christian' friends taken together.... In the long run, all ideas are absurd and false; only the people are there, regardless of their origin or religion." When Fondane was finally denounced and arrested, Cioran went with Jean Paulhan to plead for his release. Surprisingly enough, they were successful in his case; but Fondane refused to leave without his sister, who had also been taken into custody, and they both perished in Auschwitz.
There can be little doubt that, as Laignel-Lavastine notes, "the arrest of Fondane shook Cioran profoundly," and left an indelible impression on his ideas and his values. He later wrote an admiring essay about his friend, and in addition helped Fondane's wife to re-edit his works after the war as well as to complete an important unfinished book on Baudelaire. He also wrote an article asking that Fondane's name be included among those deported writers whose names were inscribed in the Pantheon. Laignel-Lavastine criticizes him for having called Fondane "Moldavian" rather than Jewish (as if this were not understood), and because other phrases might be interpreted as containing traces of his own previous anti-Semitism. But actions, such as his intervention for his friend's release, speak louder even than such words; and this is not the only instance in which suspicion is cast on any genuine transformation of sentiment in Cioran.
No such problem arises with Eliade, because no transformation of any kind took place. Quite the contrary. Eliade kept a notebook throughout the war that is now deposited in the University of Chicago library, and which, since it was never intended for publication, he did not undertake to revise so as to blur and distort his opinions and actions. It is an astonishing document, revealing a self-adulation merging on megalomania and a fervent commitment to the triumph of Hitler, Mussolini, and Antonescu over the "Anglo-Bolsheviks." Comparing himself with Goethe, whose genius he admired, Eliade concludes: "My intellectual horizons are vaster." Despite the consolation of such reflections, he was terribly depressed by the course of the war. After the defeat of the Germans and their Romanian allies at Stalingrad (which he called "a tragedy"), followed by the invasion of North Africa and the British victory over Rommel, Eliade was upset to such an extent that he notes: "Insomnias, nightmares, depression."
For him, the triumph of the Allies meant "the abandonment of Europe to the Asiatic hordes." Even though Jews were being slaughtered right and left in his homeland, not to mention elsewhere--and Eliade's diplomatic position kept him perfectly well informed--not a word about any such events appears in his pages. As the handwriting on the wall became more and more legible, he resolved not to return home, but to take another tack. "I have decided to 'penetrate' Europe more deeply and with more determination than I have done until now," he writes. Several months later, he sees himself operating as "a Trojan horse within the scientific arena," whose aim was "scientifically to validate the metaphysical significance of prehistoric life." This is exactly how he behaved after Antonescu was overthrown and he was discharged from his position at the Romanian embassy. He had influential scholarly connections in Paris, particularly the cultural historian Georges Dumézil, and he used this influence as well as others to obtain temporary teaching appointments. He had begun to write his Treatise on the History of Religions in 1944 and his influential The Myth of the Eternal Return a year later; both appeared in French in the immediate postwar years, and launched Eliade on his way to international fame and a permanent post in Chicago.
VI.
The great value of Laignel-Lavastine's book is her thorough investigation of the Romanian background, and in a much larger framework than the one provided by Petreu. The chapters devoted to the postwar years of her three protagonists, though of great interest in themselves and barely touched on by Petreu, deal with more familiar and easily accessible material. A good deal of criticism has been leveled against her book, but none, to my knowledge, has really undermined the factual basis of her indictment, even though she may be faulted on matters of detail.
A different question arises when she discusses the issue of whether Eliade and Cioran ever underwent any sort of "true transformation" of their earlier views, or only engaged "in a secret game of projections, calculations, and concealments." This involves matters of interpretation on which opinions may differ. Such a question, as she concedes, applies only "very weakly" to Ionesco, who was more a victim of circumstances than of any ideological commitment he had reason to regret. In later years the picture on the book jacket of the three men engaged in friendly conversation could create a wrong impression, even though it approximates at least a modicum of the truth of what became their relation.
In the immediate postwar years, many of the Romanian intellectuals in Paris (not all, to be sure) clustered around Eliade, whose hotel room became "one of the principal rendezvous of the exile." Ionesco showed up at such gatherings, as he told a friend, only in order "to escape from [his] undermining solitude," while at the same time declaiming against this group as "an affair of Legionnaires [Iron Guardists] who have not repented." Moreover, aside from the need to overcome the "painful isolation" that he felt, the Romanian political situation had changed entirely, and he now found himself more or less partially in agreement with his ancient enemies. A communist government had taken over Romania in 1947, and Ionesco could join the others in deploring this imposition of the collectivism--of the right or the left--that he had always abhorred.
All through his later life he actively supported democratic causes, affixing his name to petitions to support the Prague Spring, the Afghan resistance against Russia, and the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, and joining movements such as Amnesty International. He was tireless in his support of Israel, thus bucking a strong current of French gauchiste opinion. He joined Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kolakowski, and Czeslaw Milosz, among others, in his anti-communism. He is depicted as thus "sliding to the right," but doing so in defense of the values in which he had always believed: the liberty of man, humanism. As more or less of a gauchiste herself, however, Laignel-Lavastine cannot resist a dig at "the rather reactionary side of the old academician, which sometimes brings on a smile or a reaction of annoyance" when "his anti-communism becomes in the end a little ridiculous." This is a nasty thrust that does her little credit.
Eliade's remarkable career illustrates his skill and success at playing "the secret game of projections, concealments and calculations." Reference already has been made to the falsification of the memoirs and journals that is illustrated all through the volume; but his Iron Guard past nonetheless caught up with him from time to time. His application for appointment to the French Center for Scientific Research, though sponsored by a formidable array of prominent scholars, was turned down because a renowned medieval historian of Romanian origin wrote a detailed letter about his early commitments. Similarly, safely installed in Chicago in 1973, Eliade was invited for a lecture in Israel by Gershom Scholem, whom he had met at colloquiums in Ascona, Switzerland, initially sponsored by Jung (whose political past is also very suspect). In 1972 a small Israeli journal of the Romanian emigration had published an article revealing part of Eliade's connection with the Iron Guard, but without citing any written sources. Scholem was troubled, but Eliade wrote a letter piling lie upon lie, indignantly denying that he had ever published a line in praise of the Iron Guard and relying on the inaccessibility of the Romanian material at that time.
The invitation to Hebrew University was withdrawn, though Scholem, presumably incapable of believing in such duplicity, urged Eliade to visit him personally and offered to arrange an interview with the author of the article to clear up matters of disagreement. But Eliade prudently cancelled the trip, and never visited Israel then or later. Part of Eliade's strategy was to cultivate friendships with prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals, as Ravelstein/Bloom had rightly charged. Saul Bellow spoke at his funeral in 1986. His novel indicates that he may have had some regrets at having done so.
Nothing blatantly anti-Semitic can be found in Eliade's postwar writings, but the prejudice is transposed into a much more scholarly key in his theory of religion. One of the cornerstones of his doctrine was that archaic man lived in a world of cyclical time, whose recurrences were marked by festivals of one kind or another in which "sacred time," the time of religious experience, was re-created. The modern world has largely lost this ability to relive "sacred time" because the Hebrews (as Eliade now calls them) broke with the cyclical time of "the eternal return" by linking God with linear time. "The Hebrews," he writes, "were the first to discover the significance of history as the epiphany of God," and this discovery of history ultimately led to all the ills of the modern world. Daniel Dubuisson, a French analyst of Eliade's views on mythology, concludes that this summary notion of history "especially invents a new accusation against the Jews, that of an ontological crime, a capital crime and without doubt unpardonable." Eliade thus remained true to himself in this erudite disguise during his later years, when his worldwide fame reached its apogee and his death was mourned with sanctimonious reverence.
The most complicated case of all was Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions, but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright in his correspondence and in private conversation. In a letter to a friend, Cioran declared in 1971 that "when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don't understand. What madness!" This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: "What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind."
There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind's certainties, including his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and controversial in Laignel-Lavastine's book. He is depicted as both evading any overt responsibility for his past and also, "unlike Eliade," weighed down by feelings "inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of diffuse guilt ... [an] 'oppressive sensation' with which he admits sometimes awakening in the morning, 'as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.'"
As in the case of Eliade, Cioran's past sometimes came back to haunt him. Paul Celan, the great German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp and who had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and translated one of Cioran's works, Précis de décomposition (A Short History of Decay), into German in 1953. The two saw each other from time to time, and Cioran came to the poet's aid when Celan was fighting off accusations of plagiarism. Yet when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the particulars of Cioran's past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with him. Despite this break, Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the poet's suicide. It is suggested that this relationship with a Jewish writer may also have been meant as the same sort of "cover" that Eliade exploited so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that, when Cioran was once asked whether he knew Céline, he mentioned Celan instead. One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair as possible in stressing Cioran's "ambivalence," Laignel-Lavastine is pushing matters too far.
The same problem arises when she comes to Cioran's attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new edition of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania, was published in Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be eliminated, along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the text: "I completely renounce a very large part [of the book] which stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain remarks about the Jews," he wrote to a friend. Nothing could be more explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on the Jews called "Un peuple de solitaires" ("A Solitary People") that was hailed as philo-Semitic. But Laignel-Lavastine believes this to be an illusion, because on comparing this text with what Cioran had written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their history is much the same as that provided earlier--except that what had been evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive spin. Moreover, Cioran continually identifies his own situation with that of the Jews, writing that "their drama [that of the Jews] is mine." In 1970 he mused that "I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to be Jewish."
This obsessive self-identification with the Jews is interpreted as "the reversed expression of the same psycho-pathological phenomenon" that had earlier led to Cioran's worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them surely indicates some sort of change. Also, the objection is made that while Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so except in general terms, without attempting to explain why they are now rejected. For Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran's tantalizingly ambiguous relation to his past is hardly a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the case with Eliade, he was merely "translating into an acceptable language ideological motifs and attitudes [that are] ideologically disqualified in the West." Petreu is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease: "From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: 'I ... am not ... an ... anti- ... Semite.'"
Let me add my personal testimony at this point. During my years in Paris I met Cioran and saw him on a number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate interest). Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive.
If there is a general criticism to be made of Laignel-Lavastine's excellent book, it is that Cioran is pursued too relentlessly, perhaps in an effort to counteract his devoted admirers in France and elsewhere--the late Susan Sontag, for example, who introduced him to the United States. A lack of knowledge of the Romanian background allowed him to be seen innocently and too exclusively in the light of his soaring philosophical speculations. But if these are now shadowed by the political commitments that he himself later found incomprehensible, the reliable evidence of his genuine struggle to cope with his past deserves more sympathy. In Cioran's case, compassion is not the enemy of truth.
Joseph Frank is professor emeritus of comparative literature and Slavic languages and literature at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet (Princeton University Press).
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Cine isi aduce aminte de...
....teatru radiofonic, Iosif Sava, Noapte buna copii, Unda vesela, Cine stie, cistiga, ziarul "Urzica", revista Secolul XX, revista "Magazin istoric", covrigi cu iaurt, "Dialog la distanta",Alexandru Stark, "Metronom" -Chiriac,la Europa libera, radio Luxemburg, Timur si baietii lui, "Los Paraguayos" in turneu, magnetofonul Tesla, ceaiurile cu lumina stinsa si Pink Floyd, snitel la pachet in drum spre tabara, cordeluta, numar si uniforma, studentii de la arhitectura pictând icoane pe geamurile la "Ion Mincu" in iarna lui '68, portocale în foita Jaffa(?) remaiem ciorapi, Carpati fara filtru, formatia Mondial, sedintele de exmatriculare ale celor care plecau cu parintii in Israel si Germania, formularele mari, formularele mici, balul de la Arhitectura, Liviu Ciulei,Tiriac si Nastase, manusile cu virfurile taiate sa poti tine Rotringul in mina cind desenezi in atelier la Mincu, Festivalul de Jazz de la Sibiu si J. Raducanu,
"Ambasadorii prieteniei" corurile americane, "Macarale, râd in soare argintii", prietenii plecind in Israel, Ricky Dandel, greva de la Brasov('88??), au intrat rusii in Cehoslovacia, unt, faina, piine zahar si ulei pe cartela, oua rosii cu matza, pantaloni "supraelastic", coteleapelordunarii, "tacimuri", salam cu soia,cafea cu naut, imbracat "din pachet', schlafensiedeutch", vama-veche, blatul pe tren de la Razboieni, auto-stop, colectia romanului de 5 lei(?) Seder la sinagoga de pe strada Scolii, cantonamentele echipei de volei, incalzit apa pe resou, nu poti lua premiul unu cu asa un nume dar trebuie sa stii, asa neoficial ca esti cea mai cea, Tanta si Costel, Zizi Serban,studentii din Vietnam, make love no war, repartitia la tara, gluvilact la de 5 ori pretul, Radu Vulpescu, subtextele "Elisabeta I " la Bulandra, Marin Moraru si Toma Caragiu, sopirlita libera, Miriam Raducanu, Ioan Grigorescu.... ... ceaun din fonta, cravata de pionier,
borcanele bortoase cu bomboane sticloase de toate culorile, halvitza, ciubuc, sirop de 50 de bani, casata de la cofetaria 'din centru', statuia lui Vasile Roaita, sosete trei-sferturi cu pompoane, fuste din tergal, penare din lemn, costume de baie crosetate de mina, evantai din pene de strut, tigari Marasesti, hirtie albastra de invelit caietele, par pe moatze, fier de calcat cu carbuni incinsi, plutele de pe Bistrita, aparatele de radio cit dulapul, bentitza alba reglementara, uniformele scolare, bleumarin cu guleras alb, tocul cu penitza, saniile trase de cai, galosii, butoiul in care se aduna apa de ploaie pentru spalat parul, Wundertopf, dunga dintre peretii camerei si tavan, indopatul gistilor, jocul cu cercul, bocitoarele la cimitir, fragi cu smintina, fetele care, in lipsa fardului, isi ciupeau obrajii 'sa-si faca bujori', portocala anuala adusa de Mos Gerila, evreii 'cu actele depuse' n-au voie sa intre la facultate, televiziunea alb-negru,
farfuriile din portelan vechi legate cu sirma, dopurile din cocean, acul de remaiat ciorapi, unt in frunza de brusture, creion chimic, cojile de mere pe plita incinsa, gutuile puse la copt pe dulap, manshonul, George Vraca, asternuturi brodate de mina, cani de tabla, ulei de ricin pentru gene frumoase, jupoane, L.S. Bulandra, indigo, scrisori scrise de mina, plapumarese, spalatorese, birjari, pantofi cu talpa de crep, malagambisti, sugative, Marina-Marina, shoshoni, foto-minut, caramele, primii ciorapi de matase cu dunga si talon, manichiurista care vine acasa, piata cu gainile in custi de lemn, Oraselul Copiilor, Ion Dacian, umbrelute de soare din dantela, moda dintilor de aur, caciuli rusesti cu urechi, fâsh, cicoare, sfesnicele de Shabat pastrate in catifea visinie cu broderie din fir aurit, somierele, shifonierele cu oglinzi groase de cristal, combinezoane din nailon, parfum de trandafiri bulgaresc, papusi din cirpa, sifoanele din sticla colorata,
masina de tocat carne, covata de framintat aluatul, cazanul de fiert rufe, masina de cusut cu pedala din fier forjat, pe care scria 'Singer', geamuri cu flori de gheatza, omul de zapada cu carbuni in loc de nasturi, teracota fierbinte, in fatza pravaliilor se stropeste trotuarul cu apa, sa nu se adune praful, Ciresarii, bibelouri, statuia lui Lenin, cobilitzele de care atirnau cofele cu mere murate, cocosei din zahar ars, milieuri din borangic si dantela, cishmeaua de pe strada, Nivea, borsh la borcan, trasuri, ospatul cu turturi de gheata, sutienele 'fara capac', muraturile din beci, soba cu foc din lemne, lumina misterioasa a lampii cu gaz, fotografiile de familie, alb-negru: matusi cu palarii, unchi tepeni, bunici severi, flasneta din fatza teatrului, papagalul cu norocul in cioc, Celentano, defilarea de 23 August, mititei la gratar in Parcul Libertatii, ciresele-cercei, agatate pe urechi, gara cu zgomote si miros de despartire...
Minunat inventarul planetei pe care am fost cu totii mai mult sau mai putin contemporani, mai mult sau mai putin vecini. Pentru aceia care, la fel ca tine, s-au stramutat demult pe planete mai sofisticate, am cateva vesti: halvita se poate manca si acum, mititei fripti pe gratar in parcuri, de asemenea. Au disparut doar merele murate si braga. Hartie albastra de invelit caietele se vinde si se foloseste si azi, la concurenta cu invelitorile de plastic. Un cunoscut m-a batut la cap ani de-a randul sa-i aduc galosi sau sosoni de undeva din lume. Pana la urma i-a cumparat cineva un fel de sosoni-prezervativ de prin America. Bocitoarele sunt prezente si acum la inmormantari, mai ales (dar nu numai) la tara. Nu primesti de la nimeni din Romania scrisori scrise de mâna? este si astazi cel mai raspandit mod de productie a epistolelor. Plapumaresele continua sa faca plapumi la domiciliu. Se mananca si acum caramele tip Stolwerk.
Manichiuristele si pedichiuristele pensionate presteaza servicii la domiciliul clientilor. Oraselul copiilor supravietuieste in mizerie. Orice tigan care se respecta si multi mahalagii se falesc cu dintii lor de aur. Exista somiere, sifoane din sticla colorata, masina de tocat carne si mai ales geamuri cu flori de gheatza in casele prost incalzite. In fatza pravaliilor se stropeste trotuarul cu apa. Bibelouri se cumpara cu ghiotura, figurine, catei, caluti si altele asemenea si se expun ostentativ in vitrina din sufragerie. Cele mai cautate milieuri nu numai pentru uz propriu ci si - mai ales - pentru cadouri destinate prietenelor din Israel sunt cele din macrame. Nivea, in aceleasi cutii plate albastre, este o crema mai scumpa decat multe altele. Anuntul "borsh proaspat" poate fi citit la multe ferestre, mai ales de subsol. Muraturile din beci, soba cu foc din lemne supravietuiesc si ele in multe case.
Si mai avem, mai avem... closete in fundul curtii la tzara, copii infasati strans, tiganci care ghicesc in palma, in ghioc si in carti, babe care leaga si dezleaga farmece, uniforme cu guleras, funda si sortulet si felurite alte relicve ale stravechii civilizatii daco-romane. In mica alimentara de la coltul lui Ilie Pintilie cu Clopotarii Vechi stateau aliniate capatzani de zahar candel si bunicul nu voia sa-mi cumpere, ca-mi stricam dintii... ... scrobeala de rufe. Albastreala de rufe se numea (cel putin la Focsani) "sineala". "Colectia celor 15 lei", "doxuri", spirt medicinal in rol de after shave, briliantina din ulei de nuc... fusta soleil, combinezon de crepdeshin, manecute tricotate pe cinci andrele, bocanci cu blacheuri, tocuri luichenz, cazaca, bolerou, decolteu encoeur, decolteu en bateau, perdelute de marchizet, cuvertura de plus rosu sau verde, carpete de chelim, telefoane (cozi rulate peste urechi) tuns nemteste,
Ora vesela cu Stroe si Vasilache. Alo, aici e Stroe/ si roaga sa-i dati voie/ o clipa sa va-nveseleasca/ sa glumeasca iar cu voi. Schmoll Pasta, Gladys, Frank Cafea, Bob, Bob, e-un sapun/ Bob, Bob, cel mai bun, /Bob, Bob, ideal,/ un sapun fenomenal. hau, hau, hau, la Sabego! Johny e-un baiat de treaba/toata lumea se intreaba/ cum de e atat de negru si lucios. Toata ziua-n ascensor/ ba ma sui ba ma cobor,/ sunt (firul conducator?), sus, jos si iar sus.... balene, clame, invizibile, fileu (de par) rulou, tunsoare a la garconne, coafura paj, coafura a la Alida Vali, scandal (corset), ciorapi de muslin, ciorapi tricotati, ciorapi de matase naturala Kunert, jambiere, cache-nez (cand am intrebat in clasa 1 primara cine mi-a luat cache-nez-ul vernil, o colega mi-a spus ca nu intelege evreieste). Femeia, eterna poveste,/ Nu-ntreba cine este,/ ci iubeste-o mereu./ Iubesc femeia/de dor nebuna/ blonda sau bruna,/imi e tot una. Sa nu iubesti prea mult femeia...
Casuta noastra/cuibusor de nebunii/ te asteapta ca sa vii... Inghetata pe batz, rusi cu ceapa, nechezol, telemea de paispe, fratii petreus, adidasi, branza regala, patricieni, vata pe batz, stofa pe puncte, loden, transperante, briz-bizuri, la patru pasi de o excursie, steaua fara nume, floarea din gradina, Daniela si Aschiuta, Tanta si Costel, capitanul Val-Vartej, Cine stie castiga, La leul si carnatul, La trei ochi sub plapuma, Pariziana, Roata lumii, Teatrul Mogador, Popesti-Leordeni, Bumbesti- Livezeni, Salva-Visheu si de 'hei-rup'-urile de rigoare.... Da' de pufoaicele alea cenusii ce zici? Si de aparatoarele de ploaie de cap de dama pliabile (nu stiu daca ordinea atributelor e buna...), alea care arata ca o punga de plastic cu doua bretele, numa buna s-o pui peste un permanent proaspat.... ce zici de helanca? de izmenele de dama chinezesti, flaushate, roz sau vernil, transformate cu abilitate in caciuli de dama 'moderne'...
de pixurile de la expozitia americana, de 'Avaramu' vazut de nu stiu cite ori, de translatoarea de la cinemateca.... de taxiurile Pobeda - dar si de ceasurile Pobeda... de merdenelele din Kogalniceanu, de cremshniturile de la Casata... ... un Grundig cit un sicriu, Aici e Radio Europa Libera/buna seara, dragi ascultatori, asternuturi brodate de mina, Am, lasate 'pentru copiii vostri', si nu stiu cum sa fac sa le arunc fara sa se prinda consoarta. Celentano, Rita Pavone, cravata de pionier... cu colturile roase, facute ferfenitza. Distinctiile pionieresti clasa I si II, Autobuz mao-tze-dun, insignele FGMA, FGAPS; laleleee, laleleeeee; macarale; cind la trap cind la galop, Dorina Draghici, Maria Lataretu, Sergiu Malagamba, TARS; ZIS; ZIM; Molotov; GAZ; MAZ; mingi din crep; biciclete MIFA, MOVE, Tatraplan, "la canal", "la stuf", legea/articolul 324; Ion Talianu, Calboreanu, calimara cu cerneala, cinema Muncitoru, Fory Etterle,
badanagii, spoitori, bulibasha, chimir; militia economica, Jean Marais, Raf Valone, Luigi Ionescu, Scinteia pionierului, Teatrul Tandarica, Teatrul Licurici; Gabriel Popescu si Alexandru Demetriad la inchisoare pt pederasty, Arta Florescu, tigari Nationale sau Olt/Mures pentru bunica, de un leu, salicilat; penicilina uleioasa, festivalul tineretului, lipii... ... minti ca o gazeta americana, Dr Frukter- Biblia in pediatrie, Cavit 9 pentru pofta de mancare, te-slavim-Rominie-pamint-parintesc, pronosport, loz-in-plic-dai-3-lei-si iei nimic, bomboane agricole, fondante, parizer, icre de Manciuria, cartofi noi, inghetata pe bat, la microfon Noel Bernard, malagambisti, artista poporului Lica Gheorghiu, misto-nasol-gagiu, intra in vernacular, controverse la c***l lui Graur, filme 'psihologice' sovietice, filme lacrimogene italienesti, Alain Delon...pe care l'am 'tradat' cu Simon Templar alias "The Saint", rochita de catifea, trening, bascheti,
imbracaminte de la 'pachet', pantofi Guban, posete 'plic', pantaloni evazati, covoare de plush cu scena "Rapirea din serai", scrumiere in forma de peste, inele ghiul, tablouri cu sirene - marfa de contrabanda adusa de vaporenii intreprinzatori si connoiseurs de rafinamente proletcultiste. De cate ori ascult tangoul de demult, trandafirii tai, Beng beng, Unde ie iluziile mele care le-am perdut? my, my, my Delilah, breton gen Beatles, clasificarea muzicii in usoara, grea si populara, primele auto(de)serviri, "Dialog la distanta", telefoane cuplate, program de apa calda, creioane chimice si HB, ascutitori chinezesti, noile uniforme scolare, tovarasa diriginta, martisoare, cadouri de 8 martie, plocoane pentru scutiri la educatie fizica, "Snagov" fumat in WC-ul cimitirului tineretii mele, panglica obligatorie, braga si placinte dobrogene, frigider Zil, aspirator Buran, camera Laika, poze cu dedicatie pe verso, Pif le chien, Revista mea, Paris Match... ...
Bula si bancuri cu cutremurul, BT-uri, sticla de bere tip CAER, cico, prajituri cu nume antiapetisante "Buturuga", "Cartof" (delicios, plin cu nuca), 'stewardesele' de pe ITB, 'blatul' studentesc la teatre, calatorii clasa 1-a cu 'nashul' cursuri de 'socialism stiintific', cartusul de Kent si sticla de whisky, chibrite care nu se aprindeau, palinka Bloody Mary, nesscaffe cu apa minerala, Noapte buna, copii... ... Maresiev, Galia Koroliova, Alexandr Matrosov, Pavlik, Stahanov, Valeri Cikalov, Ivan Budionii, Ceapaev, mai vreti? Daca nu va astimparati va infund cu Vodopianov, Ostrovski (ala cu asa s-a cacalit otelul), Fadeev, Zboara Cocorii, Comunistul, Fata cu Parul Carunt, Libelula, Piati Minuuuut... Alarma in munti, Sadko, Cazacii de pe Don, Tamara Makarova, Vesna, Kalman Latabar, Alerg dupa o stea, Norman Wisdom (sic)... sufertash, Duba Neagra, baia comunala, motoreta Puch, motoreta ILO, bicicleta Wanderer,
Submarinul Dox, stamba, tesatura anti-jeg, burtiere, pantofi cu talpa de rafie/paie, sandale cu talpa de lemn, cafeaua Meinl, ghetele de baschet cehesti, ceasuri Schaffhausen/Doxa, geamgii, iaurgii, laptari, zarzavagii, sacagii, tocilari, sapunul 'Cheia', magiunul fiert in conforca din curte, 'Cleopatra, ochii-ti ard ca flacara!', 'Cumparati curent de la IREB!', 'Dati copiilor bomboane!', statia de radioficare, dusumele de lut, pantaloni de doc, fotbal cu nasturi, bluze de nailon stravezii prin care se vedeau bretelele de la sutien s suncile de la talie, legaturile de schi Kandahar, pantalonul-pana, pantalonii pescaresti, frizura-periutza, vase de bucatarie emailate, discurile 'Elite special', patefonul cu ac, gramofonul, rufe inghetate, puse iarna afara la uscat, caimac, chiloti de diftina, ierbar, mingi de cârpa, raglan, moda turbanelor, baticurile, pantofii de la Dermata, pantofii de la Guban, drot de facut bucle, IJ-urile,Ramona,
lalele, lalele, lalele/ frumoase ca visele mele..., Gigi Larga ..(pardon: Marga!), Salut voios de pionier!, cazacii de pe Don, Eu sunt Vuving al tau cel mic/ mi-e foame si mi-e frig..., sotronul, turca, foto-montaje, lozinci, tigari Carpati, Maiakovski si versul alb, deschizatorii de drumuri noi: Marx, Engels, Lenin si tatucul Stalin, turta dulce, chilotii moartea pasiunii, firer de calcat cu carbuni, motoreta partaitoare "Carpati", cozile in asteptarea mesadei de porc, femururi imaculate de vita la Kg., capatani de porc, gaturi si ghiare de pui, bomboana cocos pe bat, sandale romane cu sfoara, sandale de panza, cutii de lemn cu marmelada americana, difuzor de cartier, razuitoare pentru spalat rufe, soda si lesia de cenusa pentru spalat rufe, sapun de casa din resturi de grasimi, opaituri, pap din coca pentru lipit, ornamente de Cracuin din hartie creponata si carton, papusi din carpa si carton, halva turceasca,
rasnita tubulara din alama pentru cafea, cafea la nisip in ibric de cupru, cafea de naut si cicoare, Gheorghiu Dej, Ana Pauker, etc., orele de Aparare Locala Antiaeriana, masina de tocat carne, ora copiilor, Teatru Radiofonic, stiu ca ma iubesti si tu..., Zambete pe portativ, De la munte la mare, Ora Satului, Marius Mihail si muzica usoara, braga, ia la maica.. porumbielu' cald!, de ce nu-mi spui ca ma iubesti?.. , cararuie care duci in varf de munte/ si te pierzi in nouri ca un fir de fum..., prajituri "Moscova", sunca artificiala, apa de ploaie pentru spalat parul, frectia cu gaz cantra paduchilor, carute cu coviltir, carute cu roti din cauciuc, hasnale, blocuri de ghiata pentru racitoare, suporturi metalice pentru sifoane, armonicele, papucii din papura, covoare din resturi de carpe, jumari presate la calup, "-Daca n-ai punga, iti dau branza asa.. in mana..!", sarsanalele: prima grija si podoaba, "-Ia marfa la rand cocoana, nu alege, ca nu-i a ta!",
dialog prietenesc: "-stai la rand, ma nenorocitule!", "-haordeu mancati-as, da' de ce, e coada ma-ti?", serialul: "om bogat, om sarac", televioare Cosmos, ciuperci din lemn pentru tesut ciorapi, Votati Soarele!, "-Spoi-tingir nuaaa!..", "-Floriceleee!..", sugiucul, ciorapi grosi raiati, galosii de cauciuc, sacagii, felinarele, bomboane cu miere, de lapte, spirtoase, praline, lapte acidulat si cornuri "Sinaia", japoneze, cosurile din papura pentru piata, genti din papura, pantofii "Cuban", tocurile cui cu pufere protectoare, moatele pe bucati hartie, fileuri pentru par, droturi pentru bucle, plase pentru targuieli, jurnale in loc de fete de masa, cismeaua comuna de la coltul strazii, laturile aruncate in drum, balega starzilor, pubele de gunoi neacoperite facute din ..orice e la indemana.., gropile starzilor si canalele infundate, miasme, tantari, sobolani, muste, jegul de sub unghii si cam de peste tot, boli...,
Academician Doctor Inginer: COdoi, artistii poporului, cantarea Romaniei, tot inainte cu gandul fierbinte!.., Ceausescu: tatal nostru!.., filme alb-negru, ca: Undeva..in Europa, Cenusareasa, Auschvitz.., Copilaria lui Gorki, batice, palarii cu boruri tari, perdele crosetate, goblenuri si covoare pe pereti, jambiere, turbane, panza anti-jeg, cearceafuri din panza numita america, cizme de cauciuc cu toc sau fara, tigarete, fuste midi, pantaloni largi, noduri cand subtiri, cand groase la cravate, rochii balerina pe jupoane, bolerouri, chiloti de celofibra, tetra...
"Ambasadorii prieteniei" corurile americane, "Macarale, râd in soare argintii", prietenii plecind in Israel, Ricky Dandel, greva de la Brasov('88??), au intrat rusii in Cehoslovacia, unt, faina, piine zahar si ulei pe cartela, oua rosii cu matza, pantaloni "supraelastic", coteleapelordunarii, "tacimuri", salam cu soia,cafea cu naut, imbracat "din pachet', schlafensiedeutch", vama-veche, blatul pe tren de la Razboieni, auto-stop, colectia romanului de 5 lei(?) Seder la sinagoga de pe strada Scolii, cantonamentele echipei de volei, incalzit apa pe resou, nu poti lua premiul unu cu asa un nume dar trebuie sa stii, asa neoficial ca esti cea mai cea, Tanta si Costel, Zizi Serban,studentii din Vietnam, make love no war, repartitia la tara, gluvilact la de 5 ori pretul, Radu Vulpescu, subtextele "Elisabeta I " la Bulandra, Marin Moraru si Toma Caragiu, sopirlita libera, Miriam Raducanu, Ioan Grigorescu.... ... ceaun din fonta, cravata de pionier,
borcanele bortoase cu bomboane sticloase de toate culorile, halvitza, ciubuc, sirop de 50 de bani, casata de la cofetaria 'din centru', statuia lui Vasile Roaita, sosete trei-sferturi cu pompoane, fuste din tergal, penare din lemn, costume de baie crosetate de mina, evantai din pene de strut, tigari Marasesti, hirtie albastra de invelit caietele, par pe moatze, fier de calcat cu carbuni incinsi, plutele de pe Bistrita, aparatele de radio cit dulapul, bentitza alba reglementara, uniformele scolare, bleumarin cu guleras alb, tocul cu penitza, saniile trase de cai, galosii, butoiul in care se aduna apa de ploaie pentru spalat parul, Wundertopf, dunga dintre peretii camerei si tavan, indopatul gistilor, jocul cu cercul, bocitoarele la cimitir, fragi cu smintina, fetele care, in lipsa fardului, isi ciupeau obrajii 'sa-si faca bujori', portocala anuala adusa de Mos Gerila, evreii 'cu actele depuse' n-au voie sa intre la facultate, televiziunea alb-negru,
farfuriile din portelan vechi legate cu sirma, dopurile din cocean, acul de remaiat ciorapi, unt in frunza de brusture, creion chimic, cojile de mere pe plita incinsa, gutuile puse la copt pe dulap, manshonul, George Vraca, asternuturi brodate de mina, cani de tabla, ulei de ricin pentru gene frumoase, jupoane, L.S. Bulandra, indigo, scrisori scrise de mina, plapumarese, spalatorese, birjari, pantofi cu talpa de crep, malagambisti, sugative, Marina-Marina, shoshoni, foto-minut, caramele, primii ciorapi de matase cu dunga si talon, manichiurista care vine acasa, piata cu gainile in custi de lemn, Oraselul Copiilor, Ion Dacian, umbrelute de soare din dantela, moda dintilor de aur, caciuli rusesti cu urechi, fâsh, cicoare, sfesnicele de Shabat pastrate in catifea visinie cu broderie din fir aurit, somierele, shifonierele cu oglinzi groase de cristal, combinezoane din nailon, parfum de trandafiri bulgaresc, papusi din cirpa, sifoanele din sticla colorata,
masina de tocat carne, covata de framintat aluatul, cazanul de fiert rufe, masina de cusut cu pedala din fier forjat, pe care scria 'Singer', geamuri cu flori de gheatza, omul de zapada cu carbuni in loc de nasturi, teracota fierbinte, in fatza pravaliilor se stropeste trotuarul cu apa, sa nu se adune praful, Ciresarii, bibelouri, statuia lui Lenin, cobilitzele de care atirnau cofele cu mere murate, cocosei din zahar ars, milieuri din borangic si dantela, cishmeaua de pe strada, Nivea, borsh la borcan, trasuri, ospatul cu turturi de gheata, sutienele 'fara capac', muraturile din beci, soba cu foc din lemne, lumina misterioasa a lampii cu gaz, fotografiile de familie, alb-negru: matusi cu palarii, unchi tepeni, bunici severi, flasneta din fatza teatrului, papagalul cu norocul in cioc, Celentano, defilarea de 23 August, mititei la gratar in Parcul Libertatii, ciresele-cercei, agatate pe urechi, gara cu zgomote si miros de despartire...
Minunat inventarul planetei pe care am fost cu totii mai mult sau mai putin contemporani, mai mult sau mai putin vecini. Pentru aceia care, la fel ca tine, s-au stramutat demult pe planete mai sofisticate, am cateva vesti: halvita se poate manca si acum, mititei fripti pe gratar in parcuri, de asemenea. Au disparut doar merele murate si braga. Hartie albastra de invelit caietele se vinde si se foloseste si azi, la concurenta cu invelitorile de plastic. Un cunoscut m-a batut la cap ani de-a randul sa-i aduc galosi sau sosoni de undeva din lume. Pana la urma i-a cumparat cineva un fel de sosoni-prezervativ de prin America. Bocitoarele sunt prezente si acum la inmormantari, mai ales (dar nu numai) la tara. Nu primesti de la nimeni din Romania scrisori scrise de mâna? este si astazi cel mai raspandit mod de productie a epistolelor. Plapumaresele continua sa faca plapumi la domiciliu. Se mananca si acum caramele tip Stolwerk.
Manichiuristele si pedichiuristele pensionate presteaza servicii la domiciliul clientilor. Oraselul copiilor supravietuieste in mizerie. Orice tigan care se respecta si multi mahalagii se falesc cu dintii lor de aur. Exista somiere, sifoane din sticla colorata, masina de tocat carne si mai ales geamuri cu flori de gheatza in casele prost incalzite. In fatza pravaliilor se stropeste trotuarul cu apa. Bibelouri se cumpara cu ghiotura, figurine, catei, caluti si altele asemenea si se expun ostentativ in vitrina din sufragerie. Cele mai cautate milieuri nu numai pentru uz propriu ci si - mai ales - pentru cadouri destinate prietenelor din Israel sunt cele din macrame. Nivea, in aceleasi cutii plate albastre, este o crema mai scumpa decat multe altele. Anuntul "borsh proaspat" poate fi citit la multe ferestre, mai ales de subsol. Muraturile din beci, soba cu foc din lemne supravietuiesc si ele in multe case.
Si mai avem, mai avem... closete in fundul curtii la tzara, copii infasati strans, tiganci care ghicesc in palma, in ghioc si in carti, babe care leaga si dezleaga farmece, uniforme cu guleras, funda si sortulet si felurite alte relicve ale stravechii civilizatii daco-romane. In mica alimentara de la coltul lui Ilie Pintilie cu Clopotarii Vechi stateau aliniate capatzani de zahar candel si bunicul nu voia sa-mi cumpere, ca-mi stricam dintii... ... scrobeala de rufe. Albastreala de rufe se numea (cel putin la Focsani) "sineala". "Colectia celor 15 lei", "doxuri", spirt medicinal in rol de after shave, briliantina din ulei de nuc... fusta soleil, combinezon de crepdeshin, manecute tricotate pe cinci andrele, bocanci cu blacheuri, tocuri luichenz, cazaca, bolerou, decolteu encoeur, decolteu en bateau, perdelute de marchizet, cuvertura de plus rosu sau verde, carpete de chelim, telefoane (cozi rulate peste urechi) tuns nemteste,
Ora vesela cu Stroe si Vasilache. Alo, aici e Stroe/ si roaga sa-i dati voie/ o clipa sa va-nveseleasca/ sa glumeasca iar cu voi. Schmoll Pasta, Gladys, Frank Cafea, Bob, Bob, e-un sapun/ Bob, Bob, cel mai bun, /Bob, Bob, ideal,/ un sapun fenomenal. hau, hau, hau, la Sabego! Johny e-un baiat de treaba/toata lumea se intreaba/ cum de e atat de negru si lucios. Toata ziua-n ascensor/ ba ma sui ba ma cobor,/ sunt (firul conducator?), sus, jos si iar sus.... balene, clame, invizibile, fileu (de par) rulou, tunsoare a la garconne, coafura paj, coafura a la Alida Vali, scandal (corset), ciorapi de muslin, ciorapi tricotati, ciorapi de matase naturala Kunert, jambiere, cache-nez (cand am intrebat in clasa 1 primara cine mi-a luat cache-nez-ul vernil, o colega mi-a spus ca nu intelege evreieste). Femeia, eterna poveste,/ Nu-ntreba cine este,/ ci iubeste-o mereu./ Iubesc femeia/de dor nebuna/ blonda sau bruna,/imi e tot una. Sa nu iubesti prea mult femeia...
Casuta noastra/cuibusor de nebunii/ te asteapta ca sa vii... Inghetata pe batz, rusi cu ceapa, nechezol, telemea de paispe, fratii petreus, adidasi, branza regala, patricieni, vata pe batz, stofa pe puncte, loden, transperante, briz-bizuri, la patru pasi de o excursie, steaua fara nume, floarea din gradina, Daniela si Aschiuta, Tanta si Costel, capitanul Val-Vartej, Cine stie castiga, La leul si carnatul, La trei ochi sub plapuma, Pariziana, Roata lumii, Teatrul Mogador, Popesti-Leordeni, Bumbesti- Livezeni, Salva-Visheu si de 'hei-rup'-urile de rigoare.... Da' de pufoaicele alea cenusii ce zici? Si de aparatoarele de ploaie de cap de dama pliabile (nu stiu daca ordinea atributelor e buna...), alea care arata ca o punga de plastic cu doua bretele, numa buna s-o pui peste un permanent proaspat.... ce zici de helanca? de izmenele de dama chinezesti, flaushate, roz sau vernil, transformate cu abilitate in caciuli de dama 'moderne'...
de pixurile de la expozitia americana, de 'Avaramu' vazut de nu stiu cite ori, de translatoarea de la cinemateca.... de taxiurile Pobeda - dar si de ceasurile Pobeda... de merdenelele din Kogalniceanu, de cremshniturile de la Casata... ... un Grundig cit un sicriu, Aici e Radio Europa Libera/buna seara, dragi ascultatori, asternuturi brodate de mina, Am, lasate 'pentru copiii vostri', si nu stiu cum sa fac sa le arunc fara sa se prinda consoarta. Celentano, Rita Pavone, cravata de pionier... cu colturile roase, facute ferfenitza. Distinctiile pionieresti clasa I si II, Autobuz mao-tze-dun, insignele FGMA, FGAPS; laleleee, laleleeeee; macarale; cind la trap cind la galop, Dorina Draghici, Maria Lataretu, Sergiu Malagamba, TARS; ZIS; ZIM; Molotov; GAZ; MAZ; mingi din crep; biciclete MIFA, MOVE, Tatraplan, "la canal", "la stuf", legea/articolul 324; Ion Talianu, Calboreanu, calimara cu cerneala, cinema Muncitoru, Fory Etterle,
badanagii, spoitori, bulibasha, chimir; militia economica, Jean Marais, Raf Valone, Luigi Ionescu, Scinteia pionierului, Teatrul Tandarica, Teatrul Licurici; Gabriel Popescu si Alexandru Demetriad la inchisoare pt pederasty, Arta Florescu, tigari Nationale sau Olt/Mures pentru bunica, de un leu, salicilat; penicilina uleioasa, festivalul tineretului, lipii... ... minti ca o gazeta americana, Dr Frukter- Biblia in pediatrie, Cavit 9 pentru pofta de mancare, te-slavim-Rominie-pamint-parintesc, pronosport, loz-in-plic-dai-3-lei-si iei nimic, bomboane agricole, fondante, parizer, icre de Manciuria, cartofi noi, inghetata pe bat, la microfon Noel Bernard, malagambisti, artista poporului Lica Gheorghiu, misto-nasol-gagiu, intra in vernacular, controverse la c***l lui Graur, filme 'psihologice' sovietice, filme lacrimogene italienesti, Alain Delon...pe care l'am 'tradat' cu Simon Templar alias "The Saint", rochita de catifea, trening, bascheti,
imbracaminte de la 'pachet', pantofi Guban, posete 'plic', pantaloni evazati, covoare de plush cu scena "Rapirea din serai", scrumiere in forma de peste, inele ghiul, tablouri cu sirene - marfa de contrabanda adusa de vaporenii intreprinzatori si connoiseurs de rafinamente proletcultiste. De cate ori ascult tangoul de demult, trandafirii tai, Beng beng, Unde ie iluziile mele care le-am perdut? my, my, my Delilah, breton gen Beatles, clasificarea muzicii in usoara, grea si populara, primele auto(de)serviri, "Dialog la distanta", telefoane cuplate, program de apa calda, creioane chimice si HB, ascutitori chinezesti, noile uniforme scolare, tovarasa diriginta, martisoare, cadouri de 8 martie, plocoane pentru scutiri la educatie fizica, "Snagov" fumat in WC-ul cimitirului tineretii mele, panglica obligatorie, braga si placinte dobrogene, frigider Zil, aspirator Buran, camera Laika, poze cu dedicatie pe verso, Pif le chien, Revista mea, Paris Match... ...
Bula si bancuri cu cutremurul, BT-uri, sticla de bere tip CAER, cico, prajituri cu nume antiapetisante "Buturuga", "Cartof" (delicios, plin cu nuca), 'stewardesele' de pe ITB, 'blatul' studentesc la teatre, calatorii clasa 1-a cu 'nashul' cursuri de 'socialism stiintific', cartusul de Kent si sticla de whisky, chibrite care nu se aprindeau, palinka Bloody Mary, nesscaffe cu apa minerala, Noapte buna, copii... ... Maresiev, Galia Koroliova, Alexandr Matrosov, Pavlik, Stahanov, Valeri Cikalov, Ivan Budionii, Ceapaev, mai vreti? Daca nu va astimparati va infund cu Vodopianov, Ostrovski (ala cu asa s-a cacalit otelul), Fadeev, Zboara Cocorii, Comunistul, Fata cu Parul Carunt, Libelula, Piati Minuuuut... Alarma in munti, Sadko, Cazacii de pe Don, Tamara Makarova, Vesna, Kalman Latabar, Alerg dupa o stea, Norman Wisdom (sic)... sufertash, Duba Neagra, baia comunala, motoreta Puch, motoreta ILO, bicicleta Wanderer,
Submarinul Dox, stamba, tesatura anti-jeg, burtiere, pantofi cu talpa de rafie/paie, sandale cu talpa de lemn, cafeaua Meinl, ghetele de baschet cehesti, ceasuri Schaffhausen/Doxa, geamgii, iaurgii, laptari, zarzavagii, sacagii, tocilari, sapunul 'Cheia', magiunul fiert in conforca din curte, 'Cleopatra, ochii-ti ard ca flacara!', 'Cumparati curent de la IREB!', 'Dati copiilor bomboane!', statia de radioficare, dusumele de lut, pantaloni de doc, fotbal cu nasturi, bluze de nailon stravezii prin care se vedeau bretelele de la sutien s suncile de la talie, legaturile de schi Kandahar, pantalonul-pana, pantalonii pescaresti, frizura-periutza, vase de bucatarie emailate, discurile 'Elite special', patefonul cu ac, gramofonul, rufe inghetate, puse iarna afara la uscat, caimac, chiloti de diftina, ierbar, mingi de cârpa, raglan, moda turbanelor, baticurile, pantofii de la Dermata, pantofii de la Guban, drot de facut bucle, IJ-urile,Ramona,
lalele, lalele, lalele/ frumoase ca visele mele..., Gigi Larga ..(pardon: Marga!), Salut voios de pionier!, cazacii de pe Don, Eu sunt Vuving al tau cel mic/ mi-e foame si mi-e frig..., sotronul, turca, foto-montaje, lozinci, tigari Carpati, Maiakovski si versul alb, deschizatorii de drumuri noi: Marx, Engels, Lenin si tatucul Stalin, turta dulce, chilotii moartea pasiunii, firer de calcat cu carbuni, motoreta partaitoare "Carpati", cozile in asteptarea mesadei de porc, femururi imaculate de vita la Kg., capatani de porc, gaturi si ghiare de pui, bomboana cocos pe bat, sandale romane cu sfoara, sandale de panza, cutii de lemn cu marmelada americana, difuzor de cartier, razuitoare pentru spalat rufe, soda si lesia de cenusa pentru spalat rufe, sapun de casa din resturi de grasimi, opaituri, pap din coca pentru lipit, ornamente de Cracuin din hartie creponata si carton, papusi din carpa si carton, halva turceasca,
rasnita tubulara din alama pentru cafea, cafea la nisip in ibric de cupru, cafea de naut si cicoare, Gheorghiu Dej, Ana Pauker, etc., orele de Aparare Locala Antiaeriana, masina de tocat carne, ora copiilor, Teatru Radiofonic, stiu ca ma iubesti si tu..., Zambete pe portativ, De la munte la mare, Ora Satului, Marius Mihail si muzica usoara, braga, ia la maica.. porumbielu' cald!, de ce nu-mi spui ca ma iubesti?.. , cararuie care duci in varf de munte/ si te pierzi in nouri ca un fir de fum..., prajituri "Moscova", sunca artificiala, apa de ploaie pentru spalat parul, frectia cu gaz cantra paduchilor, carute cu coviltir, carute cu roti din cauciuc, hasnale, blocuri de ghiata pentru racitoare, suporturi metalice pentru sifoane, armonicele, papucii din papura, covoare din resturi de carpe, jumari presate la calup, "-Daca n-ai punga, iti dau branza asa.. in mana..!", sarsanalele: prima grija si podoaba, "-Ia marfa la rand cocoana, nu alege, ca nu-i a ta!",
dialog prietenesc: "-stai la rand, ma nenorocitule!", "-haordeu mancati-as, da' de ce, e coada ma-ti?", serialul: "om bogat, om sarac", televioare Cosmos, ciuperci din lemn pentru tesut ciorapi, Votati Soarele!, "-Spoi-tingir nuaaa!..", "-Floriceleee!..", sugiucul, ciorapi grosi raiati, galosii de cauciuc, sacagii, felinarele, bomboane cu miere, de lapte, spirtoase, praline, lapte acidulat si cornuri "Sinaia", japoneze, cosurile din papura pentru piata, genti din papura, pantofii "Cuban", tocurile cui cu pufere protectoare, moatele pe bucati hartie, fileuri pentru par, droturi pentru bucle, plase pentru targuieli, jurnale in loc de fete de masa, cismeaua comuna de la coltul strazii, laturile aruncate in drum, balega starzilor, pubele de gunoi neacoperite facute din ..orice e la indemana.., gropile starzilor si canalele infundate, miasme, tantari, sobolani, muste, jegul de sub unghii si cam de peste tot, boli...,
Academician Doctor Inginer: COdoi, artistii poporului, cantarea Romaniei, tot inainte cu gandul fierbinte!.., Ceausescu: tatal nostru!.., filme alb-negru, ca: Undeva..in Europa, Cenusareasa, Auschvitz.., Copilaria lui Gorki, batice, palarii cu boruri tari, perdele crosetate, goblenuri si covoare pe pereti, jambiere, turbane, panza anti-jeg, cearceafuri din panza numita america, cizme de cauciuc cu toc sau fara, tigarete, fuste midi, pantaloni largi, noduri cand subtiri, cand groase la cravate, rochii balerina pe jupoane, bolerouri, chiloti de celofibra, tetra...