It seemed a slam dunk: a proposal to rename an avenue running through the center of Romania’s capital that honored a World War II fascist functionary convicted of war crimes.
Diana Mardarovici, the Bucharest city councilor who had proposed changing the street’s name, figured nobody at City Hall would object to removing a tribute to someone who had been involved in confiscating money, jewels and property from Jews and in other crimes for Romania’s Nazi-aligned government.
“I thought this would be peanuts, a piece of cake,” Ms. Mardarovici recalled. “Surely, I thought, we all agree that Nazis are bad.” Her proposal last year never even made it to a council vote.
“My colleagues on the City Council are not Nazis. My colleagues don’t hate Jews,” she said. “But they feel that admitting past crimes by people they see as heroes takes away from their national identity.”
The episode was one of several abortive efforts in recent years to banish street names, statues and other honors accorded to Romanian fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, some of whom were the country’s best-known writers and intellectuals, celebrated for developing Romanian culture and opposing communism.
Mircea Vulcanescu, whose name Ms. Mardarovici wanted to remove from the street, was a philosopher, sociologist and economist who, though convicted of war crimes after World War II, is still widely lauded as a luminary of Romanian culture.
Some of the people honored have been purged, but the survival of others, Ms. Mardarovici said, helps explain how an ultranationalist, Calin Georgescu, managed to rally so much support in a bid to become Romania’s president. He had been well positioned to win a runoff vote last Sunday — until the constitutional court, citing various irregularities, called it off. A date for a new election has yet to be set.
A little-known independent, Mr. Georgescu won the first round on Nov. 24 by tapping into deep seams of resentment against foreigners, domestic elites, minorities and those seen as tarnishing Romania’s past.
The surprising cancellation of the second round derailed Mr. Georgescu’s surging campaign but left untouched the forces that had propelled it.
Ms. Mardarovici said she was “relieved” the court had upended Mr. Georgescu’s presidential campaign, which mixed leftist diatribes against exploitation by foreign corporations with admiring words for past Romanian fascists.
But, she added: “This will definitely not address our underlying problem. We are going through an identity crisis as a country.”
Ruled by the Roman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the lands that now form Romania became a fully independent state only in 1877, and have been tormented since by what Liviu Rotman, a history professor at the National School for Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, called a “siege complex.”
Romanians, encircled by the Slavic peoples of Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine, have often felt beleaguered. Nationalists have long argued that Romanians arrived in the region long before the Slavs or Hungarians, the country’s biggest minority, tracing their origins back more than two millenniums. That has led many Romanians to overlook the unsavory aspects, or crimes, of those contributing to a distinct national culture.
After the 1989 collapse of communism, punishment meted out against Mr. Vulcanescu and other wartime criminals by the communist regime gave them an “aura as heroes,” said Alexandru Florian, head of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.
Street names celebrating communists were changed to honor people like Mr. Vulcanescu as Romania looked to the past to assert its national identity.
Mr. Vulcanescu, who died in a communist-era prison in 1952, is remembered now not as an agent of the Holocaust but as a leading intellectual from the 1930s, a period when many prominent Romanian thinkers embraced extreme nationalism suffused with religious faith. They saw themselves as defending their country against communism and hostile foreign forces working with domestic minorities.
“Romanian intellectuals were all nationalists, and the whole culture became impregnated with their ideas,” Professor Rotman said.
“Cultivated amnesia,” he said, has largely erased memories of where those ideas led during World War II, when Romania allied with Hitler’s Germany. A 2004 report by a commission led by the Romanian-born, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel estimated that 280,000 to 380,000 Jews died in Romania and areas under its control during the war.
That amnesia left many people easily “seduced” by Mr. Georgescu, Professor Rotman said.
Unlike other prominent and often raucous nationalists in Romania, Mr. Georgescu, a multilingual former agronomist, presented himself as a sober-minded spokesman for ordinary people rooted in the land and the values of the Orthodox Church.
“Georgescu is not a noisy, vulgar politician, but can actually convince people,” said Oliver Jens Schmitt, a history professor at the University of Vienna. Mr. Schmitt is also the author of a biography of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of Romania’s antisemitic Legionary Movement in the 1930s and its paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard.
Mr. Georgescu, Mr. Schmitt said, “is an indicator of the extent to which Legionary propaganda has slowly penetrated the Romanian mainstream.”
Mr. Georgescu, speaking recently on Romanian TV, dismissed reports of his supporting the Legionary cause as “fake.”
But past statements by Mr. Georgescu dug up by Romanian media outlets after his shock first-round victory show the candidate praising the Legionary Movement and mimicking speeches of Ion Antonescu, Romania’s fascist leader during World War II.
Public celebration of the Legionary movement is banned. A series of laws and decrees since the early 2000s have made it illegal to honor convicted war criminals or promote hatred against minorities. Teaching about the Holocaust has been mandatory in state schools since last year.
But that did not stop several dozen extreme nationalists from gathering on Nov. 30 in a forest outside Bucharest to commemorate the anniversary of the 1938 death of the movement’s founder, Mr. Codreanu.
One of those attending, a 20-year-old university student who gave only his first name, Alexandru, said he had broken up with his girlfriend since she had participated in an antifascist protest. “Why is it bad to be called a Nazi?” he wondered. Prosecutors last week opened a criminal investigation into the forest commemoration.
Mr. Georgescu, the ultranationalist running for president, has stayed clear of such events. But he has expressed admiration for Mr. Codreanu, describing in 2020 his Legionary movement as “the strongest essence and expression of the health and free will of the Romanian people.”
Many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where fascist terror before and during World II gave way to communist tyranny after 1945, have rallied to defend war criminals as patriots because they opposed communism.
Ukraine honors Stepan Bandera, a nationalist responsible for the slaughter of Jews and Poles. Latvia has a remembrance day for members of the Latvia Legion, an arm of the Nazi German Waffen-SS. Many Hungarians revere their own wartime leader, Adm. Miklos Horthy, an ally of Hitler.
In Romania, while postwar communist leaders, particularly Nicolae Ceausescu, paid lip service to the fight against fascism, they also embraced an ethnic nationalism with often fascist overtones.
Among other things, Mr. Ceausescu persecuted Hungarians in pursuit of “Romanization” and quietly supported the rehabilitation of the wartime fascist leader, Antonescu, who was executed in 1946.
Andrei Ursu, the author of books about Mr. Ceausescu’s security service, said Romania’s communist police and intelligence agencies were filled with hard-line nationalists. After the collapse of communism in a bloody revolution in 1989, he said, they promoted the political careers of rabid anti-Semites and xenophobes. That helped open the way for Mr. Georgescu’s candidacy for president, he said..
Also making a historical reckoning difficult in Romania is the fact that extreme nationalism entered the intellectual mainstream.
Several of the most celebrated writers from what is viewed as a golden age of Romanian literature between the last century’s two great wars, including Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, were once enthusiastic fascists.
“You can’t cancel them. They are too important. If we cancel all the fascists, we will be left with Nadia Comaneci,” the gymnast, “and Dracula,” said Liviu Ornea, a Jewish writer and mathematics professor at the University of Bucharest.
In October, Mr. Florian, the director of the Holocaust institute, felt cheered when a court ordered Bucharest’s government to change the street name honoring Mr. Vulcanescu in response to a suit filed by his institute.
Then, after Mr. Georgescu won the opening round of the presidential election, City Hall this month responded to the ruling: It will appeal in the hope of keeping the fascist’s name.
The post As Romania Tilts Right, Its Wartime Past Haunts Its Politics appeared first on New York Times.
