sescu regime.
The political schemers, of course, soon bridged the abyss between Eliade’s thinking and their own immediate interests. Which does not make his unhappy guilt (involuntary, this time) any less. Eliade was, after all, an intellectual with much experience in such matters. In contrast to his great predecessors in Romanian culture (such writers and thinkers with a similar right-wing vision as Eminescu, Hasdeu, Vasile Pârvan, and Iorga), Eliade had the “advantage” of witnessing the Holocaust, the unfolding of Stalinist genocide, the horrors of right-wing and left-wing dictators. Eliade lived the longest part of his life in a democratic society, in which he could see that, besides its economic and intellectual achievements, and despite its many shortcomings, democracy is the only system in which there can be a dialogue between the right and the left, even in their extremist forms.
In its everyday, domestic aspects, the reality of “totalitarian” systems such as Nazism and communism has been far more complicated than is suggested by the classifications and the denunciations. Honesty requires those who have lived with “true socialism” to reject simplistic recrimination, which is more likely to cut off than to help an understanding of the truth. The current spectacle of millions of former Party members in Romania now madly reciting anti-communist slogans is moving, because it forces us to think twice before returning to our comfortable categories. How quickly these people forget not only their own guilt, not only the unhappiness of those who were truly oppressed or marginalized by the totalitarian powers, but also the many “happy” moments enjoyed during their somnolent complicity. Guilty pleasures? Happy guilt? It would be hard for these opportunists, past and present, to admit to this kind of ambiguous happiness, just as hard as it probably was for many Nazis — genuine and “convinced” Nazis who only in retrospect were forced to acknowledge the horror, and to speak of their happy Nazi youth, of the demonstrations, the balls, the lectures, and the other ecstasies of their own felix culpa.
An honest and critical analysis of the significance of Eliade’s life would have been important to the whole of Romanian culture. Banned in Romania for the first decades after the war, Eliade began to be “retrieved” in the 1970s. This was not without complications: though Ceausescu’s “National Stalinist” regime sought the kind of nationalist legitimacy that the Legion had enjoyed, the last leaders of the communist “old guard” could not forget the political orientation of their old enemy. It is now known, for instance, that in 1937, on learning that the student Gogu R
dulescu, a communist who later rose to become vice-president of the Council of State and a member of the executive of the Romanian Communist Party under Ceausescu, had been detained at Legion headquarters and beaten with wet ropes. Eliade not only expressed satisfaction with this barbarous “punishment,” but said that he would have put out Rdulescu’s eyes.
Yet Eliade’s literary works began to be reprinted in Bucharest, and gradually some of his scholarly works appeared as well. Despite its author’s political past, and despite its title, The History of Religious Ideas was distributed in “atheistic” Communist Romania “through institutions” to a list of the “privileged” selected by Party officials. Eliade began to meet not only with Romanian writers, but also with Romanian “officials,” even with representatives of the Romanian government. Though Eliade’s political past was not to be discussed in Romania, his work was so respected and his personality so fascinating that his name gradually made its way into many publications and into the work of many intellectuals. It was taken up, too, by the noisy nationalism that had for some years appeared in several journals (Spt mîna, Luceafrul, Flac ra), which, protected and even encouraged by repressive officialdom, practiced a genuine cultural and “patriotic” terrorism.
In 1982, a black year for Romanians under Ceausescu’s leftist-rightist dictatorship, I saw Eliade’s play Iphigenia performed at the National Theater in Bucharest. The play had first been performed in 1941, another black year, and was published again in Romanian in 1951 by an expatriate right-wing press in Argentina. As in 1941, no doubt, the tension outside the theater, and the mood of the audience, its fear, disgust, exhaustion, and despair, combined with the play in a most unfortunate way, so that it seemed a kind of dark exaltation of “sublime” death for a glorious “cause.”
“There is a real campaign beginning in the West to unmask Mircea Eliade’s ties to the extreme right during the period between the Wars,” wrote the Romanian dissident Dan Petrescu in the final years before Ceausescu’s fall, in an essay smuggled to the West. “This may at least lead, as it did for Heidegger, to increased popularity for his work.” Petrescu went on to exclaim, “If only the collaboration of Romanian intellectuals with the present regime — which is anything but leftist — can be discussed one day. Then we’ll see a show!” Indeed, Ceausescu’s regime was anything but leftist, and the same was true of the members (about four million of them!) of the Communist Party, which had no decisive tradition in Romania. But that show is now running, and it has become grotesque. Everyone proclaims his own innocence, his own suffering. And some of the loudest of those are the former “intellectual” servants of the dictatorship.
Romania’s current problems with democratization must bring to mind the country’s complicated history: the old identity crises and the addiction to extreme solutions are working together again to prolong the post-totalitarian impasse. Still, some encouraging effects of the transition to democracy can be seen. The free press isn’t entirely nationalistic and provincial. It contains many voices that warn against the new dangers of political manipulation and against the old dangers of narrow-minded nostalgia and isolationism of the extreme right-wing ideology. Some esteemed intellectuals have created the Group for Social Dialogue, a critical forum that scrutinizes and debates the dismantling of the social-political institutions of the totalitarian state, and which follows and encourages the still timid phases of structuring a civil society. Although the old Nomenclature and the old-new secret police are smartly and efficiently using their network for enriching their comrades and building a shady alternative to democracy, the future cannot be, is not, the past.
Like other countries in the region, Romania will soon look to NATO and the European Community for help with her evolution, and the public discourse will certainly be influenced by this. Yet the way will be neither short nor easy. The country has to examine its history before starting a new future. There have been too many unhappy choices in the past and their consequences for the last half of a century, if not longer, cannot be ignored. The transition toward an open society will probably be marked by corruption and opportunism, greed, demagogy and manipulation, traditions that it will be difficult to override in this new, unstable and weak phase of democracy. But the darkness of dictatorship will surely still be vividly remembered, at least for a while, and that will help to energize hope. As Havel said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The potential for Romania’s renewal is there, it has to be stimulated and guided to its fulfillment.