VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries
Few stories in this century are more fascinating than the intellectual his–
tory of Romania's mystical revolutionaries of the 1930s. Until recently,
the activities of the intellectuals associated with the "legionnaires of the
Archangel Michael" have almost universally been glossed over with a veil
of silence and presented as an ephemeral, almost insignificant episode in
their tumultuous
Lehrjahre.
Nor have any of the participants engaged in
soul-searching to detect the reasons for their youthful obsession. What
followed after 1940 has been a long, and one must say, successful exercise
of willed amnesia. Yet in the preceding decades, the fascist commitment
of the "Young Generation," and its identification with the Iron Guardist
movement, was the most straightforward expression of nationalism and
anti-Senutism to be found in Eastern Europe.
Mircea Eliade wrote in
Itinerar spiritual,
a 1927 series of essays pub–
lished in
Cuvintul,
what became the group's credo: the old generation
created Great Romania, the young one would create a great culture.
Political geography was insufficient: a spiritual realm was required for a
nation to exist. Although influenced by the apostles of traditional
Romanian nationalism, from Mihai Eminescu and B. P. Hasdeu to
Nicolae Iorga and Vasile Parvan, the members of this group were never–
theless attracted to Europe's then new cultural trends: surrealism, expres–
sionism, syndicalism, psychoanalysis, and the study of esoteric creeds and
religions. Spellbound by their readings of Pascal, J oseph de Maistre,
Schopenhauer, Berdiayev, d'Annunzio, Sorel, Maurras, Klages, Spengler,
Bakunin, and Papini, they dreamt of a new Middle Age, exalting the
values of organic community based on a heroic sense of sacrifice and mar–
tyrdom. The cult of excess was the hallmark of their
Weltanschauung .
The
tradition of the dissatisfied, skeptical, tragically depressed writer was inter–
nalized and embellished by them.
They represented a Balkan counterpart to the revolutionary aristo–
cratism preached by Ernst Junger and other proponents of the Germanic
resurrection: they were anti-bourgeois, anti - mercantile, anti-democratic.
The cen trality of anti-Semitism in this philosophy was linked both to the
rejection of the economic and political forms associated in East-Central
Europe with Jews as agents of capitalist transformations and to the per-
