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 modeclass="underline" “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 aspects.
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.