by Marci Shore
Communism had exalted the worker. In his postcommunist incarnation, Corneliu Vadim-Tudor exalted the peasant—the Romanian peasant who was not to be trifled with, who was ever ready to use his spear to batter the heads of his enemies. “And if UN intervention troops do come,” Tudor announced, “as some Hungarian extremists keep threatening us, the Romanian peasant will beat them down, at whatever risk, at any cost, because such a life in disgrace is not worth living.”
Corneliu Vadim-Tudor represented a certain continuity with Nicolae Ceauşescu’s national Stalinism—which had been a dynastic communism, a rule by personality cult, a chauvinist megalomania with predilections for the macabre and the grotesque, including draconian pronatalist policies that left children starving in filthy orphanages. Corneliu Vadim-Tudor embodied just one variety of excess in postcommunist Romania.
Very soon after Ceauşescu’s fall a student leader had founded the Movement for Romania. The “Movement” was based on oxymoronic “solid metaphysical grounds” as well as on the “exemplary model” of Romania’s preeminent nineteenth-century poet Mihai Eminescu, “the Last Romantic,” who was sent to an asylum following a nervous breakdown. When Eminescu departed from this world before his fortieth birthday, his mistress professed she could never live without him and died a few weeks later. The Last Romantic was an exuberant nationalist, an eloquent anti-Semite, and a passionate worshipper of racial purity. For him, liberalism was a Western invention that had brought death to the spirit and had “transformed Romania into a quagmire into which the social sewage of the West and the East is discharged.”
The Movement for Romania’s leader called on the young—his own generation—to purify society, to return to the values of the peasantry. Recently his monthly newspaper had included an open letter saying, “We are streams in one and the same river.” The letter was addressed to former members of the Iron Guard.
In Romania neofascism meant this: a return to the Iron Guard. In the 1920s, an archangel visited the prison cell of a young nationalist named Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. This angel, Codreanu later explained, had inspired him to create Romanian fascism. Codreanu’s Iron Guard was not a political party. It was a cult and a crusade. Anti-Semitism was not a policy but a holy cause, and the nation not a political body but a mystical entity. Codreanu, “the Captain,” mounted a white horse and set off through the countryside, where peasants received him as a savior. He was handsome and fearless and infatuated with death.
In 1936 one of the Iron Guard’s leading figures broke with Codreanu. Soon afterward the defector fell ill with appendicitis and underwent surgery—and there in his hospital bed his former blood brothers found him. Again and again they fired shots into his body, with an ax they chopped up his corpse, they danced around the pieces of flesh, they prayed, they kissed, they cried with joy.
The Iron Guard glorified the peasantry and the primitive. Its ideology was anticommunist and anticapitalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Western, antidecadent and antimodern. Yet Codreanu—“the Captain”—found support among the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated intellectuals in Bucharest. French-speaking philosophers became ideologues of the Iron Guard. These were the brightest minds of interwar Romania, cultivated by a peculiarly seductive professor. The young philosophers, anguished by modernity, called for a spiritual regeneration transcendent of politics. Theirs was a self-conscious embracing of the excessive, an ecstatic antirationalism. “I can only love a delirious Romania,” Emil Cioran wrote.
Of the writers seduced by fascism, Cioran was my favorite. There was something perversely dazzling about his passionate self-hatred, his sadomasochistic exaltation of violence, his madness and despair.
Throughout the long years of communism, Emil Cioran and his friends, like the Iron Guard itself, had been taboo. Now the fascist philosophers had returned to fashion.
DESPITE HIS CONVICTION that the West was “a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse,” the once-fascist-sympathizing Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran lived most of his life in Paris. When he was an old man he explained to an interviewer how Romania was different from France: “One simply goes too far. And what, basically, is the West, what is the great French civilization, the idea of courtesy, other than a boundary that one accepts on account of reason; just do not go over the boundary; it doesn’t pay; it is bad taste, etc. As for the Balkans, one cannot speak of civilization; there is no criterion for it; there, one is simply excessive.”
Emil Cioran, who had always been drawn to cemeteries, had himself been buried in late June 1995, just days before I left for Romania.
When I arrived it was summer in Bucharest and very hot. The Romanian capital was a city with sharp edges—both terrifying and enthralling in a way that Prague, less urban and less intimidating, was not. The first person I spoke to there was Csortan Ferenc, the director of minority culture at the Cultural Ministry, who met me for coffee in the lobby of my hotel. An ethnic Hungarian engaged in minority rights issues, Csortan was a mild-mannered man approaching middle age. His comments were reasoned and thoughtful.
Nicolae Ceauşescu’s reign had been more than brutal, in the winter there had been no heat, and Romanians had watched their children die from the cold. They had been educated to accept this, and this kind of education had a lasting effect on the psyche: Romania might now have a democratic system, but it did not have democratic people. Csortan was not an idealist. There would be no stepping into paradise.
“To bet on an optimistic scenario for the future would be a foolish mistake,” he said. “We are in the middle of history. If the past was full of terrible things, the future will be full of terrible things.”
Nonetheless, Csortan was working for change—for a more democratic Romania, a Romania more accepting of difference. He was working for change with the understanding that this meant working with real people in the real world.
There was something else. “We have a right to live the life you have,” he told me as he stood up to leave. “By the simple fact that we were born here, to be condemned to a second- or third-rate life is not morally sustainable.”
THE NEXT MORNING I went to the Romanian parliament building in Bucharest. When I stepped inside the entrance hall, the first thing I saw was a large table with pictures for sale: glossy photographs of members of parliament, head shots in the style of opera singers or rock stars.
“There are crazy people everywhere,” said a leader of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, the party representing Romania’s Hungarian minority, “but here they’re in the government.”
It was true.
It was certainly the case of the current Romanian president Ion Iliescu’s coalition partners, a pastiche of Far Right and Far Left, parties whose leaders included former members of Ceauşescu’s regime like Corneliu Vadim-Tudor and extreme nationalists like the mayor of the Transylvanian capital of Cluj, Gheorghe Funar.
It was perhaps less true of the president himself. Ion Iliescu was of the Party of Social Democracy in Romania, and his was a national socialism less violent and extreme than that of his predecessor, Nicolae Ceauşescu. While not averse to allying himself with racists, he was not a racist himself. When political opponents accused Iliescu’s wife of being Hungarian, then of being Russian, then of being Jewish, Iliescu did pause to remark that even if she were Jewish, this would not be a crime—before assuring everyone that she was, in fact, a pure-blooded Romanian.
I had asked Csortan Ferenc if President Iliescu were an opportunist.
“Don’t say opportunist,” Csortan answered, “say realist.”
In Bucharest I met no one from Gheorghe Funar’s or from Corneliu Vadim-Tudor’s respective nationalist parties. It was the more moderate opposition who wanted to talk to foreigners.
A parliamentarian from the Democratic Party told me he longed for the banal: he only wanted Romania to be normal, ordinary.
Two parliamentarians from the Christian-Democratic National Peasants’ Party explained that in Romania, unlike Poland a
nd Czechoslovakia, there had been no real transition, nothing had actually changed, the same people remained in power. It was true that in other postcommunist countries the communists had now returned, but here was the essential difference: in Romania they had never left.
The Christian Democrats denied that there was ethnic conflict between Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania. In their minds the “so-called conflictual” situation was the result of political manipulation, a power play among competing Romanian factions. Gheorghe Funar had exploited certain statements by Hungarians to win the mayoral election in Cluj. Had it not been for such self-interested exploitation, a democratic mayor would have been elected and the ethnic problems in Transylvania would not exist.
“But Gheorghe Funar,” I said, “came to power in a democratic election.”
“In any democracy, accidents can happen. Hitler came to power in a democratic process.”
It was perhaps understandable, then, that these Christian Democrats felt warmly toward the prospect of the monarchy’s return.
ON A TREMBLING plane I left Bucharest the next morning for Cluj. It was sunny in Transylvania. A beautiful June day. Cluj was a bright city, a cheery city—in contrast to everything I had imagined about Transylvania: vampires and bats, cobwebs and castles.
Hungarian historians claimed that a Hungarian community existed in Transylvania by 896, long before ancestors of modern Romanians first appeared in 1222. Romanian historians claimed that, on the contrary, Romanians were descended from ancient Dacian tribes who’d arrived in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains two thousand years ago and had later become part of the Roman Empire. The year 896 marked a Hungarian invasion of an already-existing Daco-Roman community. Hungarian historians countered that there were no sources documenting the presence of Daco-Romans in Transylvania during the early Middle Ages. Romanian historians answered that the absence of sources was attributable to the fact that the Dacians were hiding in the Carpathian Mountains to protect themselves from the Hungarian invaders.
After the fall of communism, statues of Romulus and Remus appeared in ethnically mixed Transylvanian cities. These were the two sons of the Roman priestess Ilia by the god Mars, who founded Rome in 753 B.C.E. In the Transylvanian statues Romulus and Remus were depicted as two small human figures, standing with open mouths beneath the teats of a she-wolf: the wolf symbolized the Roman Empire, and the open mouths beneath the teats provided a touch of the erotic grotesque.
When in February 1992 Gheorghe Funar was elected mayor of Cluj, the battle of the monuments was only beginning. In the city’s Union Square had long stood a statue of the fifteenth-century Hungarian king Matthias on horseback, surrounded by six flags, each representing a land he had conquered. When Hungary lost Transylvania to Romania after the First World War, a Romanian historian announced that one of the flags—the Moldavian flag—was historically inaccurate, for Matthias had failed to conquer the Romanian province of Moldavia. In 1920 a new inscription was added to the Matthias statue: “Conqueror of peoples, defeated only … when he tried to invade unconquered Moldavia.” When in 1940 Hitler returned Cluj to Hungary, this inscription was removed. When in 1992 Gheorghe Funar became mayor, he announced that the Romanian historian’s inscription would be restored. That November Transylvanian Hungarians protested attempts to restore the Romanian inscription by creating a human chain around the King Matthias statue. Romanian soldiers arrived from Bucharest.
Then in May 1994 came the announcement that the statue of King Matthias might be removed entirely: Mayor Gheorghe Funar had plans for archaeological excavations aimed at uncovering the remains of a Roman forum beneath Union Square. The following month the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, the largest Hungarian political party, decided on a twenty-four-hour-a-day guard presence to prevent the statue’s removal. Young Hungarians declared themselves willing to “lie down around the monument and defend it day and night with their bare chests.”
Cluj’s mayor called the Hungarians “descendants of barbaric peoples, living in Europe for only one thousand years, this being not long enough for them to acquire the rules of civilized, European-like behavior.”
Ariana, my Romanian interpreter in Cluj, was a very young woman, perhaps twenty years old, who spoke an eerily perfect, very American English she’d learned without ever having left Transylvania. She was wearing the kind of short, pretty dress that young women wore in the summer to stroll along the town square, laughing with their friends and flirting with boys. She was cheerful and animated.
We spoke with a Hungarian student who attended the university in Cluj. He was active in the Hungarian Student Union, although I could not imagine him lying down by the King Matthias statue, defending it with his bare chest. He was not a radical, nor did he seem very angry. Rather, he was contemplative. Perhaps he would be happier if Transylvania were a part of Hungary, but he believed it would be a mistake to make that happen: following Yugoslavia’s example—changing borders by means of violent ethnic cleansing—was no way to solve problems.
Ariana liked him, I could tell. They were the same age, and there was a hint of flirtatiousness between them.
The Hungarian student was neither a fatalist nor an idealist. He understood that choices were circumscribed, that he lived in a part of the world where people were bound to the place of their birth. Somehow the Transylvanian Hungarians had to make things work here, in postcommunist Romania—where totalitarianism had come to an end but people were still afraid.
Fear now came from within. In Cluj I visited, too, Doina Cornea, a petite, energetic woman in her seventies, a professor of French with short gray hair who in the 1980s had been among Romania’s most courageous dissidents. She spoke quickly and emphatically. She was preoccupied with the Securitate, the executed dictator’s ominous secret police, among whose victims she had been. It was unknown what exactly had happened to them, these henchmen guilty of the crimes of the Ceauşescu era; she believed that they were still lurking, now enshrouded. There were signs of their presence: one day she received a newspaper photograph anonymously. The caption claimed it was she who was pictured there, and that the scarf she wore was pure silk from Bordeaux, the dress from Paris, the shoes Nina Ricci. On another occasion a newspaper published an article claiming that Doina Cornea’s daughter had declared her mother insane. The daughter, living in Paris, sued the newspaper and won her case. The court awarded a certain amount of money, but both mother and daughter insisted that as compensation they wanted only a correction in the paper. After a year, their lawyer finally learned that the newspaper no longer existed and the author of the story had disappeared. The author, Doina Cornea believed, belonged to the Securitate, perhaps one of her former tormentors.
“You cannot have a democracy,” she told me before I left her small house in Cluj, “with people who have a communist mentality, and that is a tragedy.”
Everyone in the present opposition seemed to believe this. Mentalité was a preoccupation.
The Hungarian student from Kolozsvár wanted me to know that, despite informal segregation, at the university he had Romanian acquaintances and even Romanian friends. The Romanians who were part of his student world were not nearly as bad as Corneliu Vadim-Tudor and Gheorghe Funar—who, he hoped, would soon be gone.
“Because it’s not fair,” he said, “to have a city like Cluj, and a mayor like him.”
I wanted to meet Gheorghe Funar.
My contacts at the Soros Foundation in Romania refused to arrange a meeting with Cluj’s mayor. Their mandate was to build a democratic society. They would not talk to fascists. My interpreter Ariana, though, was quite happy to make the telephone call. She herself seemed unconcerned about politics. She was young and pretty and in possession of an especially marketable skill. She wanted to enjoy life. And it would be fun to go to city hall.
It was late afternoon, almost evening, when we arrived. Gheorghe Funar was not there, but one of his fellow party members from the city council had come in his place
.
As we walked up the wide stairway, I said to Ariana, “I’d like to be very, very nice to this man. I’d like you to say whatever you need to say, so that we sound extremely polite.”
“Of course,” she said. “I always do that anyway.”
I was hopeful: we were two young women in summer dresses, wholly unthreatening. I smiled at the city council member when he received us in his large office. I told him it was a pleasure to make his acquaintance, that I was very thankful for his time, that I understood there had been so many media distortions about Gheorghe Funar’s city government, and that I would be grateful to learn directly from him what was true and what was not.
“With pleasure,” the city councilman said.
Two of his teeth were black, and his smile was mildly terrifying. I looked at Ariana, sitting beside me with her legs crossed. She was adorable. He would not be in a hurry to part from us.
There was the issue of dignity. From now on, he emphasized, Romanians wanted to be treated as partners and as equal partners—in business, in politics, in everything. Romanians were not begging for anything. Perhaps they were not yet ready to integrate into Europe—but they would be. In another few years. Certainly by the turn of the century.
On the subject of ethnic discrimination in Transylvania he was adamant: Romanians were not the perpetrators but the victims. There were places in Transylvania, he said, where the poor Romanians who spoke no Hungarian could not get anything in stores.
Gheorghe Funar, he explained, had merely drawn attention to what Hungarians really wanted, for until very recently their desire for Transylvania had been masked. They wanted the borders modified but could not say this aloud. Instead they made up stories. They told lies. They falsified history. Recently they claimed that Romanians had inhabited Transylvania only since the sixteenth century. The real reason, he told me, that Hungarians were protesting the archaeological excavations in Union Square was their fear that evidence would be discovered proving that Romanians had been living in Transylvania for more than two thousand years.