In the early 30s politics began to colour Cioran’s work, as they did that of his contemporaries too (Mircea Eliade for example). Studies in Germany between 1933 and 1935 made him realize the decadence of liberal democracy, which he proposed to replace with the infinitely more attractive folkish regime he saw around him in Hitler’s Germany. Writing for the Romanian magazine Vremea from Munich, he praised the Night of the Long Knives (‘what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken’), became a supporter of Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael, otherwise the Iron Guard, and hatched the political vision he pours into his 1936 book The Transformation of Romania. In 1941 he accepted the post of cultural adviser in France to the post-Legionary Romanian administration under Ion Antonescu. He lasted three and a half months.
"The Romanian democratic regime has worked only to protect the Jews and Jewish-Romanian capital.
If we were to give absolute freedom to the Jews, I firmly believe they would change even the name of the country in less than a year.
The Jew is not our fellow man, our kind, and no matter how close we become, the chasm is still there, whether we like it or not. It is as if they were descended from a different breed of monkey than ourselves, condemned to a sterile tragedy, to hopes that always turn out to be false. It is at a human level that we cannot get close to them, for a Jew is first Jewish, and only then human."
The Transformation of Romania
[caption id="attachment_544" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
Cioran in uniform with Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu[/caption]
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