[1] In Romania, the minorities represented 28.1% of the population, that is, 5,072,893 people (Manuilă, in Encyclopedia of Romania, I). Jews represented 4% of the population (between 722,000 and 758,000 citizens).
by Marta Petreu
excerpt After the year when its first program was launched, namely Mircea Eliade's Spiritual Itinerary, the generation of '27 (or the young generation, the generation of the '30s, the generation that lived life for life's sake, the experiential and Orthodox generation), so rightfully named by Dan C. Mihăilescu, was first of all a phenomenon of Bucharest, having its "headquarters" at the University's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. The tough nucleus of the generation is formed by Nae Ionescu's students and his collaborators at Cuvântul. At the beginning, there were strongly personalized relationships among the members of the generation, and this aspect renders it similar, in its incipient phase, to Junimea, to the Literary Circle in Sibiu, or to Echinox. As the generation stands out more and more tumultuously in Romanian cultural life, it draws young men from other cultural fields (writers, actors, directors, painters, ballet dancers, journalists, etc.) as members; at the same time, contagiously, it turns itself from a phenomenon initiated in Bucharest, into a larger one, comprising, "for the first time in the history of Romanian culture", all the cultural centers in the country, as Mircea Vulcănescu noticed. Romania's legitimizing crisis Through its two programs – A Spiritual Itinerary in 1927, written by Eliade, and The Manifesto of "The White Lily" in 1928, written by Sorin Pavel, Ion Nistor and Petre Marcu-Balş (Pandrea) – the generation announces itself as apolitical, "parricide" (E. Ionescu), autochthonous, anti-French, Orthodox, anti-"1848-ers" and against the Junimea circle. It relies on its own experience (hence, the name of "experiential generation", given by Mihail Ilovici), on living, on existential adventure, on culture and spirituality. It is a generation which had a frenetic start and is marked by a frenetic rhythm; not accidentally, its (contested) leader, Mircea Eliade, demands in 1928 that the young Romanian intellectuals live and create as if they were living the last year of their lives. At the beginning, this generation is obsessed with getting Romanian culture out of its "provincialism" and making it exist on a universal scale. The idea, formulated in different ways, may be found in Eliade and Vulcănescu, Ionel Jianu and Bucur Ţincu. Decades later, here is how Eliade describes that moment: "Unlike our forefathers, who had been born and had lived with the ideal of the reunification of the people, we no longer had a ready-made ideal at hand. (…) We were the first generation that was not previously conditioned by a historical objective to be achieved." Simultaneously, Eliade recognizes his fear that "our generation, the only free, «available» generation, will not have the time to fulfill its «mission» (…) to be able to create freely…" An outsider of the generation, Bucur Ţincu, states the same ideal of universality in Cluj, at the very moment of his debut: "Today's generation has to overcome, in its orientations, the national ethic of past generations. (…) We need a profound culture based on science and philosophy." The problem of creating a major Romanian culture was, actually, in those years, a problem which the entire Romanian intelligentsia was highly aware of; after the lucky year 1918, when the whole of Romania was united, Romanian intellectuals freely and lucidly assumed the problem of legitimizing Romania in front of the Occident; they all agreed that the only way a people can justify itself "in front of the spirit's judgment seat" (D. D. Roşca) is by the universal values it creates. The members of the generation of '27 were not the initiators, but only the noisiest, the most impatient and violent promoters (Cioran) of Romania's legitimizing crisis. An apolitical, parricide, autochthonous, experiential, anti-"1848-ers" generation At the beginning, there was no political projection in the generation's program. Conservative, autochthonous, antidemocratic and Orthodox formulations did exist in the ideational disorder of the two manifestoes; yet, they lacked political finality, and, in the case of Eliade, they may be considered as a mere reflection of Nae Ionescu's courses. These formulations did not necessarily lead to politics, much less to extreme-right politics. As a proof, Bucur Ţincu's evolution who, at his debut (1931), had the same premisses as Eliade and the "White Lily" Group, but after 1935, more precisely after some time spent in France, he evolved towards a democratic option, explicitly opposite to communism and the Iron Guard Movement. Up to 1932-1933, the generation manifested itself in a strictly cultural environment, namely that of the debate. The numerous young intellectuals' associations that preceded Criterion – "The Intellectual Group", "The Forum" etc. – were apolitical and cultural. Even the founding of Criterion, on May 25th, 1932, had a purely intellectual purpose and character. As proof of their detachment from politics, there were discussions about Lenin, Mussolini, Garbo, Gide, Chaplin, Gandhi, Krishnamurti, etc. at Criterion in the fall of 1932; among the speakers standing at the same tribune of the intellectual debate on Lenin there were two communists (Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and Belu Silber), a member of the Iron Guard (Mihail Polihroniade), a neutral (Mircea Vulcănescu), and an Austro-Marxist socialist (Henri H. Stahl) who took the word from the audience to confront Pătrăşcanu. Between October and November 1932, the generation of '27 continued to be, according to the intention of its organizers and leaders, a cultural and apolitical generation, despite being suspected of "crypto-communism" and bolshevism by the State Security Police, and despite being suspected of philo-semitism by the Iron Guard Movement and the supporters of Cuza. At the same time, the fall of 1932 and the winter of 1933 prepared and marked the dissolution of the apolitical unity of the generation, as well as its entering the field of active political fighting. Comarnescu, for example, wrote at the end of 1932 that the association was "used as a tribune by the communists, although there were some members who were heading towards the right"; in January 1933, he wrote the following: "Some of the members are joining the right-wing movements, such as Mişu Polihroniade, who tried at first to enlist Argetoianu's and other politicians' sympathy. We will have many surprises, as this is the time when everyone's stand is beginning to establish itself more clearly – for those who want to join the active politics, either of the left or of the right. Our generation is divided into two opposite groups, that are caught up in a fierce fight. I do not want to become an active politician, I would like to keep my intellectual stand and devote myself to culture". In his turn, Cioran, a convinced apolitical person, wrote at the beginning of January 1933: "…the new generation seems to have abandoned its initial orientation: instead of the religious and philosophical problems posed some years ago (…) we are being presented now, in a scandalous absolutist way, with the political and social alternative of the left or of the right, we are asked to fit entirely either into the one or the other, to adopt a political attitude, to make observations on the Iron Guard or on the ascendance of the young people of the «left»"; "…we are asked to believe in such a small thing as an organization or to militate all the way to sacrificing ourselves for an ephemeral historical ideal." Three ways to politicization In 1945, going over the history of his "proud" generation, Eugen Ionescu speaks, in his turn, about the politicization of the generation as a means of migration towards the extreme right even of those who used to be "communists" (Haig Acterian, Mihail Polihroniade). The general suggestion is that the generation broke in two, the legionary extreme right, and the left. A late testimony of Ionel Jianu, dating from the '90s, presents a more complicated picture: "…several groups started to form inside «Criterion»: the extreme right, which went towards the Iron Guard Movement – Mihail Polihroniade, Haig Acterian, Alexandru Christian Tell, Marietta Sadova, and others. Then, a nationalist right group, which did not go all the way to the extreme right, but adopted Nae Ionescu's options: Mircea Eliade, Mircea Vulcănescu, Noica and so on… There was also a central group, made up of Sebastian, Comarnescu, myself, and others, and an extreme-left one, including Belu Silber, Alexandru Sahia, Nicolae Cristea…" Leaving aside the statement about Eliade and Noica, which simultaneously conceals and reveals them, the image offered by Jianu is the closest to the historical reality of the '30s. The generation of '27 did not divide into two, but literally broke up into three: some headed for the Iron Guard movement of the extreme right, some for the communist extreme left, and some kept their apolitical and cultural stands, manifesting themselves as democrats in times of pressure; this last category contains several political nuances ranging from centre-right to centre-left, just like traditional, democratic political parties have several nuances. 1. Among those who joined the extreme right legionary movement were Mihail Polihroniade, the first one to become a legionary, but whom Eugen Ionescu wrote about as having been a communist first of all; Emil Cioran, who became a member in November 1933 and brought together elements of the extreme right and of the extreme left in the doctrine of national collectivism, showing a declared admiration for Bolshevik Russia which equaled his admiration for Hitler's Germany; Mircea Eliade, who joined the movement in November-December 1935. E. Ionescu informs us that at one point Eliade was about to "adopt a left-wing stand"; he was probably talking about Eliade's collaboration with "Azi" magazine, edited by Zaharia Stancu, for which he wrote a total of 10 texts from March 1932 until October 1934, but the fact does not justify the allusion. Or is he talking about the ambiguity of his characters full of communist ideas?; Constantin Noica, who became a legionary rather late, but nevertheless a full member, in 1938; Haig Acterian (considered to have initially been a communist by both Sebastian and E. Ionescu); Alexandru Tell, one of the leaders of Criterion, according to Eliade; Petre Ţuţea, a fanatical communist until 1933, a legionary afterwards; Arşavir Acterian, Marietta Sadova, Dan Botta ("a sort of absolutely… queer legionary", as he is described by Stahl, a man who knew nothing), and from outside Criterion, from the fringe of the generation, Vintilă Horia, Radu Gyr, P. P. Panaitescu, Ernest Bernea, Traian Herseni (who was initially suspected of communism, since he collaborated with Zaharia Stancu's "Azi" magazine, and then became a legionary, according to the writings of Nicolae Mărgineanu). 2. Those who went towards the communist extreme left were: Belu Silber, "the only communist among us", according to Eliade, who was saved from prison in 1931 by Nae Ionescu, either at the request of Pandrea, or that of Sebastian; Petre Pandrea, a former student of Nae Ionescu at Dealu Monastery, a communist from the very beginning, as he declared himself; in the Manifesto of the "White Lily" (1928) he adopted a national-autochthonous stand; after 1931, he was the defender in all communist trials, therefore his evolution went from nationalism to extreme-left communism; in 1938, Pandrea became a member of the National Peasant Party; Miron Radu Paraschivescu, since 1933, a great admirer the Soviet Union and of the socialist revolution; Alexandru Sahia, author of USSR Today (1935), a very laudatory book about Soviet realities; yet Pandrea writes that Sahia visited the Soviet Union only after he had published the book. Vulcănescu's list of "Marxists" is even larger; besides those mentioned above, it includes Nicolae Tatu, Alfons Adania, Ştefan Beldie, Anton Dumitrescu, M. Grigorescu, etc. 3. Those whose stands waver between detachment from politics and democracy, depending on the circumstances: Eugen Ionescu (an apolitical man until 1938), Petru Comarnescu, Ionel Jianu, Mihail Sebastian, Bucur Ţincu, Alexandru Vianu, Ion Vlasiu, Anton Golopenţia, Sandu Tudor, etc.; a special case is represented by Stahl, who was an Austro-Marxist. Vulcănescu was not a legionary, although he was an admirer of Nae Ionescu, a sympathizer of the legionaries, a subscriber to an autochthonous doctrine, etc. He remained an eternal and honest civil servant of the Romanian state (the same state which both the legionaries and the communists wanted to destroy by means of a revolution), having the status of the apolitical technician, just like Golopenţia. Hesitating between extremes The most interesting phenomenon about this generation is the fact that many of them dally with, or take part in, both extremes, successively. If one extreme fails to rise to their expectations, instead of falling back, they fall from one extreme into the other, according to the law of the pendulum. Between 1932 and 1933, the generation of '27 is / seems to be under the control of a radical-revolutionary impulse which only political extremism can fully satisfy. This phenomenon of migrating from one extreme to another manifests itself in 1944 as well, when a large number of legionaries, ranging form simple people to intellectuals, move quickly to the communist side. The phenomenon of 1944-1945 seems to have been an opportunist one, and therefore different from the legionary conversion of 1932-1933, done out of pure conviction. There were, nevertheless, some conversions to legionarism in 1940 which were dictated by opportunism, after the proclaiming of the national-legionary state. The existence of both a legionary extreme right and a communist extreme left inside the generation of '27 remained an uncommented upon phenomenon, somewhat hidden in the shadow. The reason for this concealment must be sought, first of all, in the communist regime, which blocked historical and ideological research; secondly, the very hesitation between communism and the legionary movement is such a scandalously strange problem, that a debate on this subject was quite impossible during the old regime; thirdly, the immense value of the young people who adhered to the extreme-right legionary movement eliminated for a long time from the debate those who adhered to the communist extreme left and who were of a lesser importance, as far as their value was concerned. Coincidences and divergences of doctrine between communism and the legionary movement: What do the two extremes have to offer, politically speaking? There are not only obvious divergences, but also important coincidences between their doctrines. 1. Both communism and legionarism (I mention them in this order simply because of chronology: the Romanian Communist Party – PCR – was established in 1921, whereas the Legion was founded in 1927) have in common "revolutionary Messianism". In the context of interwar Romania, the idea of a revolution which would level all the existent order to the ground and install a new one, together with a "new, happiness-inducing world" (Eliade, M. R. Paraschivescu) was obsessively invoked. The revolutionary idea came from Europe, where the scent of revolution was already in the air. Most likely, the revolutionary syndrome was due to the fact that the simple existence of the Soviet Union caused an unbalance in Europe's system of values and reference points. If we also take into account the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War (Germany, Hungary, etc.), if we take into account Mussolini's fascism and, since 1933, Hitlerism, we may be able to understand where the Romanian revolutionary impulse came from. The documents of the PCR and the UTC (Union of Communist Youth) dating from 1921-1940 speak about "the danger of the revolution which hovers over capitalist-landowner Romania", about the powerful "radicalization and revolutionizing of large masses of workers in the cities and villages", about the "deepening of antagonisms in the bourgeois-landowner camps", about the "revolutionary forces" which, under "the leadership of the Communist Party, will strike a blow (…) against the capitalist regime", about the fact that Romania "has entered the period of workers' and peasants' revolution for good, and without the possibility of stopping" (Pages from the History of the PCR, IV), about "the Russian Revolution which is our revolution", and how every "red fighter is (…) a soldier of the world revolution" (Pages from the History of the UTC). In their turn, the legionaries proposed their own revolution, "the national revolution". Its theoretician was Vasile Marin. The national revolution would form "the national, totalitarian state", the "unified, authoritarian, totalitarian, legionary state of tomorrow", the "Romanian-national-Christian-legionary state of tomorrow". 2. Both communism and legionarism attack democracy violently: not only Romanian democracy, but also the idea of democracy. Communists declare from the very beginning: "The PCR does not believe in bourgeois democracy. Democracy, parliament, free elections, equality (…) are nothing but lies"; or, our democracy is "for the few exploiters and oppressors, headed by the king and the camarilla". Or, their answer to the question "where to?" would be: "Neither with the confused and powerless «democracy», nor with the narrow-minded and deceitful fascism"; instead of bourgeois democracy, they dream about and propose "the dictatorship of the proletariat". The legionaries, in their turn, attack "imported" democracy, considering it as having every possible flaw: it is corrupted, it gave the right to vote to Jews and to other minorities, it serves the great finance, it lacks authority and elitism, etc. (see Codreanu and V. Marin). The attack on the democratic regime and the idea of change are so widely diffused that even a democratic author such as Eugen Ionescu, hostile to both communism and the European extreme right, writes that "the old democracies" lost their power and became "almost just as fateful as the communist or the extreme-right regimes", so they should be revived by a "gust of fresh air", for them to discover-rediscover some sort of mystique – perhaps the mystique of freedom – which would bring them back to life. 3. Both the communists and the legionaries had a liberating, redeeming ideal, achievable only after Romanian democracy would have been eradicated from the country and the revolution would have taken place. The extreme left promised universal redemption, namely by means of economic, social and political class purification. In Romania, it promised redemption for the workers: "It will save Romanian workers and peasants from being exploited and oppressed" (From the History of the PCR). Violence in history, or the fighting among social classes, which Marx raised to the level of dynamic principle of history, would be accompanied, of course, by victims; the documents of the PCR promise that it will lead to "chasing the exploiters away with the gun in our hands". The fate of the victims – considered guilty by the communists, since it was all about property and exploitation – is left unmentioned. The communist practice between 1945-1989 nevertheless showed what it meant to get rid of exploiters, of the exploiting class, of political parties and politicians. And this was the beginning of the Romanian Gulag. In their turn, the legionaries led "the fight to redeem the country", and planned for "a new Romania and the long-waited for resurrection of this people" (Codreanu) by means of race purification. It would take a "new man" to accomplish the national revolution, that is, to get rid of the democratic regime, the political parties and, the main obstacle in the way of Romanian fulfillment, "the foreigners". Among the "foreigners" (for Codreanu, "foreigners" are the Romanian citizens of a different ethnicity), the Jews came first in line. The texts written by Codreanu and those by Vasile Marin allow us to notice that in the state they envisaged, the Jews would no longer have any political rights, and, very likely, no right to property. The idea of expelling them from the country – "Romania belongs to Romanians. Jews should go to Palestine" – and that of murdering them – "we shall spread death around" – were also present. The practice of the legionary movement was in accordance, ranging all the way from breaking windows and beating to anti-Jew murders during the (January 1941) rebellion. The idea of a "final solution", brought about by Germany in 1941, could not be applied to Romania by the legionaries, because they had been removed from power, chased, imprisoned, etc. We should note that, in the eyes of the Legion, Romanian politicians would be punished as well, a programmatic idea put into practice by means of the political assassinations and the terror spread during the legionary government. And this was the beginning of the Romanian contribution to the Holocaust. 4. Both the communists and the legionaries demand discipline from their members: discipline at both the individual and organizational levels: "In the end, a communist must be a disciplined member of the movement, for without an iron discipline there can be no revolutionary organization of the working class," it is mentioned in a party document from 1924. The UTC is under the "absolute control of the party." In its turn, the Legion has a paramilitary organization, based on the principle of absolute discipline and obedience: "Be a disciplined member of the Legion, for this is the only way to succeed. Obey your superior in good times as well as bad times," stipulates the Little Book of the Nest Leader. 5. From these programmatic resemblances, we may pass now to similar political tactics. For instance, both the Communist Party and the Legion tried to hold on to their members by forbidding them to have any connection with parties which had a neighboring doctrine. What the PCR claimed was this: "Have no trust in Cuza, in bourgeois parties, have no trust in the so-called socialist parties"; Codreanu, in his turn, forbade the legionaries to get close to A. C. Cuza's party which was, after all, his party of origin. Then, any successful action – for example, editing the Socialist Youth (1922) and Ancestral Land (1927) magazines – represented a won "battle", a "revolutionary deed", etc. 6. Both the communists and the legionaries exaggerated the importance of national minorities in Romania. Of course, they did it for completely different reasons. The communists claimed that minorities were "oppressed nationalities" and that they "make up for two fifths of Romania's population" (Documents from the History of the PCR, 1935). Codreanu and V. Marin considered that the minorities in Romania were suffocating; especially the Jews, whose number they estimated to be around three million.[1] The reasons for which the communists increased the figures are simple: when it was established (May 8th, 1921), the PCR adhered unconditionally to the Third Communist International. According to the directives given by the Communist International, Romania was considered a multinational country. Over the entire interwar period, the PCR engaged in propaganda against any discrimination based on race or nationality – which constitutes its respectable point – and for the right of the "oppressed nationalities" to self-government: "The right to self-government going all the way to their break-up from the Romanian state." In all occasions, the PCR and the UTC repeated this slogan meant to break up the newly-formed Romanian national state. From the other side, that of the legionary movement, the importance of minorities was exaggerated both as an expression of the persecution psychosis according to which everything that was bad came from the minorities, especially from the Jews, and as a means to maintain an anti-minority, anti-Hungarian and anti-Jew psychosis. Researchers dealing with this problem – Ornea, Volovici, Oişteanu, Armin Heinen, etc, including diarists such as Pandrea or Zaharia Boilă – noticed that the success of the extreme right "was the result of a revived anti-Semitism" (Heinen), and that the stirring of anti-Semitism starting with 1922 (in Cluj; see Zaharia Boilă) was a scheming diversion that caught on, afterwards, in interwar Romania, which was only happy to find itself a scapegoat for the many real problems it had with itself. 7. Romanian communism was imported. Communists had the Russian revolution and the achievements of the Soviet Union as a model. The documents of the PCR describe the heavenly atmosphere in the soviets, the collectivism, the 5-hour working day, the socialism "where there are no social classes" and there is no exploitation, and, of course, express the total solidarity with the Soviet Union, as well as the wish for Romania to have a "Soviet government". Although the communist press was significantly reduced in number, although there was also a small number of communists, for those that were, the idea of the Soviet paradise caught on and lasted until later on. M. R. Paraschivescu, for example, dreamt about "the universal revolution", "the dictatorship of the people" and yearned for Stalin: "O, History, bring Stalin back quickly with his uneducated armies! He is our only hope"; in a similar way, he rejected Gide's book on the Soviets: "I, for one, will not utter one single bad word against the USSR", and declared his equal love for "Loti (his wife) and for the Party". (And if Dan Botta was dreaming of an "illiterate country", M. R. Paraschivescu, as we may see, waited for Stalin's "uneducated armies"; at the extreme right or the extreme left, the intelligentsia of the generation yearned equally for barbarism and primitivism as a solution to Romanian problems.) The legionaries, for a change, are our own national creation. Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's national socialism acted as confirmations of the legionary movement, but they were not the model which could have inspired Codreanu, Moţa and V. Marin. The sources and models of the legionary movement were mainly autochthonous: ideas belonging to A. C. Cuza, Nichifor Crainic (despite his ecstatic attitude towards fascism), Nae Ionescu, and many elements of the legionary organization and life were taken by Codreanu from DealuMonasteryHigh School in Valea Voivozilor, where he had studied. 8. Both the (rather few) communists and the (increasingly more) legionaries went through a process of fanaticization which prevented them from seeing the truth, even when it was standing right in front of them. Whereas Cioran praised Hitler in a trance in 1934, and in the sad autumn of the national-legionary state he glorified Codreanu's face and considered him as important as Jesus, Miron Radu Paraschivescu, a communist, wrote in his diary, on December 4th, 1944, that "one of the most beautiful poems of mine, published in Orizont, is about Stalin", and that he was happy because it expressed "a feeling of confidence in the Soviet leader"; on July 11th, 1945, although admitting that "the Red Army" "violates and kills", he accepts the fact as it is, on the grounds that it was all "an accident"; what mattered most was that the army liberated the people and brought on the socialist revolution. The differences and similarities between the two extremes can go on. The communists are international people, whereas the legionaries are nationalists. The former are in favor of equality among people, the latter are in favor of elitism and propose an aristocracy made up of worthy members of the Legion. Communists are in favor of getting rid of ethnic, racial, and national discrimination, the legionaries theorize on discrimination inside the Romanian state, according to ethnic, national or racial criteria. The communists support the idea of equality and the elimination of social and class differences (and we know how many lives this idea cost!), the legionaries put forward the idea of aristocracy and that of the elite. The communist doctrine is much more promising and humanitarian than that of the legionary movement, which is xenophobe and anti-Semite. It so happened that in Romania the two extremes gained power successively: the extreme right, a Romanian creation, which had become a "collective popular mystique" (Stahl), a movement of the masses, held power for a short period of time: only four and a half months. The communist extreme left – an imported product, which had few members in the interwar period, very few of them coming from the young intelligentsia – was imposed by the Soviet army and by international treaties signed by the world's democratic countries; it lasted for 45 years. The reasons for political option In 1932-1933, the generation of '27 starts to become more and more involved in politics, some members (a lot) join the legionary movement, others (a few) become communists, still others maintain their apolitical stands, opening up to democracy, if necessary. The problem that arises is why did so many of them choose to join the extreme right and not the democratic centre or the communist extreme left? Those who went around the central, democratic political stand did it precisely because they were under the influence of the revolutionary idea and they wanted to replace the existent order with a new one. And the first answer to the question "why hadn't they opted for communism?" is that the Communist Party, by supporting the right to self-government up to the point where some provinces would break up from the Romanian state, was not at all attractive for these young authors who intended to legitimize Romania through the creation of universal cultural values. In other words, the fact that the Romanian Communist Party envisaged a break-up of the barely united national state was reason enough for most intellectual young people to head in a different direction. (It was not reason enough for M. R. Paraschivescu, for example, who thought that Romania should be turned into a federal state.) Then, an immediate cause, named as such by Cioran and Eugen Ionescu, was the insidious and personal influence of Nae Ionescu, who got close to the Legion in the fall of 1933 and, following his expulsion from the Camarilla or the break-up with the King, he became its ideologist in the shadow. Other causes have to be searched for, depending on the case, among the metaphysical fundaments of each author and in the way in which each of them found their ideas or interests in the very protean Legionary Movement. We must not forget the fact that political pressure in Romania was increasing, that the Legionary Movement was becoming stronger, and the European extreme right gained more and more ground. 22 magazine, 18-24 February, 2003 Marta PETREU (b. 1955) teaches philosophy at the University of Cluj. A poet, journalist and essayist, she is also the author of An Infamous Past: The Transfiguration of Romania, an "unobtrusive guide to the fevered, alienated milieu that turned Cioran, an apolitical philosopher of history and culture, into a passionate partisan of Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin" (Robert Legvold, in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006).
[1] In Romania, the minorities represented 28.1% of the population, that is, 5,072,893 people (Manuilă, in Encyclopedia of Romania, I). Jews represented 4% of the population (between 722,000 and 758,000 citizens).
by Marta Petreu
[1] In Romania, the minorities represented 28.1% of the population, that is, 5,072,893 people (Manuilă, in Encyclopedia of Romania, I). Jews represented 4% of the population (between 722,000 and 758,000 citizens).
by Marta Petreu