Journal
1935-1944
Journal
1935-1944
The Fascist Years
MIHAIL SEBASTIAN
Translated from the Romanian by Patrick Camiller
With an Introduction and Notes by Radu Ioanid
Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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It is more than fitting here to acknowledge with praise the first published edition of this journal, in Romanian, edited by Leon Volovici. We mourn his passing in December 2011.
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Copyright © 1998 by Editions Stock in the French edition
English translation copyright © 2000 by Ivan R. Dee, Inc.
First Rowman & Littlefield paperback edition 2012
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The assertions, arguments, and conclusions contained herein are those of the author or other contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Sebastian, Mihail, 1907-194S.
[Jurnal. English]
Journal, 1935—1944 / Mihail Sebastian ; translated from the Romanian by Patrick Camiller ; with introduction and notes by Radu Ioanid.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sebastian, Mihail, 1907—1945—Diaries. 2. Jews—Romania—Diaries. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939—1945)—Romania—Personal narratives. 4. Romania—Biography. 5. Romania—Politics and government—1914-1944. I. Ioanid, Radu. II. Title.
DS135.R73S38713 2000
940.53'18'092—dc21
00-031535
ISBN 978-1-56663-326-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4422-2024-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISOZ39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
by Radu Ioanid
“Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,” said Woland. “That cannot be. Manuscripts don’t burn.”
—Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
On 29 May 1945, as he rushed to cross a street in downtown Bucharest, thirty-eight-year-old Mihail Sebastian, a press officer at the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was hit and killed by a truck. As it happened, Sebastian was late to an appointment at Dalles Hall where he was to teach a class about Honoré de Balzac.
The deceased had been born Iosif Hechter, in 1907, in Brăila on the Danube. At the time of his death he was well known in Bucharest literary and political circles as a writer of fiction and of literary criticism, and as the author of several successful plays. His sudden demise left his mother and brothers in a state of shock, while members of Bucharest high society shook their heads in disbelief. As time passed, a few former girlfriends thought fondly of him every now and then; here and there a literary critic mentioned his name; a theatre director occasionally staged one of his plays.
Eventually Sebastian’s name came to be associated chiefly with his plays, less so with his novels. A far lesser-known contribution to Sebastian’s legacy, however, was the diary he had written during the period 1935-1944, and which remained among his possessions when he died. In 1961, as Sebastian’s brother Benu emigrated from Romania to Israel, he shipped the diary out of the country via the diplomatic pouch of the Israeli embassy. Benu was right to be cautious; many manuscripts before (and since) had been confiscated by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, only to disappear for many years if not forever.
Sebastian’s extraordinary diary was published for the first time in full in 1996 in Romanian, followed by a French edition in 1998. The diary was nothing short of a time bomb, its publication generating an explosive debate about the nature of Romanian anti-Semitism in general and about Romania’s role in the Holocaust in particular. Vasile Popovici, a literary critic, wrote upon reading the diary, “. . . You cannot possibly remain the same. The Jewish problem becomes your problem. A huge sense of shame spreads over a whole period of national culture and history, and its shadow covers you, too.”
Sebastian’s diary spans a period that saw the rise of three successive anti-Semitic dictatorships in Romania, each more devastating for the country’s 759,000 Jews than its predecessor. This triad began with the regime of King Carol II (February 1938-September 1940), which was followed by the rule of Ion Antonescu in alliance with the fascist Iron Guard (September 1940-January 1941), and ended with Ion Antonescu as Conducător (Leader), ruling alone after having violently suppressed his erstwhile Iron Guard allies (1941-1944).
Sebastian’s diary is not the sole or even the first literary account of the Nazification of European society to emerge from the postwar years. Victor Klemperer’s diary, published under the title I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1945, also recounts the brutal and merciless way in which he was rejected by his native society simply because he was born Jewish. Also like Sebastian, Klemperer recorded and noted the systematic shrinking of the physical and intellectual freedom allowed to him as a consequence of Nazism. Still, while Klemperer wrote as a Jew in the heart of the Nazi Reich in Berlin, he was protected by his wife’s “Aryan” status and his own conversion. Sebastian wrote under Romanian fascism (which was characteristically different from German Nazism) and enjoyed no protection from the onslaught, having no “Aryan” relatives and refusing to convert. It is worth noting that this seems to have been a matter of principle for Sebastian. Although he felt few religious ties to Judaism, he scorned the reaction of his fellow Jews who saw baptism as the only possible solution to escape deportation: “Go over to Catholicism! Convert as quickly as you can! The Pope will defend you! He’s the only one who can still save you. . . . Even if it were not so grotesque, even if it were not so stupid and pointless, I would still need no arguments. Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now, I cannot be anything else. Nor do I think I want to be.” At the height of the anti-Jewish persecution in September 1941, Sebastian went to the synagogue because he wanted to be with his fellow Jews: “Rosh Hashanah. I spent the morning at the Temple. I heard Şafran [chief rabbi of Romania] who was nearing the end of his address. Stupid, pretentious, essayistic, journalistic, shallow and unserious. But people were crying—and I myself had tears in my eyes.”
It is not only in terms of their “Jewishness” that Klemperer and Sebastian are distinct (and thus too the perspective they brought to their diaries). Perhaps more important was their differing surroundings and the very nature of the fascist movements they endured. If Klemperer survived because of the legalistic technicalities of Nazi defi
nitions of “Jewry,” Sebastian survived due to the particularly opportunistic nature of the Romanian fascist regime. For like almost half of Romanian Jewry, Sebastian remained alive until 1944 only because in the eleventh hour the Romanian authorities changed their tactics, and even their position, on the so-called “Jewish problem.” When Marshal Antonescu, and others whose voices counted at the time, realized that Romania, which was allied with Nazi Germany, might not be on the winning side in the war, he and his minions ceased deporting and killing Romanian Jews. Thus Romanian Jewry, which had been targeted for extermination between the years 1941 and 1942, abruptly became a bargaining chip, a means by which the Romanian authorities could hope to buy the goodwill of the Allies and soften the postwar repercussions of defeat. Sebastian’s diary is, among its many other attributes, a compelling chronicle of the years during which the collective fate of Romanian Jews hung by a thread.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bucharest, where Sebastian lived and died, was affectionately referred to as “little Paris.” Filled with charm and personality, Bucharest was also a modern city, electric lighting having been introduced in 1899, one year after the French architect Albert Galleron built the impressive Ateneu Roman concert hall. Beautiful boulevards such as the Calea Victoriei were lined with private palaces and sumptuous hotels, among them the famous Athenée Palace. On the same street a New York-style skyscraper owned by ITT faced the popular restaurant Capşa. Electric streetcars provided public transportation throughout the city, and elegant automobiles carried their owners to meetings for business or pleasure. Bucharest was cosmopolitan, and its upper classes traveled to Paris and Vienna, dressing in the fashions of the West. An aristocracy in decline and a rising bourgeoisie competed with each other for wealth and prestige, and the symbols of their fortunes and status were very much on display. Modern villas dotted the northern part of the city, near the beautiful Herăstrău Park. Bucharest had many other wonderful green spaces too, among them Cişmigiu Park, copied from New York’s Central Park, and Parcul Lib-ertapi, designed by the French architect Eduard Redont. Winters were quite cold and summers too hot in Bucharest, but resorts in the Carpathian Mountains and on the Black Sea were only a few hours’ ride by train or car. Like any other capital city, Bucharest had its share of museums, art galleries, universities, newspapers, public and private schools, and, of course, intellectuals.
Ever a city of contrasts, however, Bucharest’s high society mingled in the streets with their less fortunate neighbors from the middle class, with barefoot peasants from Oltenia who delivered milk and cheese, and with Bulgarian gardeners who sold fresh vegetables. Quite unlike the city precincts of elegant villas and hotels, Bucharest’s suburbs contained ugly industrial enterprises and neighborhoods where the lower middle class and poor lived in cheap houses, often situated on unpaved streets. Here and there Eastern markets and a certain way of dealing reminded foreign visitors that “little Paris” was in fact closer to the Levant than many Romanians wished to acknowledge.
An image of this colorful and now vanished world is captured in the pages of Sebastian’s diary. It is not simply a Holocaust memoir but the journal of a life in transit. He wrote about his daily life in Bucharest, his love affairs, his vacations, and the musical performances—especially symphonies—that he adored. Sebastian was so much in love with music, especially with Beethoven and Bach, that it sometimes became more important to him than his admittedly active romantic life. He was twenty-eight years old when he began the diary, already famous following the publication of his book De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years) and for the viciously anti-Semitic foreword to the book that had been written by his mentor, Nae Ionescu. Sebastian was an assimilated Romanian Jewish intellectual who struggled to write seriously and to find an existential sense to his life. His accounts of his relationships with his mother and two brothers are personal and intimate, as are his descriptions of his intense and not always happy love life. An avid reader, he especially loved Proust, Gide, Balzac, and Shakespeare.
In addition to its personal side, Sebastian’s diary also chronicles the social and political life of the Romanian capital between 1935 and 1944. Sebastian socialized with rich and famous liberal aristocrats, with genuine democrats and reptilian opportunists, with Zionist Jews and Communist Jews, and with actors, novelists, and literary critics. He wrote his novels and plays in Bucharest but also in the not far distant Bucegi Mountains. He took vacations on the Black Sea and sometimes traveled abroad, especially to France.
Sebastian had a strange destiny. He belonged to a group of gifted young intellectuals close to the newspaper Cuvântul, who started out as nonconformist and relatively liberal. When Cuvântul was transformed into the official newspaper of the Iron Guard, many of Sebastian’s friends drifted with their common mentor, Nae Ionescu, toward Romanian fascism. While many of Sebastian’s references to his friends and colleagues from this group seem benign at first, the diary ends up capturing Romanian democracy—and many of Sebastian’s former friends—in a free fall toward fascism. As Sebastian noted during the early war years, his life was becoming increasingly narrow. Many of his “friends” deserted him, and escalating anti-Semitic legislation made him a pariah.
Romanian politics between the two world wars were slightly more democratic than those of Bulgaria, Hungary, or Poland. The government was an outright model of democracy compared to the fascist and Communist dictatorships that were to follow it. Still, policy between the wars generally was controlled by the will of the monarch. When the king grew displeased with his prime minister, the crown nominated a replacement from the ranks of the opposition. That more malleable nominee, now beholden to the king, was given the task of organizing elections, an arrangement that not surprisingly almost always resulted in the nominee’s political party gaining a comfortable majority in parliament. In practical terms, Romania after World War I was a fledgling democracy, inevitably at risk of being tempted by Europe’s rising totalitarianism.
Anti-Semitism, which always had been a predominant characteristic of modern Romania, further affected this shaky democracy. Throughout the nineteenth century, Romanian politicians and intelligentsia were heavily anti-Semitic; even the considerable constitutional and political changes brought about by World War I (i.e., the adoption of a modern constitution and of nominal suffrage) did not alter this basic feature. Despite decades of pressure from the Western powers, Romania refused to grant legal equality to its Jews until 1923, and then grudgingly. After 1929, against the backdrop of recurrent economic crises, the so-called “Jewish question” took on an increasingly mass character, such that anti-Semitic activities were not solely the work of radical organizations. Both mainstream and fascist parties exploited anti-Semitic agitation. Intellectuals too entered the debate; those oriented toward the fascist Iron Guard were naturally in the forefront of anti-Semitic campaigns against Romanian Jews. In addition to radical solutions to the “Jewish problem,” they advocated replacing democracy with a Nazi-like regime possessed of a distinctly Romanian flavor. For all the changes wrought throughout the course of modern Romania, anti-Semitism has been a consistent and dominant element, and remains widespread in intellectual circles to this day.
The tragedy of the Romanian intelligentsia in the period between the world wars was that rather than trying to improve an imperfect political system, they chose to throw it overboard, instead linking themselves with totalitarian personalities and systems. The political scientist George Voicu aptly described Romania’s late-1930s abandonment of the Western political model: “The dictatorships that followed (royal, Iron Guard-military, military, and Communist) were not significantly opposed [by the Romanian intellectuals] because sociologically the ground had been prepared: somehow a political culture permissive if not in sync with these solutions appeared.” It is exactly this civic desertion, this “Nazification” of Romanian society, that Sebastian witnessed and documented. Captured in this diary, it constitutes one of its most important aspec
ts.
The mâitre à penser of the Iron Guard intellectual generation was Nae Ionescu (no relation to the playwright Eugen Ionescu). The “grey eminence” and one of the principal ideologists of the Iron Guard, Nae Ionescu taught philosophy at the University of Bucharest and later was paid for his pro-Nazi activities by I. G. Farben. He was described by his contemporaries as inconsistent, unscrupulous, opportunistic, and cynical. In the late 1920s, Nae Ionescu, who had already become an influential intellectual but was not yet an Iron Guard ideologist, “discovered” and published the works of Mihail Sebastian. Sebastian never forgot this support and for this reason repeatedly sought a rationale to excuse and explain his early mentor.
One of Sebastian’s fundamental choices was to consider himself a Romanian rather than a Jew, a natural decision for one whose spirit and intellectual production belonged to Romanian culture. He soon discovered with surprise and pain that this was an illusion: both his intellectual benefactor and his friends ultimately rejected him only because he was Jewish.
The first big disappointment came from Nae Ionescu. Asked in 1934 by Mihail Sebastian to write a preface to his book De două mil de ani, Ionescu wrote a savagely anti-Semitic piece. He explained to Sebastian and his readers that a Jew could not belong to any national community. As he put it, “. . . Belonging to a particular community is not an individual choice. . . . Someone can be in the service of a community, can serve it in an eminent way, can even give his life for this collectivity; but this does not bring him closer to it. Germany carried on the war due to the activity of two Jews, Haber and Rathenau. Through this, however, Haber and Rathenau did not become Germans. They served, but from outside, from outside the walls of the German spiritual community. Is this unfair? The question has no sense: it is a fact.” Nae Ionescu warned Sebastian not even to think of himself as Romanian: “It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian. . . . Remember that you are Jewish! . . . Are you Iosif Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.” Sebastian nevertheless chose to publish Ionescu’s anti-Semitic preface, but he responded in a later book with anger and sadness.
Journal 1935–1944 Page 1