geert on Sun, 26 Apr 1998 14:29:37 +0100 |
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Syndicate: Norman Manea - The New Republic 1 |
Copyright 1998 The New Republic, Inc. The New Republic, APRIL 20, 1998 Norman Manea: Romania, the Holocaust, and a rediscovered writer. In the rough transition to democracy, the countries of Eastern Europe are going simultaneously forward and backward. The "forward" movement concerns their contract with the future: their adaptation to the social and economic requirements of the capitalist world, and the international accreditation that this will bring them. The "backward" movement is owed to their fragmented and incomplete evaluation of their history before and during the era of communism, a history that was manipulated and falsified by the ideology and the interests of the single Party of the totalitarian state. Since 1989, this tension has often made itself felt in the everyday life of Eastern Europe. In Romania, the question of nato membership for excommunist countries found almost the entire political spectrum of the country taking a pro-nato position. Suddenly the promise of a stable, integrated future within the European Community appeared to offer a cure for the country's traumatic past, which was seen as resulting more from the aggressiveness of the neighbor to the East (and from betrayal by the West) than from any shortcomings in the public life of the country itself. And then, at the same euphoric moment a book appeared to complicate matters. A glimpse of a new Romanian future coincided with a glimpse of its past, with the publication, in 1996, of Jurnal, 1935-1944 (Journal, 1935-1944), by the Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian. This chronicle of the dark years of Nazism reignited the great debate about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Romania. These are subjects that some would have preferred to ignore. Sebastian's important book--it is appearing in a number of European countries, and it deserves to be published in the United States as well--exposes the deformities of a decade in which "everyone was a little wheel in the huge anti-Semitic factory of the Romanian State." In the writer's journals of those days, the banal regularity of his daily life--with its bookreading, its love affairs, its poverty, its meetings with friends--sets the brutality and the fear in sharp relief. In Sebastian's world, however, the quotidian is ready at any moment to kindle to vast reserves of ferocity. In this respect, Sebastian's Journal resembles Victor Klemperer's massive journal of the years 1933 to 1945, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I Will Testify to the Bitter End), whose publication in Germany in 1995 also had a powerful impact. The much-delayed publication of these books in Eastern Europe, where the Nazi period was frozen in the cliches of the Communist period, gives witness to the everyday lives of "assimilated" Jews awaiting death from the world to which they thought they belonged. But Sebastian was an elegant stylist, who moved from theme to theme with admirable ease, and his book is a greater literary achievement than Klemperer's. It offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's journal, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's diary. Above all, it is an account of the "rhinocerization" of certain major Romanian intellectuals whom Sebastian counted among his friends, including Mircea Eliade, E.M. Cioran, Constantin Noica, and Camil Petrescu, writers and thinkers who were mesmerized by the nationalism of the extreme right and the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's " reactionary revolution." Rhinocerization? The odd term derives from Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, a farcical allegory of the incubation and the birth of fanaticism, or "the birth of a totalitarianism that grows, propagates, conquers, transforms a whole world and, naturally, being totalitarian, transforms it totally." The playwright described his play as the story of "an ideological contagion." Ionesco is one of the few admirable characters to emerge from Sebastian's journal, a friend with whom Sebastian saw eye to eye in rejecting the totalitarian temptations of the left and the right. Ionesco has himself given a memorable description of the atmosphere in Bucharest at that time. " University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, Iron Guard, one after another," he wrote. "From time to time, one of our friends would say: Of course I don't agree with them at all, but on certain points, for example the Jews, I must admit....' And this was symptomatic. Three weeks later, the same man would become a Nazi. He was caught up in the machinery, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros." In poignant sequences that are not easily forgotten, Sebastian dwells on the gradations of this "machinery" of brutalization, and on the historical context in which it developed. Today, more than half a century after it was written, this journal stands as one of the most important human and literary documents of the pre-Holocaust climate in Romania and Eastern Europe, of the conditions in which the Judeocide could be unleashed. Mihail Sebastian (this was the pen name of Joseph Hechter) was born in 1907, to a middle-class Jewish family, in the Danube port of BrAila, a town that he always loved; and he died in an accident in the spring of 1945, less than a year after Soviet troops entered Romania. (He was rushing to give the opening lecture on Balzac at the newly opened Popular (Free) University in Bucharest, and was run over by a truck. Recently, some people have tried to connect the accident to Sebastian's resignation from the Communist paper Romania LiberA, for which he wrote briefly in 1944.) During the interwar period, Sebastian was well known for his lyrical and ironic plays (Star Without a Name, Let's Play Vacation, and The Last Hour), as well as for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy (Women, The Town with Acacia Trees, The Accident), and his extraordinary literary essays. Sebastian's activity as a journalist centered on the conservative paper Cuvintul, which was edited by Nae Ionescu (no relation of the playwright), and this often set him at loggerheads with both the left-wing press and the Jewish press. Nae Ionescu was a lively minor thinker preoccupied with metaphysics, logic, and religion. He never wrote an important work. He was, rather, a charismatic figure--a kind of guru--for young Romanian intellectuals between 1922 and 1940. He ended up as a supporter of the extremely right-wing, extremely nationalistic "Christian-orthodox" Iron Guard movement. Many years later, in 1967, Mircea Eliade bizarrely included Nae Ionescu in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and wrote this about his mentor: " God, for Nae Ionescu, is present in history through the Incarnation ... man's mode of being is completely fulfilled only through death, death is above all transcendent." A Romanian reader will recognize in Eliade's words more than a strictly academic evaluation. Sebastian's Journal begins in 1935, when Nazi Germany was flexing its muscles, and anti-Semitism was brimming with energy, and the danger of war was growing more acute. Indeed, a year earlier Sebastian had provoked a hue and cry with his novel De douA mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years). Written in the form of a pseudo-diary, and somewhat in the style of Andre Gide, the novel portrays the identity crisis of its protagonist, a young Jewish intellectual in Romania, in a period when the country itself is also undergoing the crisis of modernity. The first-person, nameless narrator, an architect by profession, records not only his apprenticeship years of friendship, love, and culture, but also the shock of his encounter with Romanian anti-Semitism. Sebastian's characters include the mesmerizing professor Ghita Blidaru, a sharp and passionate critic of modern values (modelled on Nae Ionescu), the nihilist Parlea (modelled on Cioran), the "Europeanist" architect Vieru, the Zionist Sami Winkler, the Jewish Marxist S.T. Haim (modelled on Bellu Zilber, a peculiar member of the then-illegal Romanian Communist Party), the Yiddishist Abraham Sulitzer, the British businessman Ralph T. Rice. The last lines of the novel express the protagonist's breakthrough into a feeling of resignation. Is he a Romanian? Is he a Jew? Who, precisely, is he? As he gazes at the villa that he designed and built for his "native Romanian" mentor Blidaru, he no longer seems to care about the search for roots. He experiences a moment of serene separation. He accepts with equanimity the two-thousand-year-old heritage of the outsider. The house is what its wanderer-builder always wished himself to be: "simple, clean, and calm, with an even heart, opened to all seasons." Sebastian's novel is set against the background of an anti-Semitism that had not yet taken the extreme form of the "Final Solution." But the catastrophe was rooted in what preceded it, as was suggested by Ionescu's preface to Sebastian's novel. Sebastian had asked Nae Ionescu to write the preface in 1931, when he started work on the book. Ionescu had guided Sebastian's early steps in journalism. As a professor of philosophy of religion and a scholar of the Old Testament, he had a good knowledge of Judaism. Though Ionescu was politically committed to the Right, he had a few years earlier rejected "the theory of the national state" with all its " police-type absurdities." By the time Sebastian finished his novel, however, Europe had already lurched violently to the right. In Romania it was not just an "anti-Semitic" year, it was, as Sebastian put it, a "hooligan year." And in keeping with the political weather, Nae Ionescu had become one of the ideologues of the Iron Guard, also known as the Legion, the right-wing extremist organization that deployed anti-Semitism as a major political weapon within a kind of terroristic Orthodox Christian fundamentalism. In 1934, still believing in his old friend's loyalty of "conscience," Sebastian gallantly repeated his request for Ionescu's endorsement of his book; and his former mentor, now a "Legionary Socrates," respected the promise he had made. He wrote the preface. And the words with which Sebastian expressed his shock on reading the preface have been conveyed by Eliade in his memoirs: "Nae gave me the preface. A tragedy, a real death sentence!" This was no exaggeration. Nae Ionescu's preface argued that Jewish and Christian values are essentially irreconcilable. The really virulent language comes at the end, when the JewishChristian conflict is seen as soluble only through the disappearance of its cause, the Jews. The Iron Guard ideologue provided a definition of Romanian identity: "We are Orthodox Christian because we are Romanian, and Romanian because we are Orthodox." This was not a new definition; prestigious intellectuals had already espoused it. What was especially dramatic, and especially dangerous, was the historical context in which these inflammatory pronouncements now appeared. Especially hard to forget was the part of Nae Ionescu's preface in which " Judah," having "refused to recognize Christ the Messiah," was declared an essential, irreducible enemy, a "dissolver of Christian values." The indictment was total, unconditional: "Judah suffers because it gave birth to Christ, beheld him and did not believe.... Judah suffers because it is Judah.... Iosif Hechter, you are sick. You are sick to the core because all you can do is suffer.... The Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter, and you have had no knowledge of him.... Or you have not seen, because pride put scales over your eyes.... Iosif Hechter, do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?" The writer of the novel that was being introduced was not referred to as Sebastian, but as Hechter, as "Judah." Thus the hooligan year 1934 was given a hooligan scandal. At the time, it seemed to some commentators that Sebastian's willingness to allow this incitement to genocide to appear at the front of his "Jewish" novel was perverse and cowardly. Assailed by fascists and Marxists, Christians and Jews, liberals and extremists, Sebastian replied with an essay, "How I Became a Hooligan," which appeared in 1935, the year in which his Journal begins. He wrote that anti-Semitism, which "channels toward Jews the hate-filled distractions of organisms in crisis," was nonetheless "on the periphery of Jewish suffering." In 1935, he still had a certain condescension toward external adversity, seeing it as minor or rudimentary in comparison with the ardent "internal adversity" that besets the Jews. Despite the dangers closing in from all sides, Sebastian continued to dwell romantically on the "spiritual autonomy" that Jewish suffering conferred upon the Jews. Judaism was a strict and tragic position in the face of existence. " No people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one has kept stricter watch on himself or punished himself more severely. The biblical prophets are the fieriest voices ever to have sounded on earth." Sebastian locates the "open wound" of Judaism, its "tragic nerve," in the tension between "a tumultuous sensitivity and a ruthlessly critical sense," between "intelligence in its coldest forms and passion in its most untrammelled forms." Sebastian liked to refer to himself as a "Danube Jew," and defined his identity as follows: "I am not a supporter, but always a dissident. I have confidence only in the single individual, but in him I have a great deal of confidence." He was adamantly opposed to the idea (it was all around him) that the collective has priority. "The death of the individual is the death of the critical spirit," and ultimately "the death of man." Sebastian's enemy is man in uniform: "Is it religion you want? Here's a membership card. Or a metaphysic? Here's an anthem. Or a commitment? Here's a leader." He thirsts for dialogue and friendship, but he clings to his faith in solitude: "We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone, without half-memories, without half-loves, without half-truths." As for the country that he never ceased to love for its paradoxes, its contradictions, and its eccentricities, Sebastian was not inclined to flatter it. "Nothing is serious, nothing is grave, nothing is true in this culture of smiling lampooners. Above all, nothing is incompatible.... Compromise is the blossom of violence. We therefore have a culture of brutality and horse-trading." The formulation profoundly describes a time when collusion and compromise were preparing a future of violence. Sebastian recalls the surprise that a Frenchman visiting Bucharest in 1933 felt at the intellectual "cohabitation" prevalent in the country. A notorious Iron Guardist, "caught in the act of intellectual tenderness" with a notorious Marxist, explained that "we are just friends--which doesn't involve commitment." Just friends: this, for Sebastian, is a "summing up of Bucharest psychology," a psychology of stupefying melanges and metamorphoses. "Incompatibility: a concept completely lacking at every level of our public life." The formulation recurs in the Journal: "Incompatibility is something unknown on the Danube." This and other statements appeared even more prophetic as the situation in Romania became more and more extreme. In 1937 the Iron Guard (supported by Sebastian's friend Eliade) scored a major success at the polls. Finally there were no illusions. "All is lost," Sebastian noted on February 21. The anti-Semitic government led by the poet Octavian Goga introduced into official discourse the evil "energy" of a language attuned to new imperatives: jidan (kike), jidAnime (a horde of kikes). The official review of Jewish citizenship, and the elimination of Jews from the bar and the press, was followed by further restrictions and humiliations. The danger grew. Officially inspired anti-Semitism gradually became a cheap entertainment within the reach of more and more people. The Iron Guard " rebellion" in January 1941 unleashed the predictable horrors in a city terrorized by armed street clashes and murderers chanting religious hymns. "A large number of Jews have been killed in BAneasa Forest and thrown there (most of them naked)," Sebastian noted on January 29. "But it seems that another lot have been executed at the slaughterhouse, at StrAulesti." A few days later, when he was reading about anti-Semitic persecutions in the Middle Ages in Simon Dubnow's History of the Jews, he turned again to what had happened."What stuns you most about the Bucharest massacre is the absolutely bestial ferocity with which things were done. . .the Jews slaughtered at StrAulesti were hung up on abattoir hooks, in the place of split-open cattle. Stuck to each corpse was a piece of paper with the words: kosher meat'.... I cannot find more terrible events in Dubnow." The worst fears were coming true. Even before the horrors, Sebastian had recorded premonitions. "An uneasy evening--without my realizing why. I feel obscure threats: as if the door isn't shut properly, as if the window shutters are transparent, as if the walls themselves are becoming translucent.Everywhere, at any moment, it is possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside--dangers I know to have always been there.... You feel like shouting for help--but from whom?" This was written, as if in a state of siege, on January 14, 1941. Many of Sebastian's friends were now in the enemy camp. The failure of the Iron Guard revolt infuriated and embittered them. "The Legion wipes its ass with this country," said Cioran immediately after the Iron Guard was defeated.Eliade expressed the same reaction more professorially: "Romania doesn't deserve a legionary movement." In 1941, General Ion Antonescu, a former ally of the Legion who was obsessed with "law and order," established a military dictatorship with the support of the Fuhrer. This did not put a stop to anti-Semitic murders. The summer of 1941 brought not only Romania's entry into the war, but also a fresh round of atrocities. Massacres took place at Ia,si; and long before the Nazi gas chambers were established--also in Ia,si--the sinister experiment of a "death train" killed hundreds and thousands of Jews by asphyxiation in sealed wagons on a journey heading nowhere. "A simple account of what is reported about the Jews killed in Ia,si or transported by train ... is beyond any words, feelings or attitudes. A bleak, pitch-black, crazy nightmare." Thus Sebastian in his diary on July 12, 1941. A few months earlier, in April 1941, the military dictator Antonescu told his ministers: "I'll retreat into my fortress and let the crowd massacre the Jews.After the massacre, I'll make order." And in September 1941, after the Ia,si massacre, and after Romania entered the war on Germany's side, Antonescu explained that the fight was not against the Slavs, it was against the Jews. " It's a mortal combat. Either we win and the world will be purified, or they win and we become their slaves." In the autumn of 1941, the Jewish population of Bukovina began to be deported to Transnistria. On October 20, Sebastian writes: "An anti-Semitic dementia that nobody can stop. Nowhere are there any restraints, any reason... . I see pallor and fear on Jewish faces. Their smile, their atavistic optimism freeze up. Their old consoling irony dwindles away." The Journal goes on to record the census of residents with "Jewish blood," the "carnage in Bukovina and Bessarabia," the obligation of Jews to give clothing to the state and of the Jewish community to pay a huge sum of money to the authorities, the ban on Jews selling goods in markets, the confiscation of skis and bicycles from Jews. "There is something diabolical in anti-Semitism," we read in the entry on November 12, 1941. "When we are not drowning in blood, we are wading through muck." For a rationalist such as Sebastian to use the word "diabolical" is a measure of the bestiality provoked by the " vulgar" anti-Semitism of his time. As Sebastian's journal proceeds between the blood and the filth, the " atavistic optimism" and the "consoling irony" grow dim. And the "internal adversity" of the Jews, with its selfcriticism and its "spiritual autonomy"?The Journal itself illustrates the awful truth that those are the natural assumptions, the necessary assumptions, of the human condition, and in no way the self-consuming aberration of a particular people. Even when external hostility is everywhere, and internal adversity appears to be a forbidden or trifling luxury, critical introspection survives, and it becomes the instrument of the spirit's survival. As the individual becomes just an anonymous member of a threatened community, the solitude by which Sebastian defined himself changes, even if its substance does not alter. "We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone": for a besieged man, surely, this sounds like a frivolous understatement. For what is the "price" of the solitude of a whole community, a whole people? It defies any normal parameter of suffering. For this reason, the tone of the Journal is really remarkable. The intimate exchange between solitude and solidarity slowly gives way to a mournful compassion. The "old" private solitude allows itself to be welcomed by the new isolation of the persecuted group, in a wounded, coerced joining. Under the pressure of hatred and horror, Sebastian's writing maintains the " grace" of its intelligence, which evil does not succeed in destroying. Marked now by the star of the captive minority to which he has been returned, the writer attempts to enliven the emptiness of waiting. He listens to music; he reads; he writes; he sees friends. A large and moving part of the Journal focuses on friendship, especially on his friendship with Mircea Eliade, the " first and last friend." After the "death sentence" handed down to him by Nae Ionescu, the "hooligan" Hechter-Sebastian no longer claimed anything but the right to perfect solitude, "without half-memories, without half-loves, without half-truths." In the sharply worse conditions of the following years, however, he proved to be still in the painful grip of Eliade, persisting in a friendship of halves of memory, love, and truth. The crisis of Sebastian's friendship with Eliade grew steadily worse. As early as 1936, it was no longer possible for Sebastian to ignore Eliade's political affiliations. "I would like to remove any political references from our discussion. But is that possible?" The answer is not long in coming: "The street reaches up to us whether we like it or not, and in the most trivial reflection I can feel the ever wider gulf between us.... There are awkward silences between us ... the disappointments keep piling up--one of them being his involvement with the anti-Semitic Vremea." (Vremea was a rather liberal weekly until the mid-1930s, when it started to "evolve" according to the spirit of the time.)