Mihail Sebastian

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mihail Sebastian (actually Iosif Hechter ; born October 18, 1907 in Brăila , died May 29, 1945 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian writer.

While his dramas and novels are little known outside of Romania, the publication of his diaries from the years 1935–1944 received international attention from 1996: In them, Sebastian, who came from a Jewish family, describes the effects of increasing anti-Semitism in Romania from the 1930s through to on the pogroms and deportations of the Holocaust from 1941. In Romania, the publication of the diaries led to a broad social discussion about the country's fascist past, particularly regarding the involvement of its leading intellectuals such as Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade with the “ Iron Guard ”.

life and work

Beginnings as a writer

Sebastian came from a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in Brăila. He was a brilliant student who was especially passionate about literature. During the final examination of his Baccalaureate, the chairman of the examination board at his grammar school, the philosopher and publicist Nae Ionescu , noticed him and invited him to Bucharest. Here he began to study law in 1926, which he graduated with a license to practice in 1929; since about this time he also called himself Mihail Sebastian. While still a student, he published his first articles in the daily Cuvântul run by Ionescu and various cultural magazines. He soon gained a reputation as a brilliant literary critic, with his main interests being in the modern novel, especially the French one ( Renard , Gide, and especially Proust ). 1930–1931 he spent a year in Paris to do his doctorate there; the encounter with French literature, art and the way of life had a lasting impact on him. The greatest influence exercised on him, however, the philosophy of life ( trăirism ) Ionescu. This connected him with other young writers from the interwar period - Mircea Eliade , Emil Cioran , Eugen Ionescu and Constantin Noica in particular should be mentioned here - which soon became a literary movement in its own right and was known as the “young generation” ( tânăra generaţie ).

In 1929–1931, Sebastian wrote his first novel, Die Stadt der Akazien , for which he did not find a publisher until 1935. His first book publication was in 1932 the fragments from a found notebook , a montage of diary entries and short essayistic texts, which in 1934 together with Eugène Ionesco's No! and Mircea Eliades Soliloquien won the Royal Foundation's Young Talent Award. This was followed in 1933 by the volume of short stories Frauen , strongly influenced by Gide , whose narrators describe his various relationships with different women with cool distance, if not indifference.

"For two thousand years"

His second novel For Two Thousand Years (1934) caused a scandal. In this strongly autobiographical book, Sebastian dealt with the " Jewish question " in Romania: His protagonist, a Bucharest student, is often exposed to anti-Semitic attacks and sees himself torn between Orthodox Judaism and complete assimilation, including between communism and Zionism, and finally accepts the immutability of his existence as a Romanian Jew, with all actual or supposed contradictions and social disadvantages that this status brings with it:

“I will never stop being a Jew, because this is not a mere role that one could simply cast off… Even if the state declares itself competent to declare me a ship, a polar bear or a camera, I will nothing else than Jews, Romanians, people of the Danube remain. 'Too much at once,' whispers the anti-Semitic voice in me (there is also one with which I have my dialogue at many an hour). Of course, it's too much. And yet all three versions are true. "

For the novel, Sebastian asked his mentor Nae Ionescu, who also appears as a philosophy professor in the book, which is also designed as a key novel , for a foreword. The latter, however, had come closer and closer to the anti-Semitic politics of the Iron Guard, which in turn appealed to Ionescu's increasingly nationalistic, if not folkish, lectures. In the 1920s Ionescu had spoken out in several articles against the growing anti-Semitism in Romania, but now he has made a radical about-face. Ionescu's foreword to the novel thus became a blatantly anti-Semitic pamphlet. Ionescu justifies the discrimination of the Jews as a historically and theologically inevitable consequence of the murder of Christ ; the Jews represented a threat to the "Christian order"; Jews and Christians are “alien bodies” to each other, whose values ​​and ideas in politics or business life are incompatible; after all, they differ fundamentally - metaphysically - in their “general understanding of being.” Ionescu concluded the foreword with the words:

“Iosif Hechter, you are sick. You are essentially sick because you cannot help but suffer and because your suffering has deep causes. The Messiah has already come and you did not recognize him. Iosif Hechter, don't you feel the cold and darkness surrounding you? "

Despite this sharp insult, Sebastian decided to have the novel appear with Ionescu's foreword. This led to an unprecedented controversy in the Romanian literary scene. Numerous intellectuals, including Mircea Eliade, George Racoveanu and Mircea Vulcănescu , intervened with articles in the debate about the novel. Sebastian himself was attacked from different sides: nationalists accused him of insulting the Romanian people, others of making common cause with Ionescu and thus with the fascists. In 1935 he published the Justification How I Became a Hooligan in his defense . As a result of the break with Ionescu, Sebastian left the Cuvântul.

The "Vernashornung" of the young generation

In the years that followed, Sebastian saw many of his friends follow Ionescu's example and join the Iron Guard. As a testimony to this “conversion” of the young generation to fascism and the advancing fascization of ever broader social classes - a process that Eugen Ionescu later described in Die Nashörner as “rhinocerization” - Sebastian's diary is of great historical interest, but at the same time a very personal testimony to this Development. The diary documents the gradual end of his close friendship with Mircea Eliade . Eliade had defended Sebastian against anti-Semitic attacks in the debate on For two thousand years , but then soon sympathized with the fascist movement. Sebastian wrote in an entry from September 25, 1936:

“He is a man of the right, right down to the last resort. During the Abyssinian War he was on the side of Italy. During the war in Spain on the side of Franco. With us he is on Codreanu's side. He makes half-hearted, rather embarrassing attempts to hide this fact, at least from me. But there are times when he gets carried away and then he screams like last night ... From now on I want to keep any political allusion out of our talks. But is that possible? The events on the street impose themselves on us whether we want them to or not, and even with the slightest reflection I can feel the growing rift in our relationship. "

Soon afterwards, Eliade was openly agitating for the Iron Guard and visibly avoided Sebastian, as did many other followers who were not associated with a Jew, and certainly did not want to be seen in public with one. However, Sebastian did not lose hope for better times: On December 19, 1937, his diary said:

“To lose a job - at Cuvântul ; a person to whom I felt obliged - Nae Ionescu; a number of friends - Ghiță Racoveanu, Haig, Marietta, Lily, Nina and finally the first and last friend, Mircea - to lose everything, absolutely everything, that cannot be a disaster at the age of 30, but an experience that matures. "

Eliade made a career in the diplomatic corps after 1940 under the new fascist rulers and was first appointed to the Romanian embassy in London and later to Lisbon. When he last visited Bucharest in the summer of 1942, in Romania, which is now allied with Germany, before emigrating, he did not even try to meet Sebastian. 30 years later Gershom Scholem confronted him for this failure; Eliade replied that he feared the Gestapo might become aware of Sebastian in this way. He confided the real reasons in his diary in 1946: “I was ashamed of myself at that time. While I was a cultural attachê in Lisbon, he had to endure all these humiliations because he was born as Iosif Hechter and wanted to stay Iosif Hechter . Now I am fighting helplessly against something that can no longer be made good. "

After his break with Ionescu, Sebastian wrote for various more culturally than politically oriented magazines such as the theater magazine Rampa , the French-language daily L'Indépendence Roumaine and the Revista Fundațiilor Regale ("magazine of the royal foundation"), which hired him in 1936 as a permanent editor. In addition to literary articles, he also wrote numerous commentaries on current political events, in particular on the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

World War II and Holocaust

In 1940 he published his third and last novel, The Accident , which, however, was hardly noticed in the turmoil of the beginning World War. He himself increasingly felt the anti-Semitic legislation in Romania, which, beginning in the 1930s, denied Romanian Jews more and more civil rights. In 1940, when Jews were excluded from working life, he lost his lawyer license and his position as editor at the Revista Fundaschlussiilor Regale . However, after the performance of plays by Jewish playwrights was banned, he succeeded in staging his drama Stern ohne Namen under the pseudonym Victor Mincu in 1944 .

SS deployment against Romanian Jews (1941)

In January 1941 he witnessed the first pogrom organized by the Iron Guard , in which more than 100 Bucharest Jews were murdered. In the further course of the year he recorded in his diary how the news about massacres (particularly the Iași pogrom ) and deportations of Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia unsettled the Bucharest community. Soon he himself, like most Bucharest Jews, was drafted into slave labor and forced to pay high taxes on money and goods. Like most Jews in the Romanian " Altreich ", however, he escaped deportations to the ghettos and death camps of Transnistria , which were closed towards the end of 1942.

After the occupation of Bucharest by the Red Army in August 1944, Sebastian ventured back into public life. He got a job as a press advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1945 was appointed professor of literature at the University of Bucharest . On the way to his inaugural lecture, he was hit by a truck while crossing a street on May 29, 1945 and died on the spot.

Reception of the diaries

Individual excerpts from Sebastian's diaries concerning aspects of his literary work were already printed in various magazines in Romania during the communist period, but at least state censorship stood in the way of full publication. In 1961 Sebastian's family was able to smuggle the diaries abroad via the Israeli embassy. They finally came to Paris, where emigrated members of the Hechter family live; however, they did not agree to publication until decades later. Towards the end of 1995 they appeared in the Bucharest publishing house Humanitas, run by Gabriel Liiceanu . In the following years, translations of the diaries appeared in French (1998), English (2000), Spanish, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew and Swedish (2019). The German translation, provided by Roland Erb and Edward Kanterian , was published by Claassen-Verlag in 2005 .

In Romania

Monument to Mircea Eliade in the "Avenue of Classics," Chișinău (Moldova), inaugurated in 1997

The publication of the diaries sparked a broad discussion in Romania about how the country was dealing with its anti-Semitic and fascist past, and led to a real schism among Romanian intellectuals. After the end of the communist dictatorship in the supposedly “golden” 1930s, they were looking for starting points and models for a liberal, humanistic tradition in Romanian intellectual life. Gabriel Liiceanu, for example (a student of Noica) sees the writings of Eliade, Cioran and Noica as reaching the pinnacle of Romanian sophistication and creativity; they not only represent the Romanian culture of the interwar period, but also the cultural nation of Romania as a whole. With Sebastian's diary, a document was now available that gave impressive testimony to how these great intellectuals joined the fascist movement not only out of opportunism but out of conviction, especially years before Romania entered the war on the side of Germany.

In 1992, the Romanian exiled writer Norman Manea revealed Eliade's membership in the Iron Guard with articles in the American magazine The New Republic , thus triggering a debate about Eliade's fascist past that was also widely recognized internationally, which was fueled by the “revelations” in Sebastian's diaries . Many Romanian intellectuals, including Nicolae Manolescu , the country's leading literary critic, said that reading it had shaken their view of history. The journalist Vasile Popovici wrote that the diaries “transformed” him: “The Jewish problem is becoming your problem. An immeasurable shame weighs down an entire epoch of our national history and culture and still casts its shadow over today's reader. Who could have guessed that evil was so deep that people and authors whom one admired would appear so burdened [after reading the book], so terribly burdened with guilt [...] ”In the further course of the debate, two“ camps ”emerged : With Manea and Popovici, historians and writers like Vladimir Tismăneanu , Leon Volovici and Radu Ioanid called for a relentless reappraisal of Romanian history; the other camp tried to exculpate the mistakes of Eliade and others either with reference to the circumstances of the time or to separate their achievements, for example in the field of philosophy, from their entanglements with politics; These apologists include Gabriel Liiceanu , Dorin Tudoran , Monica Lovinescu , Alex Ștefănescu and Constantin Țoiu .

The most controversial contribution to the debate was the lecture Sebastian, mon frère , which Gabriel Liiceanu gave to the Jewish community in Bucharest in early 1997. Liiceanu compared Sebastian's situation with his own as a persecuted dissident under the rule of Ceaușescu ("in my way I was also a Jew"), spun out in his speech what Sebastian would have had to say about the further course of Romanian history and attacked those Romanian Jews who got into high positions after 1945 and thus turned from victim to oppressor. Liiceanu was then accused of playing down the real anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s by reinterpreting it into an abstract dichotomy in which “Jew” and “Romanian” can simply be replaced by “individual” and “collective”; on the other hand, the accusation was raised that he was counting the victims of fascism against those of communism and thus questioning the singularity of the Holocaust . From 1998 the debate intensified when it shifted to the French press and authors such as Radu Ioanid and George Voicu tried to generate international interest in and for the debate on historical revisionism in Romania with contributions in media such as Les Temps Modernes and Le Monde were often ostracized as “dirtiers”; In return, Voicu openly referred to anti-Semitism in an article for Esprit Liiceanu in July 2001 .

The schism that arose among Romania's intellectuals in the debate about Sebastian's diaries continues to this day. Most recently, in 2009, Sebastian moved back to the center of the dispute over right-wing coming to terms with the past. The university professor Marta Petreu published the monograph Diavolul și ucenicul său ("The devil and his apprentice - Nae Ionescu-Mihail Sebastian"), in which she tried to prove primarily on the basis of Sebastian's early articles in Cuvântul , but also with individual diary entries that Sebastian was no less than his mentor Ionescu an "undisguised and real anti-democrat", an "anti-European, conjurer of the revolution, profascist, admirer of absolute leaders and followers of mass dictatorship", his relationship with Ionescu that of a compulsive masochist. The book garnered approval from the political right, but also sharp criticism: Ioana Orleanu, for example, accused Petreu in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of citing selectively, interpreting tendentiously and generally working unscientificly.

Abroad

The English translation by Patrick Camiler was made with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was published in autumn 2000 by Ivan R. Dee (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield). It also met with a great response in the American mass media; in October 2008 the New Yorker magazine even published eight-page excerpts from the diaries. Commentators such as Philip Roth and Claude Lanzmann appreciated the importance of the diaries as a contemporary document, but also their literary quality; Arthur Miller, for example, compared Sebastian's powers of observation with Chekhov's .

After the German translation of the diaries was published, Sebastian was posthumously honored with the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize in 2006. The jury stated that the diaries testified to “vigilant observation and varied reflection” and “exemplified the drama of the rapid decline of democratic structures and civilized morals.” Many reviewers also drew comparisons with the diaries of Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer . The diaries became famous in the German-speaking world, not least through staged readings that the publicist Thomas Ebermann , the literary scholar Berthold Brunner and the actor Robert Stadlober have brought to the stage in many cities since 2009.

Works

Novels and short stories

  • Femei. 1933 ("women")
  • De două mii de ani…. 1934
  • Oraşul cu salcâmi. 1935 ("The City of Acacias")
  • Accidentul. 1940

Dramas

  • Jocul de-a vacanța. 1938 ("Holiday Play")
  • Steaua fără nume. 1944 ("The Star Without a Name")
  • Ultima ora. 1944
    • German last news . Verlag Das Buch, Bucharest 1954.
  • Insula. 1947 ("The Island"; unfinished, third act completed by Mircea Ștefănescu )

Essays and other prose

  • Fragments dintr-un carnet găsit. 1932 ("Fragments from a found notebook")
  • Cum on devenit huligan. 1935 ("How I became a hooligan")
  • Corespondența lui Marcel Proust. 1939 ("Marcel Proust's correspondence")

Diaries

  • Jurnal, 1935-1944 . Editura Humanitas, Bucharest 1995.
    • German Edward Kanterian (ed.): “Full of horror, but not desperate.” Diaries 1935–1944. Claassen Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-546-00361-6 .

Collected Works

  • Selected works . Translated from Romanian by D. Hermann u. a. Espla (State Publishing House for Art and Literature), Bucharest 1960.
  • Cornelia Ștefănescu (ed.): Eseuri, Cronici, Memorial. Editura Minerva, Bucharest 1972.
  • Cornelia Ștefănescu (ed.): Opere. Editura Minerva, Bucharest 1990.
  • Cornelia Ștefănescu (ed.): Publicistică: articole, cronici, eseuri. 1926-1928. Editura Minerva, Bucharest 1994.
  • Cornelia Ștefănescu (ed.): Jurnal de epocă. Editura Minerva, Bucharest 2003. (Selected essays)
  • Teșu Solomovici (Ed.): Jurnal II - Jurnal indirect. 1926-1945. Editura Teșu, Bucharest 2006.

Secondary literature

Romanian

English

  • Matei Calinescu: Romania's 1930s Revisited . In: Salmagundi 97, 1993, pp. 133-51.
  • Matei Calinescu: The 1927 Generation in Romania: Friendships and Ideological Choices (Mihail Sebastian, Mircea Eliade, Nae Ionescu, Eugène Ionesco, EM Cioran) . In: East European Politics and Societies 15: 3, 2001, pp. 649-677.
  • Paula Daniela Ganga: Being a Jewish Writer under the Romanian Fascist Regime: The Case of Mihail Sebastian . In: Slovo 24: 1, 2012. pp. 3-18.
  • Diana Georgescu: Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian's Interwar Travel Reportage . In: Alex Drace-Francis, Wendy Bracewell (Eds.): Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe . Central European University Press, Budapest / New York 2008, ISBN 978-963-9776-11-1 , pp. 293-324
  • Moshe Idel : A Controversy over a Preface: Mihail Sebastian and Nae Ionescu . In: Modern Judaism 35: 1, pp. 42–65.
  • Irina Livezeanu: Romania's Cultural Wars: Intellectual Debates about the Recent Past (PDF file; 858 kB) . Working Papers Series of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Washington, DC, March 27, 2003.
  • Norman Manea : The Incompatibilities: Romania, the Holocaust, and a Rediscovered Writer . In: The New Republic. April 20, 1998, pp. 32-37.
  • Andrei Oișteanu : Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade: Chronicle of a Broken Friendship . In: Studia Hebraica 7, 2007. pp. 142-153. (also anthologized in Valentina Glajar, Jeanine Teodorescu (ed.): Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust . Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-11254-4 )
  • Leon Volovici : Mihail Sebastian: A Jewish Writer and His (Antisemitic) Master . In: Richard I. Cohen et al: Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry . The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford 2010, ISBN 978-1-906764-00-5 .
  • Reviews of Sebastian's diaries in the English-language press:
    • Anne Applebaum : When in Romania . In: The New Criterion , March 2001.
    • Peter Gay : Witness to Fascism . In: The New York Review of Books , October 4, 2001.
    • Eugen Weber : 'You have to hang on' . In: London Review of Books 23:22, November 15, 2001. pp. 32-33.

German

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information in the following after Edward Kanterian's preface to “Full of horror, but not desperate.” Diaries 1935–1944.
  2. ↑ Cf. Dietmar Müller: Citizens on Revocation: Jews and Muslims as Alterity Partners in the Romanian and Serbian National Code: Ethnonational Citizenship Concepts 1878-1941 . S. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 314–15 (= Balkanological publications, volume 41).
  3. ↑ On this in detail: Irina Livezeanu: A Jew from the Danube: Cuvântul, the Rise of the Right, and Mihail Sebastian . In: Shvut: Jewish Problems in the USSR and Eastern Europe. 16, 1993.
  4. ↑ Mircea Eliade: În Iudaism si antisemitism. Preliminarii la o discutie. In: Vremea , July 22, 1934. A German translation: Judaism and anti-Semitism. Preliminaries to a discussion can be found in: Hannelore Müller: The early Mircea Eliade . LIT Verlag, Münster 2004, p. 27ff.
  5. ↑ “Full of horror, but not desperate.” Diaries 1935–1944. P. 129.
  6. ↑ “Full of horror, but not desperate.” Diaries 1935–1944. P. 198.
  7. ^ Andrei Oişteanu: Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade. Pp. 150-151.
  8. ↑ Edward Kanterian: Foreword by the editor to “Full of horror, but not desperate.” Diaries 1935–1944. P. 29.
  9. ^ Gabriel Liiceanu: Preface . In: Ders .: The Pǎltiniș Diary: A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture . Central European University Press, Budapest 2000. pp. Xiii
  10. ↑ Irina Livezeanu: Romania's Cultural Wars , p. 17.
  11. ↑ Irina Livezeanu: Romania's Cultural Wars , pp. 8–9.
  12. ↑ Irina Livezeanu: Romania's Cultural Wars , p. 7.
  13. ↑ Irina Livezeanu: Romania's Cultural Wars , pp. 10-14; Dietmar Müller: Strategies of Public Remembrance in Romania after 1989: Post-Communists and Post-Communist Anti-Communists . In: Ulf Brunnbauer , Stefan Troebst (eds.): Between amnesia and nostalgia: The memory of communism in Southeast Europe . Böhlau Verlag, Cologne and Weimar 2007. pp. 62–64
  14. Jump up ↑ George Voicu: Gabriel Liiceanu et l'antisémitisme en Roumanie, une mauvaise querelle . In: Esprit 272, July 2001. pp. 190-196.
  15. ↑ Ioana Orleanu: tangles of a spectator: A Romanian book examines the writer Mihail Sebastian to denounce as right-wing extremists . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 31, 2009.
  16. ↑ Journal, 1935–1944, by Mihail Sebastian ( Memento of July 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
  17. ↑ Rationale of the jury for the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize 2006
personal data
SURNAME Sebastian, Mihail
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hechter, Iosif (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Brăila
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1945
Place of death Bucharest