The illusion that censorship inspires creativity, as is sometimes claimed in the West and as many writers and readers in the East resignedly believe, may sometimes seem a frivolous sophistry. When describing firsthand experiences of reality, erotic life, religious feeling, and especially concrete political problems, Aesopian language doesn’t always work to aesthetic advantage and often results in a lack of honesty. Truth seeks to preserve itself in obscurity and ingenious artifice and survives only in fragments, in ambiguous, often cryptic, forms. Readers in Eastern Europe looked to literature for what they could not find in the newspaper or in history and sociology textbooks. They chased truth between the lines, while the author accepted the distortion of his artistic work as the necessary price of solidarity with his audience.
In those difficult times, culture stimulated underground life and exerted a counter-force to state power by restoring trust in creativity, ideas, beauty, and intellectual dialogue, at a time when actual dialogue was strangled and corrupted. But culture did not destroy the totalitarian system; the system collapsed under its own weight because of the lack of breathing space and freedom, and because of catastrophic economic bankruptcy. Today, art’s balance sheet is disheartening. Mountains of discarded texts are the era’s sad remains. The entire epoch’s devaluation includes the books it gave birth to: those that served the system but also many that sought to resist it or appeased its arrogance in order to avoid being devoured completely.
I can picture everyone’s social apprenticeship as the adventures of an “Augustus the Fool,” stumbling from one false trophy to another — and all the more so for the artists, those ambitious creators of chimeras. And yet, the totalitarian experience remains unique because it reflects in an extreme situation not only the sinister potential of the mundane, but also the social pathology totalitarianism cultivated in such absurd contortions. This was not a monolithic society, as communists hoped and many anti-communists claimed. Instead, it distinguished itself by equivocation, deception, ceaseless hypocrisy, and mystification. Only the Chief Buffoon and his retinue of tormentors still believed, in the last years of the circus, in the absolute magic of terror and in the hypnotic power of empty promises. If the tragedy of totalitarianism is unforgettable, its grotesque comedy also cannot be forgotten. Like so many extremes throughout history, they are inseparable. In this context of society’s dead ends, the place of the artist — an extreme protagonist in extreme circumstances — acquires great importance.
The honest survivor cannot indulge in frivolous illusions or exaggerated lamentations about the fate of mankind. Paradoxically, the writer who has had to defend his integrity (with that ambitious and vulnerable mix of ethics and aesthetics I once called estetica in a Romanian pun for “East-ethics”) understands that the game of art will always defy, but can never tame, the Great Beast. This applies even more to exiles, outsiders of all systems, if not of the whole world. A writer who has undergone the most extreme experiences does not consider Flaubert’s vision of himself as a saltimbanque extravagant. Parodic fiction’s ironic revenge on the Great Beast, despite its limitations, does not necessarily exclude greatness.
More than ever, we desperately need a “transcendent ideal” in our centrifugal, materialistic, artificial world, from which the concept of the ideal seems to have been banished — a world in which atomic, ecological, and demographic dangers exacerbate a general sense of panic and confusion. On the other hand, in the disastrous aftermath of totalitarian systems of all persuasions, a clearsighted approach to the manipulations unleashed by every ideal is all the more essential.
We cannot afford to neglect any element of this dilemma — especially today, when it is heightened by the global crisis of a massproduced and entangled world. The isolation caused by the daily routine’s “horrible brutality” and “hopeless banality” is no longer a strictly intellectual stance but a societal condition. Einstein, called a “logical empiricist artist” by one of his students, claimed that man “in his search for harmony” creates scientific and artistic works with which to balance the stifling limitations of daily life. This consolation apparently remains hidden deep within our crisis. Overwhelmed by “the strange adventure of being human,” the Romanian author Max Blecher (1909–38), a soulmate of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, wrote more than fifty years ago: “I pray to be awakened to another life, to my true life. It is certainly broad daylight; I know exactly where I am and that I am alive. And yet, something is missing.” Today millions of people would probably echo these thoughts. As “functionaries of mankind,” intellectuals are reclaiming Blecher’s words as a reminder of the extreme experiences with which they have identified themselves in this incomparable, ruined century and as a motto for their growing uncertainty and future responsibility.
Translated by Tess Lewis, January 1994
THE INCOMPATIBILITIES
In the rough transition to democracy, the countries of Eastern Europe are going simultaneously forward and backward. The “forward” movement concerns their contract with the future: their adaptation to the social and economic requirements of the capitalist world, and the international accreditation that this will bring them. The “backward” movement is owing to their fragmented and incomplete evaluation of their history before and during the era of communism, a history that was manipulated and falsified by the ideology and the interests of the single Party of the totalitarian state.
Since 1989, this tension has often made itself felt in the everyday life of Eastern Europe. In Romania, the question of NATO membership for ex-communist countries found almost the entire political spectrum of the country taking a pro-NATO position. Suddenly the promise of a stable, integrated future within the European Community appeared to offer a cure for the country’s traumatic past, which was seen as resulting more from the aggressiveness of the neighbor to the East (and from betrayal by the West) than from any shortcomings in the public life of the country itself. And then, at the same euphoric moment, a book appeared to complicate matters. A glimpse of a new Romanian future coincided with a glimpse of its past, with the publication, in 1996, of Jurnal, 1935–1944 (Journal, 1935–1944), by the Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian.1
This chronicle of the dark years of Nazism reignited the great debate about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Romania. These are subjects that some would have preferred to ignore. Sebastian’s important book — it is appearing in a number of European countries, and it deserves to be published in the United States as well*—exposes the deformities of a decade in which “everyone was a little wheel in the huge anti-Semitic factory of the Romanian State.” In the writer’s journals of those days, the banal regularity of his daily life — with its book reading, its love affairs, its poverty, its meetings with friends — sets the brutality and the fear in sharp relief. In Sebastian’s world, however, the quotidian is ready at any moment to kindle to vast reserves of ferocity.
In this respect, Sebastian’s Journal resembles Victor Klemperer’s massive journal of the years 1933 to 1945, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I will Testify to the Bitter End), whose publication in Germany in 1995 also had a powerful impact. The much-delayed publication of these books in Eastern Europe, where the Nazi period was frozen in the clichés of the communist period, is witness to the everyday lives of “assimilated” Jews awaiting death from the world to which they thought they belonged. But Sebastian was an elegant stylist, who moved from theme to theme with admirable ease, and this book is a greater literary achievement than Klemperer’s. It offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew’s journal, a reader’s notebook, a music-lover’s diary. Above all, it is an account of the “rhinocerization” of certain major Romanian intellectuals whom Sebastian counted among his friends, including Mircea Eliade, E.M. Cioran and Constantin Noica, writers and thinkers who were mesmerized by the nationalism of the extreme right and the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe’s “reactionary revolution.”