Abstract
Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II, Stanford University Press: Stanford CA, 2009; xxii + 349 pp.; 9780804759861, £53.50 (hbk)
Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington DC/Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore MD, 2010; xxi + 451 pp.; 9780801894084, £34.00 (hbk)
Maria Bucur, Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania, Indiana University Press: Bloomington IN, 2009; xix + 352 pp.; 9780253353788, £18.99 (pbk)
These three stimulating and well written new monographs addressing twentieth-century Romanian (and not only Romanian) history focus on war, politics and culture. While some are more successful and original than others, they all in quite different ways provoke the reader into rethinking aspects of the relatively recent past.
Holly Case’s book is a study of the struggle between Hungary and Romania over the province of Transylvania during World War Two. A long first chapter – over a quarter of the main text – surveys the background to the differends between the two states and the terms on which they made claims to control Transylvania. Chapter 2 shows how both Hungary and Romania conceived their commitment to the Axis war aims as a prelude or bargaining ground for their ‘core’ interests in Transylvania. Chapter 3 focuses more specifically on experiences within Transylvania itself, through a series of vignettes or set-pieces from which a number of the strange paradoxes of wartime life are brought into perspective. One such paradox receives special treatment in Chapter 4, which looks at the curious lengths to which German and Italian authorities went to ensure minority protection in the province. Chapter 5 examines the experience of the Jewish population of Transylvania (but also, interestingly, Romanian and Hungarian government reaction to the situation of Jews in other countries), and argues that the ‘shockingly inconsistent’ treatment of this ethnic group was due to the fact that their concerns were effectively subordinated by decision-makers to larger territorial issues. A sixth chapter surveys the legacy of wartime confrontations in the period down to the present day.
Between States is the product of much diligent and original research, bringing together a great deal of material in different languages from archives in a number of countries. Much of it is also substantially new in English – the last book-length treatment in a Western language, Daniel Csatári’s heavily dated Dans la tourmente (1974, itself a translation of a 1969 work in Hungarian) – confines itself largely to the diplomatic dimension. Outstanding are Case’s attention to local detail, and use of individual scenes or incidents to animate broader points. This is particularly strong in Chapters 3 to 5, which lie at the heart of the book, making it not only a worthy companion to the excellent monographs of Wim van Meurs on the Bessarabian Question and Alberto Basciani on the Dobrogea, 1 but also an important contribution to the social history of wartime Transylvania, tessellating nicely with Stefano Bottoni’s first-rate recent study of post-war life in the province. 2
At the same time, not everything in Between States is as it might be, especially in respect of some of the broader claims Case makes for her material. Readers are promised ‘a new way into the history of the European idea’, but the latter is not really defined, while claims to ‘track down the origins of the current understandings of Europe from the East-Central European perspective’ (6) sit ill with a rather cavalier approach to literature: a handful of titles in east European languages is heaped up (233 n. 9) only to be dismissed, not unorientalizingly, as Orientalizing, while most Western-language work is passed over. In consequence, Case, despite having done much outstanding work gathering primary sources, arrives at inconsistent conclusions, at one point arguing that ‘the terms of the debate around Europe were set during World War II’ (224); at another, that World War II did not substantially transform the European idea in the region, which ‘had changed little since World War I’ (153; cf. 210, 219–20). These assertions needed more thinking through and attuning to current research.
Case likewise undertakes to ‘probe’ (13) or undertake ‘a close examination of’ (178) the origins of the Transylvanian question. But standard treatments of this topic are overlooked, and seemingly innocuous statements like ‘both Hungary and Romania made claims on Transylvania… since the late nineteenth century’ (10) will mislead the unwary. Romania made no formal claims before World War I, while Hungary’s are older and not just a product of ‘the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century’ (11), Ottoman suzerainty over Hungary and Transylvania having come to an end at the close of the seventeenth century. More broadly, defining the Transylvanian Question as a contest ‘between states’ ignores the fact that the province’s governance was also fiercely contested before the era of state-building – between empires, religious authorities, provincial elites, and other groupings. Other scholars have insisted on the need for a more complex, longer-term picture: as a classic work puts it, ‘with anything less, one cannot adequately render intelligible the actions of villagers or comprehend why their lives take the form they do’. 3
A final problem concerns Chapter 5, where, as stated, Case seeks to show that Hungarian and particularly Romanian attitudes towards the Jewish Question were effectively subordinated to larger territorial and foreign policy concerns, especially over Transylvania. While she discusses the issue interestingly, Case is misguided in her attempt to showcase it as some kind of unprecedented insight. In fact it is a fairly old chestnut, generally associated with well-known German historian Andreas Hillgruber, and quite frequently debated in recent papers. 4 Once more, consolidating rather than bypassing literature would have helped here.
However, while not all of Case’s bolder gambits are original or convincing, her basic claim that World War Two Transylvania has been occluded in previous works (219) is largely justified, and it is on the basis of filling this gap that Between States can be reckoned a success. Most of the information on the 1940–1945 period itself is accurate, interesting and intelligently collated (although neither the Jewish population data for the south of Transylvania, nor official Romanian estimates for the north, are given correctly in the tables on pages 126–7). 5 Other sections function very effectively as microhistory and offer many vivid and fresh insights into the wartime fate of a notoriously complex province. The reader also gets to peruse 22 fine illustrations which supplement the main text in a thought-provoking way, featuring, for instance, an interwar revisionist board game (‘Let’s reclaim Greater Hungary’) and a 2005 key fob that equates Hungary’s accession to the EU (Európai Unió) and Union with Transylvania (Erdéllyel Unió). 6 In short, Between States is a mis-set jewel, but one which – if held up to the light at the right angle – also produces real sparkles which most researchers will want to appreciate.
Vladimir Solonari’s provocative and powerful book focuses on Romanian government policy towards minorities and ethnic purification during World War Two. Like Case – with whom he has been sharing documentation and perspectives – he kicks off with an excursion through aspects of the intellectual prehistory of the problem he is treating, offering us perspectives on Romanian anti-Semitism, biopolitics, sociology, demography and minority policy. He then presents a series of case studies which build up into a bigger picture. As Romania first ceded and then regained territory, a policy of population exchange and ethnic cleansing was proposed in October 1941, in some cases implemented, and then rather abruptly stopped in the second half of 1942. We get a good view of the Bulgarian–Romanian differend, little on Transylvania, and a main focus on Romanian deportation policy in the eastern provinces, notably Bukovina, Bessarabia and Transnistria.
Solonari’s work is exciting to read and his thesis vigorously argued. The material is well organized into chapters, with a good narrative and excellent illustrations making up for the somewhat less excellent proof reading (hundreds of typographical errors mar the text and apparatus). His main claims to historiographical innovation are twofold. Firstly, he argues that Romanian policy towards Jews was part of a wider strategy aimed at all minorities inhabiting what was perceived as Romanian territory. Secondly, he says ‘the academic community has failed to sufficiently realise the full extent of the Romanian right wing’s general xenophobia, its hostility to all non-ethnic Romanians, and the degree of its obsession with ethnic purity as the only “natural” condition of the nation’ (xix).
The first point is illuminating and persuasive, although hardly new. The idea that Romanian policy was informed not just by cultural anti-Semitism but also by more specific plans for population exchange and ethnic purification involving all minorities has circulated for some time now, notably in the work of Viorel Achim and Mariana Hausleitner; 7 significant documentary contributions were made still earlier. 8 Solonari does widen the picture considerably here; but that is not quite the same thing as being ‘novel in historiography’ (ibid).
Regarding Solonari’s second claim, I am not sure I recognize the academic community to which he ascribes such inadvertence. Critical accounts of Antonescu’s ideology and doctrine are now plentiful; many sequences of Solonari’s narrative, including quite a number of the direct quotes from or about Ion and Mihai Antonescu and other leading actors, are accessible in the works of Ancel, Balta, Benjamin, Ioanid, Hausleitner, Traş că, Müller, Deletant and Heinen, as well as in the Wiesel Commission’s Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (Jerusalem 2004). 9 On the intellectual and administrative hinterland, the figures Solonari focuses on – Crainic, Gusti and Manuilă, as well as the economist Manoilescu and ethno-biologists Moldovan and Făcăoaru – have all received treatment in English, as has Traian Popovici, the mayor of wartime Cernăuţ i (Czernowitz, today’s Chernivtsi, Ukraine) who played a major role in saving Jews from that city. Solonari’s account adds colour but not that much substance: we get some interesting information about the historian Giurescu, and an anecdote about literary historian Călinescu – the latter case apparently functions as a crystal ball to access the views of ‘all Romanians’ (336–7). Some influential politicians such as Mihai Antonescu, Vasile Stoica and Valer Pop are usefully profiled. But other figures who engaged with population exchange ideas, such as the classicist Popa-Lisseanu and the historian Nistor, are overlooked, despite having been previously signalled in the Western-language historiography. 10 It is perhaps less a case of the existing literature failing to recognize the extent of Romanian xenophobia, than of Solonari failing to recognize the extent of the existing literature.
But the latter still needed synthesizing and reevaluating, and here Solonari becomes interesting, as he probes the links between these two well-researched areas – intellectual discourses and population planning on the one side, and actual leadership decisions and outcomes on the other. His answer to this question presents ethnic cleansing as having been the object of concerted preparation by Romanian social scientists and bureaucrats in the 1930s. However, with the emphasis on Romanian traditions, previously-signalled evidence of German involvement in demographic planning, such as the visits to Bucharest in spring 1941 by senior German demographic counsellors – including Friedrich Bürgdorfer, one of the authors of the notorious Madagascar Plan – is not mentioned. 11 Some German experts went further, demanding to check drafts of race laws for conformity to Nazi ideology before Antonescu saw them. 12 The latter’s adoption of an allegedly ‘very rare’ spelling of the Romanian word for race (rassă, not rasă) is said to show the influence of his demographic counsellor, Sabin Manuilă (405 n. 19); but this spelling, while not standard, was widespread since the nineteenth century. When German sources are discussed, they are misidentified: the suggestion of a certain Heinrich Clauß as a source of Mihai Antonescu’s ideas about population exchange (377 n. 27) is improbable. 13
This is not, I hope it is clear, to minimize Romanian officials’ agency or responsibility, as is practised often in nationalist historiography. But since their active concurrence has already been established by scholars, what is needed is perhaps less officious reiteration of this point but more examination of other factors like individual motivations or conjunctural pressure in informing practice. When push comes to shove – as happens in discussions of the Iaş i pogrom (166–7), of deportation planning in 1941 (190–1), of the deportation of the Gypsies (274–5) and of the stopping of deportations (294–5) – Solonari acknowledges that the specific conjunctures are best understood as the outcome of rather confused intentionalities arising from power games between Romanian and German authorities, whose somewhat different priorities clash. Likewise, it emerges (303
Maria Bucur’s book could be said to be about life not so much ‘between states’ as beneath and beyond the state’s grasp. Like Case and Solonari, Bucur is also interested in war, but less in the kinetics of decision-making or even in the reconstruction of experience, than in its perception and cultural function in twentieth-century Romanian society. Although she markets her approach under the banner of memory studies, her book actually deals with wider aspects of the social imaginary than that term implies. Such a theme could have practically infinite applications, but Bucur takes the reader on what is effectively a guided tour of major war-related Romanian lieux de mémoire – some familiar, others quite new to researchers. Seven chapters treat, respectively: traditional pre-1914 attitudes to death and commemoration; community remembrances of World War I; the role of autobiography in constructing memory; the contested politics of commemoration in the interwar period; state propaganda and war under dictatorship; anti-communism and mythologies of victimization in the post-communist period. The book is attractively produced, again with good illustrations and layout, and a rich bibliography and index.
Three things in particular make Bucur’s work stand out. The first is the sheer variety of sources and objects treated. The focus shifts from the small ‘props’ of memory like medals and figurines, to quite different cultural products like autobiographies, films, government strategies, as well as the more conventional monuments and symbols. These are not treated merely as accessories or sources of anecdote, but analysed in the light of contemporary cultural theory to show a complex range of potential identities at work. Factors such as age, religion, region, political affiliation and the urban/rural divide all receive due attention, besides a focus on gender identities – a field in which Bucur has been a pioneer in East European historiography – and the ever-present question of ethnicity. While Bucur can be highly critical, the emphasis is on inquiry rather than inquisition. The cultural frames suggested by the title are gradually dismantled, revealing neither heroes nor victims but real people whose behaviour is rendered intelligible through a gamut of psychological contexts. A major theme is the relatively limited success of the Romanian state in modelling people’s commemorative practices: but at the same time, Bucur is careful to avoid endorsing artificial narratives of resistance to state power (4).
The second notable feature of the book is Bucur’s ability to balance between analytical treatments of specific commemoration practices, and a broader survey approach. This means the book can be read as both a monograph with new things to say to specialists and as an introduction for students, not just to questions of death, war and commemoration but also to wider issues of sensibility and affect in modern Romania.
The third great benefit of Bucur’s book is the comparison across the length of the long (beginning about 1880) twentieth century. Existing authorities tend to place a caesura at 1918, 1940, 1948 or 1989. Bucur, without ignoring obvious changes, also identifies longer-term trends and continuities in a most useful way, which gives depth to the experiences she analyses without succumbing to primordialist or teleological trajectories. Moreover, although Heroes and Victims could hardly be exhaustive in this respect, examples are drawn from quite a wide variety of different localities, important in a country with such great regional diversity. While Bucur in some respects does not match the transnational perspectives offered by Solonari and Case, in others she shows a better understanding of longer-term cultural and intellectual trends, while offering useful and intelligent comparisons with other circumstances, both within and outside Europe.
Criticisms are minor and confined to points of detail. For example, 10 May marks Romania’s declaration of independence in 1877, and Charles I’s acclamation as Prince in 1866, but not (cf. 110) his coronation as King, which took place on 26 March 1881. Terminologically, I am not sure how useful I find Bucur’s term ‘post-memory’, which seems either tautological or misleading (it is not always the ‘posteriority’ of memory, its temporal distance from events, that renders its relationship with reality problematic). I would question the claim (39) that there is a lack of sources for the study of death in the pre-independence period. Although local records do not compare in quality and quantity to Western ones, there has been some good recent work on the early modern era; the comparative dearth of properly theorized approaches to the twentieth century makes Bucur’s work especially welcome but also reveals a need to tie up with earlier epochs. 15 Likewise on autobiographies, although Bucur is perfectly right to state (74) that these have been neglected in mainstream Romanian criticism, she might have noted one excellent volume, not least for the light it sheds on wartime experiences and non-Romanian-language sources which she claims are especially ignored. 16 Otherwise she is to be congratulated on a superb piece of scholarship which both sheds light on existing questions and raises important new ones. As such it can be recommended to teachers and researchers alike.
Overall, the appearance of these three works shows a maturing body of scholarship and a potential for more sophisticated and purposeful debates within a subfield whose position in modern European historiography has hitherto been relatively subordinate, but which could have a lot to say to researchers concerned with wider aspects of the continent’s past.