geert on Sun, 26 Apr 1998 14:28:15 +0100


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Syndicate: Norman Manea - The New Republic 2


Subject: Norman Manea The New Republic 2

Sebastian is already grasping the character of Eliade's politics, though
his lucidity is distorted by sentimentality, and by his essentially
apolitical vision. In 1937, however, a "long political discussion with
Mircea" leads to a sad realization: "He was lyrical, nebulous, full of
exclamations, interjections, apostrophes.... From all that I'll just
choose his (finally honest) statement that he loves the Guard, has hope in
it, and awaits its victory." In the same year, Eliade's famous declaration
of faith, "Why I Believe in the Triumph of the Legionary Movement," was
published in the movement's paper Buna Vestire. It included the following
question: "Can the Romanian nation end its life ... ravaged by poverty and
syphilis, overrun by Jews and torn apart by foreigners?"  It was not long
before Eliade's question found an answer in the humiliations and the
threats that his former friend, the alien Sebastian, born Hechter, had to
endure, as he faced being overrun at any moment by the local "patriots."
And further dialogue with Eliade only confirmed this.  "I told him I was
thinking of leaving the country," Sebastian writes on January 16, 1938.
"He agreed, as if it did indeed go without saying."  That is how it was: 
the "cleansing" of the country of its Jews was a self-evident ideal, for
which the Legionary movement never ceased to agitate.  "I have only to
walk in the door and suddenly there is silence." People speak about their
Jewish acquaintance in one way when he is in the room and in another way
when he leaves the room. On December 7, 1937, Sebastian finds Eliade's
concealment of the truth "even more sad" than the terrible truth itself,
which was that Eliade had traveled from village to village campaigning for
the Iron Guard as a "propagandist"  and also, it seemed, as a potential
candidate of the Legion in the elections. Astounding reports reach
Sebastian about what Eliade says in his absence. In March 1937, Eliade is
disgusted by the "Jewish spirit"  of a ballet. In 1939, at the time of the
German invasion of Poland, Eliade says this: "The Poles' resistance in
Warsaw is Jewish resistance.  Only yids are capable of blackmail by
putting women and children in the front line, so as to take advantage of
German scruples." And the example of Poland, with Jewish "blackmail" and
German "scruples," inspires in Eliade equally profound considerations
about Romania: "Only a pro- German policy can save us.... Rather than a
Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German
protectorate."  Sebastian's link with Eliade continued intermittently,
until the latter left Bucharest in 1940 for the Romanian embassy in
London, where eyewitnesses described him as a propagandist for the Iron
Guard. Later Eliade was sent as a diplomat to Lisbon, where his fascist
convictions were given more or less disguised forms of expression. About
Eliade's time in Lisbon, Sebastian notes on May 27, 1942: "Now he is more
of a Legionary than ever." (After the war Eliade referred only equivocally
and in passing to his guilt. See my essay, " Happy Guilt," in tnr, August
5, 1991.)  So why did Sebastian cling to this friendship with a man with
whom he should have been "incompatible"? Why did he become himself an
example of the ambiguities that he denounced? Surely Sebastian did not
delude himself that the friendship would protect him from the danger all
around him. No, there was a different reason. For a rational and gentle
man such as Sebastian, the illusion of friendship provided the
encouragement of a normal past. Memories are "the only paradise from which
we cannot be expelled," as the German poet Jean Paul observed. Moreover,
Sebastian had a calm, resigned disdain for everything ideological and
tribal. He had also a writer's curiosity about the surprises and the
ambiguities that he observed in himself and those around him, and this,
too, perhaps, made him tolerant of his fascist friend. As early as 1936,
when the ever wider "gulf" with his "first and last" friend could be felt
in "the most trivial reflection," he asked in his journal: " Will I lose
Mircea for so little?"  For so little! Sebastian's extraordinary words
express his contempt for the mediocrity of politics, and his irritation at
Eliade's deplorable "error." The innocent will show the world--will show
himself, against the world--that he can save the guilty, as a friend and
an interlocutor.  He cannot admit that mediocrity has won the day even in
the case of his brilliant and beloved Eliade, just as he cannot admit that
there is not merely "incompatibility" between the intellectual and the man
in uniform, but also a deeper, more subtle relationship of attraction and
repulsion, a relationship eager for the thrills and the compensations of
vitality, mystification, martyrdom, and all manner of excess.  Perfectly
aware of the abyss between himself and Eliade (an ideological abyss that
was already filling with corpses), Sebastian nevertheless records the
surprising moments of affection that linger in their moribund friendship.
He cannot help being concerned by the risks that his friend faced in his
ugly adventure, though he himself feels every day the cold and the
darkness of the threat from the uniforms of Eliade's "comrades."
Sebastian's portraits of Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and other Romanian
intellectuals in the grip of the nationalist delirium are devastating
precisely because of their calm, patient, affectionate tone, their
mingling of horror and candor.  In its historical context, the
Sebastian-Eliade friendship stands as a symbol of everything that
signified terror and hope, ambiguity and fear, cowardice and chance, in
the Jewish-Christian relationship in Europe in the obscene decade between
1935 to 1945. These staggering and shocking Romanian " compatibilities,"
their double-dealing and triple-dealing with complicity and compromise,
played a role in the dissipation of moral (and not only moral)
certainties, offering terrible, or generous, surprises. This might explain
both the horrific persecution and the eventual salvation of a large part
of the Jewish population of Romania.  Sebastian's Journal records, with
growing weariness and bitterness, the precise forms of disguise and
fakery.  After the Legionary revolt was defeated in 1941, Sebastian
watches some of its ex-fanatics hurry to accommodate themselves to the new
situation:  "From one day to the next they renege, modify, attenuate,
explain, agree on a line, justify themselves, forget what displeases and
remember what suits them." He discovers in horror how his friend
Eliade--who had presented himself at the Romanian embassy in London as a
future dignitary of the Legion--sums up this year in which the most
dreadful anti-Jewish massacres were carried out in Ia, si and Bucharest.
"There have been two extraordinary things for me this year," Eliade wrote
from London to a mutual friend: "the astonishing weakness of the Soviet
air force, and my reading of Camoens."  And yet, even in this nightmarish
atmosphere, a few figures brighten the pages of the Journal. First and
foremost among them is Eugene Ionesco.  In Ci, smigiu Park in Bucharest,
as one of Hitler's speeches was being broadcast on the radio, Ionesco
stood up choking at what he heard. "He was pale, white in the face.I can't
take it! I can't!' He said this with a kind of physical desperation...."
Sebastian records on October 3, 1941. "I felt like hugging him." He also
notes a message from another friend: "You make me feel ashamed,
Mihai--ashamed that you suffer and I do not." And after the anti-Semitic
massacres in Ia,si, he recalls the reaction of two university professors
in the Moldovan capital. One covered his face with "a gesture of
impotence, fear and disgust"; the other uttered just a few words: "The
most bestial day in the history of mankind."  Finally, in 1944, when the
Red Army entered Bucharest, not a few people changed sides in a flash.
"Everyone is rushing to fill posts," Sebastian records, "to make use of
titles, to establish rights.... A taste for lampooning alternates in me
with a kind of helpless loathing for all the imposture, all the
effrontery, all the sinister play-acting."  This, then, was Sebastian's
odyssey, which he experienced all in the same place. In 1934, declaring
himself a "Danube Jew," the hero of Sebastian's novel For Two Thousand
Years movingly stated on the author's behalf: "I should like to know what
anti-Semitic laws could cancel the irrevocable fact that I was born on the
Danube and love this land....  Against my Jewish taste for inner
catastrophe, the river raised the example of its regal indifference. " In
1943, he was asking, "Shall I go back to those people? Will the war have
passed without breaking anything--without anything irrevocable, anything
irreducible, between my life before' and my life tomorrow'?" In 1944, he
was preparing to leave "the eternal Romania in which nothing ever
changes." His description of an encounter with a Jewish captain from the
U.S. Army suggests which destination he had in mind for his adventure: "an
unaffected young man full of vitality, concerned about us as Jews,
concerned about democracy and its reality. A human being. A new figure. 
Really somebody." But Sebastian's hope of leaving "the land of the Danube"
was cut short by his accidental death on May 29, 1945. He was 38 years
old. Death spared him any postwar experiment with "compulsory happiness"
in Communist captivity in his own country.  The publication of Sebastian's
journal sparked a powerful reaction in Romania. Several editions have
already sold out, and the discussion continues in the press. The book
provoked a catharsis in a society that seems afraid to scrutinize its past
and hesitates to admit its own contribution to the Holocaust, in a country
in which criticism of the nationalist tradition in culture is sometimes
considered an unpatriotic act, if not actual blasphemy. " In reading it," 
writes Vasile Popovici, a writer from Timisoara, where the anti-Ceausescu
revolt began in 1989, "you cannot possibly remain the same. The Jewish
problem becomes your problem. A huge sense of shame spreads over a whole
period of the national culture and history, and its shadow covers you
too."  Still, the number of those who are willing to make the Jewish
problem their problem is not very large. For a significant number of
public voices in Romania, the Holocaust seems to be (as Jean-Marie Le Pen
once put it) a " detail" of the war. Even those who recognize the scale of
the catastrophe do not always seem prepared to accept what it reveals. 
This is especially evident in the debate about Marshal Antonescu, the
military dictator during the period of Romania's alliance with Nazi
Germany, to whom the Romanian Parliament paid homage in 1991, and who has
been honored in many public places in today's Romania. When a
distinguished Romanian intellectual with democratic leanings intervened a
few years ago in the controversy about the rehabilitation of Antonescu, he
argued that an "exclusive, overwhelming" emphasis on the dictator's
antiJewish policy "would prevent science--in this case, history--from
honestly and objectively performing its duty." Similarly, in the polemics
surrounding the publication of Sebastian's Journal, there have been voices
"annoyed" at this new and weighty testimony in what some see as an overly
protracted discussion of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, doubts have been
cast on the authenticity of the text.  Critics have ruminated on the
subjectivity of private journals generally. All this, so as not to face
the evidence of what Sebastian wrote.  It is little wonder that even the
infrequent empathy with the suffering of the Jews is peculiarly expressed.
In 1997, the director of the publishing house Humanitas, the very house
that published Sebastian's Journal, gave a talk affectingly entitled
"Sebastian, mon frere" at the Jewish Community Center in Bucharest. He
explained his solidarity with Jewish suffering in terms of his own
hardship under the Communists and the post-Communists. It is an analogy
that leaves no room to evoke anti-Semitism and the Holocaust properly, or
to analyze honestly the "happy guilt" of such intellectuals as Eliade,
Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and Noica.  Also, in an editorial statement entitled
"Vintoarea de vrAjitoare," or "The Witch Hunt," the director of the
important magazine Romania literarA complained that the condemnation of
Celine and Hamsun was lasting too long. He deplored the "Israeli" campaign
against Eliade, and the recent debate in France about Cioran's Legionary
past, and the "exaggerations" in Sebastian's Journal. Never mind that the
(far from unanimous) condemnation of Celine and Hamsun has not precluded
the recognition of their literary distinction; or that their guilt was
owed not necessarily to their writings, but to their actual collaboration
with the Nazis. By describing criticism in an open society as a "witch
hunt," and comparing it with the communist repression of intellectual
life, the editorial in Romania literarA was promoting a shocking confusion
of terms.  In contrast with such slips and ambiguities, we may cite a
statement by another prominent Romanian intellectual. Writing in 1997,
Petru Cretia observed that "the most monstrous thing after the Holocaust
is the persistence of even a minimal anti-Semitism." In this context, he
mentioned Sebastian's Journal, and the old-new compatibilities: "I know
public figures who, while parading flawless morality, impeccably
democratic conduct, wise level-headedness, and perhaps a pompous
solemnity, are capable in private-- and in some cases elsewhere--of
foaming at the mouth against Jews: here and now. I have seen irrefutable
proof of the fury aroused by Sebastian's Journal, and of the feeling that
lofty national values are besmirched by such calm, sad, and forgiving
revelations on the part of that fair-minded (often angelic)  witness." 
This statement appeared just a few days before the death of this
distinguished man of letters and good Christian. It was published not in a
mass-circulation magazine, but in Realitatea evreiascA, the newspaper of
the Jewish community in Romania.  What, then, are we to conclude from
Mihail Sebastian and his posthumous career? At least this: that the
"forward" movement of Eastern Europe should be evaluated not only for its
ability to modernize political and economic structures, but also for its
ability to clarify the recent history of these scarred societies, and to
direct them toward the full truth. This is not an easy task, and it is
first and foremost the task of intellectuals, not politicians. But our
future is premised on the quality, on the probity, of our understanding of
the past. 

Norman Manea is Writer in Residence and Francis Flournoy
Professor of European Culture and Studies at Bard College.
--translated by Patrick Camiller (Copyright 1998, The New Republic)