Book Review: Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania. The Criterion Association by Cristina A. Bejan

I vaguely remember a distopyan intellectual landscape in post-communist Romania: after being ruled for decades by a non-elite of (mostly) illiterate individuals - Party and secret police - who pretended to be communists and patriots, lately by a grotesque couple, the Ceaușescus, with a doubtful genealogy, displaying an inimaginable greediness and cruelty towards their own ´people´, the countrymen enjoyed the illusion of the institutional and mind-chaotic freedom. Only one year before the changes, some used to get under the counter versions of the History of Religions written by the exiled scholar Mircea Eliade, or acquired some obscure translation of Heidegger done by a pupil by a recluse scholar that used to be friend with Eliade, Constantin Noica. Now, the book and newspapers stands were overnight full with all kind of books - from porn to writings by authors previously forbidden, due to their non-communist beliefs, as Constantin Noica or Emil Cioran. It seemed that the public wanted books and bread and nothing else... 

The changes of mind of the censorship during communism, in charge with deciding which books should be allowed to be published and which not, were moody, with decision to take a book out of the market occuring within days after the official publication day. The literary value of the book was irrelevant, and the subversive message was relatively unclear, as everything depended on personal sympathies - or antipathies - or the sudden subjective interpretation - and fears - of a censor. I remember how intellectually surprised I was when after reading a book that mom had hidden under a row of children books - Drum fără pulbere/Road without dust by Petre Dumitriu, covering in the ´socialist realistic vein´ the works for setting up the megalomanic Danube-Black Sea Canal, inaugurated in 1984 - I realized that the book has in fact no subversive message at all. There were just some references that maybe, maybe a new political regime may have considered problematic but it was nothing really serious and anti-communist in this book, except that the author fled Romania in 1960. 

The catalogues of the post-communist publishing industry were overwhelmed in the first revolutionary years by an enornmous amount of titles and Romanian authors whose names where on the black list of the censorship - for very very diverse reasons. There were a lot of authors from the exile, there were religious texts - especially pertaining to the Christian Orthodoxy - there were authors that spent time in prison. A big part of those titles were authored by authors that belonged openly to the interwar far right. The publishing houses went a bold step further and started to publish the writings of those ideologues, but also the writings of their German counterparts, that in most cases were the sources of their pride and ideas. Instead, when the Journal of Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish author and playwriter, was published, it ignited a scandal among the nationalist thinkers, as the author reveals the clear oportunism, anti-Semitism and fascism of those considered the luminaries of the Romanian elites. In addition to Noica and Eliade - whose far-right orientation, never publicly assumed, was already the topic that a young researcher, Ioan Petru Culianu openly revealed, to be shortly thereafter shot dead - it was another figure that was re-tuned from the deep disposable Romanian intellectual memory: Nae Ionescu. An oportunistic and hedonistic teacher, whose attributed writings were in fact recollection of notes by some of his students or even various discussions, he enjoyed playing the role of the mandarin at the court of the far right characters of the time. Educated, with university studies abroad, particularly to Germany, he probably enjoyed the game of trading his knowledge for some visibility and power-broking, for being in the end the victim of his own intellectual rapaciousness.

Another very much appreciated author, the French-writing essayist E.M.Cioran, wrote a book Schimbarea la Față a României/The Transfiguration of Romania - that he later dismissed as a youth accident - where he maturely elaborated his expectations for a religious-like change over of his country of birth. Among others, he wrote: ´In everything, the Jews are unique; they don´t have a match in the wold, /they are/ under a curse for which only God is responsible. If I were a Jew I would commit suicide right here´. This version of his book was very fast published after 1989, being followed with an altered variant, omitting the problematic statements.

All those characters, and many many more, populated the intellectual realm of Romania in the early 1990s. Teenagers, keen to find their own intellectual way, separated from the communist world of their parents, avidly enjoyed those writings, the revelation of a national spirit and the freedom of attending religious masses on the occasion of Orthodox Church holidays. Which in itself, is a laudable activity, unless one realized that besides the Orthodox Church, there are also other Christian denominations in the country, co-existing with non-Christian ones. 

But this is exactly what was missing from the Romanian intellectual landscape: a critical approach of the sources and of the history in general. Things moved so fast - this is the pace of the sudden political and social changes, nothing to do about it - and the people with a proper intellectual decency and honesty were missing at the time. Thus, an important critical stage was unfortunately dearly missed.

Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania. The Criterion Association by US-based historian, poet and playwriter Cristina A. Bejan is, according to my knowledge, the first ever attempt in the English language to analyse critically the biographies and activities of the member of the group that aimed at shaped the intellectual future of interwar Romania. 

Trying to capitalize a ´unique moment in the history of the country´, Criterion was in the early 1930s an important medium of discussion of a large spectre of issues, trying to reflect as many as possible different perspectives. Practically, the most important voices of the cultural realm for decades in Romania had a longer or shorter presence at the events organised between 1932 and 1935. One needs 30 days to create a habit, therefore 3 years of intense intellectual dialogue make it as a long-life habit. 

Minutiously, Cristina A. Bejan is studying biographies and events, interactions and topics approached, displaying an impressive diversity of characters and group dynamics. At a larger scale, it reflects the inner conflicts of a society that for decades was - and in certain respects still - looking for an unyielding intellectual ground. 

Caught between cosmopolitanism and intellectual models from abroad - French, German particularly - they tend to emulate and replicate them at home - with the high rate of failure such an attempt always has. 

The book is a comprehensive work of displaying - and subsequently translating - information not available for the English-speaking researchers. Although attempts to diagnose and evaluate critically the roots of Romanian nationalism and the problematic references they embraced - some were valuable, as the studies of Marta Petreu or the late Zigu Ornea - , this study focused on The Criterion Association is the first of this kind. The fact that after so many years of ´intellectual freedom´ only one such study was published is revelatory for the state of the art of the critical thinking in Romania. But the information that Cristina A. Bejan professionally assembled and analysed made it into a good start to further and further researches on this topic. 

The most recent political and historical developments on the world stage is a proof of how important critical thinking is nowadays. Being at the same time intellectually clear in terms of the set of values to belive in and alert when those values are transgressed may prevent following in the footsteps of the pattern so well described in the 1920s by Julien Benda as ´la trahison des clercs´.