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out reserve and without control." By mid-1934, following a trip to
Munich (during his 1933-35 Humboldt scholarship study in Nazi
Germany, where he went together with Noica, who studied in Freiburg
under Martin Heidegger), Cioran went even further with his frantic en–
comia for the Nazi revolution:
There is no politician in the world today who inspires my sympathy
and admiration to a greater extent than Hitler. ... The mysticism of
the Fi.ihrer in Germany is fully justified.. . . It is Hitler's merit that he
has ravished the critical spirit of a nation .... Hitler has poured a fiery
passion into political struggles and dynamized an entire domain of val–
ues, reduced by democratic rationalism to platitudes and trivialities,
with a Messianic spirit. All of us need mysticism because we are tired
of so many truths which do not spark a flame.
Such Cioran texts have been ignored by those seduced by the elegant
(though somewhat pompous and grandiloquent) aphorisms that were later
to ensure his French and international glory. Once he left Romania, it
was as if Cioran had also left behind a world of frightening deformities,
irresponsible vagaries, and devastating nightmares. According to his con–
fessions made in different interviews published in Germany, Italy and
Spain (he systematically shunned interviews in the French media), this
"transfiguration" took place during the years he spent in Nazi-occupied
Paris. What he did during those years in terms of professional occupation
is still unknown. However, it is known that until 1944, he continued to
receive a fellowship from the French Institute. France had ceased to exist
as an independent country, so the logical conclusion is that the money
came from the Vichy regime. During those days Walter Benjamin
committed suicide, and Benjamin Fondane, Cioran's personal friend, died
at Auschwitz. Did he know about the scope of the horror? Was it possible
for an intellectual of his caliber to simply ignore the Nazi anti-Jewish
measures, including the notorious
rafle
at the Velodrome d'Hiver in 1942?
While Cioran was not a Guardist himself, his mentor Nae Ionescu
was, and so were (for short periods of time, to be sure) other members of
the Generation, including Constantin Noica.The best analysis of Nae
Ionescu's political demonism and the relationship between the Professor
(as he was revered by his disciples in the Generation) and the Iron Guard
has been provided by Mircea Vulcanescu, a philosopher belonging to
Cioran's generation, in a book written in 1942, completed in 1945-46,
but published in Romania only in 1992. Never an Iron Guardist,
Vulcanescu served in Marshal Ion Antonescu's pro-Nazi government as
undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Finances and died in 1952 in a
