It is little wonder that even the infrequent empathy with the suffering of the Jews is peculiarly expressed. In 1997, the director of the publishing house Humanitas, the very house that published Sebastian’s Journal, gave a talk affectingly entitled “Sebastian, mon frère” at the Jewish Community Center in Bucharest. He explained his solidarity with Jewish suffering in terms of his own hardship under the communists and the post-communists. It is an analogy that leaves no room to evoke anti-Semitism and the Holocaust properly, or to analyze honestly the “happy guilt” of such intellectuals as Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and Noica.
Also, in an editorial statement entitled “Vintoarea de vrájitoare,” or “The Witch Hunt,” the director of the important magazine România literará complained that the condemnation of Céline and Hamsun was lasting too long. He deplored the “Israeli” campaign against Eliade, the recent debate in France about Cioran’s Legionary past, and the “exaggerations” in Sebastian’s Journal. Never mind that the (far from unanimous) condemnation of Céline and Hamsun has not precluded the recognition of their literary distinction, or that their guilt was owed not necessarily to their writings, but to their actual collaboration with the Nazis. By describing criticism in an open society as a “witch hunt,” and comparing it with the communist repression of intellectual life, the editorial in România literará was promoting a shocking confusion of terms.
In contrast with such slips and ambiguities, we may cite a statement by another prominent Romanian intellectual. Writing in 1997, Petru Cretia observed that “the most monstrous thing after the Holocaust is the persistence of even a minimal anti-Semitism.” In this context, he mentioned Sebastian’s Journal, and the old-new compatibilities:
I know public figures who, while parading flawless morality, impeccable democratic conduct, wise level-headedness, and perhaps a pompous solemnity, are capable in private — and in some cases elsewhere — of foaming at the mouth against Jews; here and now. I have seen irrefutable proof of the fury aroused by Sebastian’s Journal, and of the feeling that lofty national values are besmirched by such calm, sad, and forgiving revelations on the part of that fair-minded (often angelic) witness.
This statement appeared just a few days before the death of this distinguished man of letters and good Christian. It was published not in a mass-circulation magazine, but in Realitatea evreiascá, the newspaper of the Jewish community in Romania.
What, then, are we to conclude from Mihail Sebastian and his posthumous career? At least this: that the “forward” movement of Eastern Europe should be evaluated not only for its ability to modernize political and economic structures, but also for its ability to clarify the recent history of these scarred societies, and to direct them toward the full truth. This is not an easy task, and it is first and foremost the task of intellectuals, not politicians. But our future is premised on the quality, on the probity, of our understanding of the past.
Translated by Patrick Camiller, April 20, 1998
Note
1. Jurnal, 1935–1944. (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996).
ON CLOWNS: THE DICTATOR AND THE ARTIST
Notes to a Text by Fellini
The year 1989 marked not only the bicentennial of the French Revolution, but also the centennials of two figures who — each in his own way — knew how to exploit the hunger of the masses and their vulnerability and gullibility.
He was a tramp in the big city, using a park bench for a bed. He wore a weathered black derby and a frock coat askew on his shoulders — both tragicomic attempts at respectability. He drifted along the sidewalks, without family. He had no friends. Acquaintances saw him go into strange fits and thought him a clown. But he was a charismatic clown — the center of a show that he perfected and in which he functioned not just as the leading man but as writer, director, producer, and set designer. When his little black mustache had become emblematic, when he had grown into the idol of millions, a great Hollywood star called him ‘the greatest actor of us all.’ His name was Adolf Hitler, born just over a hundred years ago, on April 20, 1889.1
The Hollywood star who was so fascinated by Hitler’s histrionic gifts was, of course, Charlie Chaplin, likewise born a hundred years ago, a hundred hours before Hitler. He too was a marginal figure, one of society’s outcasts: his father was an alcoholic, his mother was shunted from one charity hospital to another, and the son slept in campgrounds and railroad stations. He was incapable of forming friendships, had difficulty communicating, but would prove to have an irresistible effect on the masses.
Chaplin plays the part of the Dictator in the movie of that name, with its famous scene in which the hero, in a frenzy of triumph, juggles a balloon that represents the globe. The actor emphasizes the grotesque elements in the tyrant’s infantile schizophrenia. In its empathy with madness, his acting becomes ambiguously complicit. The character, initially conceived in a naïve, artistic fashion, flips over into a convulsive grimace of demonic ugliness. “Hitler may have been history’s most murderous genius, yet his formula shared elements with Chaplin’s. Both men tapped the need of the outsider to be let in.”2
“Do you still collect humorous clippings from the contemporary press similar to those you published in Augustus the Fool’s Apprenticeship Years?” a writer asked me in an interview that scandalized the official press for months on end. I had said that:
the artist cannot dignify officialdom by opposing it in a solemn fashion, because that would mean taking it too seriously and inadvertently reinforcing its authority, thus acknowledging that authority. He pushes the ridiculous to grotesque proportions, but artistically he creates … a surfeit of meanings …. In today’s rushed, confusing society in which everything mixes and is mixed up and destroyed, the ridiculous does run the risk of “swallowing up” art too. But the artist, even if he has been relegated to the position of a buffoon, tries to assume — albeit at the price of an apparent, momentary abnegation of the self — an ambiguous stance, to place himself on a shaky seesaw, to transform the loss into a later gain.
For me, the artist was an Augustus the Fool; mine was a deep solidarity rather than a superficial empathy with his game and with his destiny.
Where did the proud, romantic image of art with a capital A go? The artist’s situation in the world is that of “Augustus the Fool,” der arme August, as Hans Hartung’s father nicknamed his son, clearly intuiting the inner nature of the artist that neither the painter’s work nor his later life ever overtly disclosed. Aging Thomas Mann, the epitome of a rigorous, serious, and ethical author, saw artists as “eccentric spirits of the ridiculous,” “brilliant monks of the absurd,” “suspect,” and “acrobatic”: for him the artist was “neither female nor male, hence not human”; he called him “a grave angel of foolhardiness … under the roof of the tent, high above the crowd,” performing an aerial balancing act in the great circus of the world.