VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
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elite." With few exceptions, they never used the scurrilous language of
the rank-and-file Guardists: they were too refined for that. What they did
was to convince the boys and the girls of the Legionary death squads
(echipele mortii)
that dying for the "Capitan" (as the Guard's leader
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was called) meant dying for Romania. In an
ironic twist, what started as the cult of creative life culminated in the
mystique of heroic death. Eugene Ionesco recalled in an 1970 interview
the spiritual-political atmosphere in Romania of the 1930s and the
"ideological contagion" of the Nazi virus:
University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, be–
coming Iron Guards, one after the other. We were some fifteen peo–
ple who used
to
get together,
to
discuss, to try to find arguments op–
posing theirs. It was not easy.... From time to time, one of our
group would come out and say: " I don't agree at all with them, to be
sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example,
the Jews. ... " And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three
weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the
mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Toward
the end, it was only three or four of us who resisted.
To be sure, Cioran and Eliade wrote their ignominious pro-Nazi
pieces before Auschwitz. Still their lack of awareness about what was in
store for Jews in the Nazi-controlled Europe dumbfounds. For instance,
writing in February 1937, after the promulgation of the Nuremberg racist
legislation and one year before
Kristallnacht,
Mircea Eliade justified his
sympathy to National Socialism by invoking Bolshevik anti-religious zeal:
"Whatever I am told about Hitlerite terrorism, I cannot forget that in the
very center of Berlin there stands a synagogue, solemn and untainted -
unlike any church in Russia." This strategy of" comparative trivializa–
tion" (as Peter Gay calls it) is subliminally linked
to
the fallacy of a Judeo–
Bolshevik conspiracy. More recently, this vision has resurfaced in Ernst
Nolte's attempt to explain the Jewish Holocaust as part of a "European
civil war" in which Hitler's perception of a presumed Jewish-Bolshevik
threat to subjugate the Germans motivated his "preemptive" mass-mur–
derous program.
In December 1933, almost a year after Hitler's takeover, young
Cioran glowingly celebrated the Nazi neo-pagan dramaturgy: "I like the
Hitlerites because of their cult of the irrational, their exaltation of vitality
as such, their virile expansion of energy, without any critical spirit, with-
