Saul Steinberg and Romanian Absurdities

Time flows on uninterruptedly, small and big interference affect its merciless flow – births, deaths, transfers, completed and new tasks. Now, for example, I am not sitting on the second floor of the cozy studio where I used to write my blogs, but in a windowless basement room. However, I enjoy  my time down here as well, surrounded as I am by my books, CDs, DVDs and art cards. I am now finally back to one of my favorite pastimes – blog writing.

It has been a long hiatus. Not that I have suffered from writer's block, that never happens to me. Impressions and whims are constantly pouring in. It has rather been the case that for more than six months I got stuck in writing a biography about a Swedish poett – Ola Hansson. It all began with me writing a blog about this more or less obscure poet from my home district – Scania and almost imperceptibly I slipped into his life and that of his contemporaries. OI read and wrote, read and wrote and had soon reached more than five hundred written pages. I don't know what to do with them. I cannot think of any publisher willing to risk losses by accepting an extensive and fairly unconcentrated, personal examination of a poet who probably does not arise much interest, not even among the reading public.

During a time in our second home in the forests of Swedish Göinge, I rummaged through old papers and books that for some forgotten reason had ended up in the attic. I then found that the mice had feasted on the seventh part of Min Skattkammare, My Treasury, a collection of tales for children and youngsters. It was in a terrible condition, completely destroyed by the voracious mice. I became somewhat saddened, particularly since the book contained an illustrated version of Victor Hugo's description of Gilliatt's fight with a huge octopus. A thrilling tale that since I read it in my childhood, has followed me throughout life.

As I sat there grieving over the ruined book, a leaf fell out of it. It was a drawing I as child had torn out of a notebook ago and placed as a marker next to Victor Hugo's description of the ferocious fight with the awsome octopus, in reality it is certainly a harmless creature. Judging by the style of execution I probably draw the picture it when I was around ten years old. I had probably been lying in bed with a high fever during one of my recurrent colds and had then again read the fascinating octopus story. At that time, I drew every day after I got home from school. Most of the time, it was imaginative, fairly large and extensively coloured scenes inspired by those things that fascinated me – battles, exotic places, biblical or ancient stories, fairy tales and gothic horror.

In this particular, hastily mad drawing I was looked up at a flag fluttering against a sunny sky. Maybe I was thinking of some school graduation or similar event when Sweden's flag was hoisted, accompanied by patriotic chants, like this one dedicated to the Swedish flag:

Flame proudly against dark skies

like a glimpse of summers' sun.

Over fields, forests, mountains and villages,

over violet waters.

You, who sing,

prepare yourself :

be a reviver of our ancient glory.

The sun is shining! The sun is shining!

No angers' thunder can strike down the brave

Such kitsch has now thankfully disappeared from the Swedish school curriculum, but that doesn't hinder me from remembering the twaddle. The flag in my picture, however, was not emblazoned with a yellow cross against the blue, but boasted a question mark, waving high above me – perhaps as a hint of an uncertain future, possibly full of achievements and excitement like the ones stirred up in the miserable, patriotic chants. I don't think so, even at that time I was not possessed by any exaggerated form of patriotism.

In the drawing there is also what I assume to be another personification of me - at the time I had a curly head of hair which I have lost a long time ago. A to me now fairly unknown Jan is in the other half of the picture under a rain cloud leaning over and looking down towards what seems to be a chasm – bad school results, too much laziness, lack of interest in math and other boring things? Things that would not lead to a brighter future, but end in disaster. I don't know and do not remember that I worried about the future – perhaps it is rather an illustration of my fascination with gloomy things. Far from patriotic optimism and being a happy-go-lucky geek I was attracted by horror stories, dreams of rather terrible, but nevertheless alluring adventures , far from everyday life and school competition, something I was never particularly interested in. I lack competitive instinct and thus have an extremely limited interest in sports and gambling.

Well, when I look at that childish drawing, I think of Saul Steinberg, an artist who described himself as a "writer who draws". With me it was the opposite. When I stopped painting and drawing at the age of sixteen, I started writing instead. If I had continued to draw, I would have wished that I had done so in the spirit of Saul Steinberg. He was gifted with an inquisitive and bemused eye. Perhaps, in all its amateurish wretchedness, that childish drawing with its arrow and question mark there was approaching something that blossomed in Steinberg’s art.

Unlike me, Steinberg, was a master of simplification. I am far too verbal, unfocused and baroque. It was not without reason that one of my bosses, despite the fact that she the worst I've ever had,, told me that: “Jan you need to learn to edit yourself.” Something I bnever have learned to do, neither when I speak nor when I write. Without much thought words flow out of me. Steinberg has made an excellent illustration of my particular dilemma. A man filled by a skein of baroque thoughts are uninhibited putting them down on a piece of paper:

As the sketching writer he actually is, Steinberg succeeds without  any difficulty whatsoever in summarizing a spoken situation in a wonderfully apt rendering:

Steinberg often turns words into images and through such imagary he often succeeds in expressing complicated thoughts in a simple way. Like here in a cover for The New Yorker, where he is relating the individual with the mass:

His puns are abundant, amusing and thought-provoking, as when he calls attention to xenophobia:

Rough text, or ditto animals and people, express in Steinberg various forms of danger, or downright evil, as in this image of Hitler as a wolf. Both the nose and the back bear the features of the dictator.

Steinberg illustrates how explosive enthusiasm burns itself up like a firework and sinks into a quagmire of hopeless delay:

Or how a positive attitude collapses against a brickwall of negativity:

Tor me, Steinberg's ability to summarize, compress and thus also simplify appears to be his main characteristic as a great artist. Consider, for example, this masterful rendition of a man waiting for a train:

In many ways Steinberg was a subtle minimalist and he could go very far in his simplifications, like these men and a boy looking at the moon:

Or a man in the subway:

A couple who, on a terrace at night, unite in a kiss:

A man in an armchair, enjoying a drink and a cigarette:

Steinberg was adept at creating small scenes, as taken from a film, or perhaps a personal memory:

In this he recalls his 18-year-younger successor and colleague as a New Yorker illustrator, the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Sempé, who was obviously inspired by Steinberg.

The New Yorker is a wide spread and popular magazine with international distribution and it would not surprise me Swedish cartoonists were inspired by Steinberg, possibly can traces of him can be found in Gurr (Rolf Harald Gustafsson) and Poul Ströyer.

I suspect that Steinberg’s art also have had an impact on Pop Art. Presumably influencing Peter Max’s “psychedelic art”, which was very popular in his time.

Or the creator of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, Heinz Edelmann.

There was definitely a mutual influence between Steinberg and his good friend the German-American Richard Lindner, who is often counted among the so-called the Pop artists. In a painting by Lindner, Steinberg and his wife Hedda Sterne are glimpsed at the far left:

It was in October 1941 that Steinberg, from his exile in the Dominican Republic, submitted a drawing to The New Yorker and immediately had it accepted. Since then, he has over the years contributed with huge number of front-page illustrations to The New Yorker as well as many humorous drawings. Marked as they were by his sharp and often idiosyncratic humour, they fitted quite well with The New Yorker's coolly sophisticated outlook.

His oft-reproduced "perspective" from New York, out across the United States, to the Pacific Ocean and the world beyond became an icon.

The New Yorker covers generally has a connection to life in the big metropolis, for example Steinberg's screeching police car.

Extremely typical of New York and one of the sounds I recall when I think of our time in the huge city, which I learned to like a lot. Steinberg also depicts other typical New York phenomena, such as the large number of yellow cabs. Few residents of downtown New York have their own cars; parking spaces are rare and parking fines are high. It surprised me how effective the traffic cops were, especially considering that during our time in New York, crime prevention was poorly practiced. Not that I ever encountered any unpleasant intermezzo. I found most New Yorkers to be friendly and polite.

Steinberg's esteemed distinctiveness meant that he was allowed make New Yorker covers that could not be directly connected to either the United States or New York, but depictions of thoughts and human characteristics

A theme that strikes me when I look in my books with Steinberg's art and connect his artwork with my own age is how often he depicts a motif that is commonly called the Age Staircase, i.e. our path from the cradle to tomb. The motif used to be found in Swedish cottages and apartments, usually in the form of a so-called oil print.

It appeared all over Europe and the US in different variants and during different times.

In at least one New Yorker cover, Steinberg refers to the age stair. Here he used the theory of evolution and allowed man to gradually decline until he become a shell.

In various books by and about Steinberg, I have found at least twenty variations on the theme, such as this one, which makes me think of my own life in the Dominican Republic, where it happens that I often end up on the beach.

On another occasion, Steinberg reflects women's fashion through the ages by a feminized age stair.

On another occasion, the man in a strange, and to me partly incomprehensible, drawing is abstracted and transformed into a ball that eventually bounces down towards death.

A creepier variant is a staircase that shows the man's way down through the ages and how he thus is gradually obliterated.

Briefcase-carrying men climb a ladder of age to finally plummeing straight ahead to their deaths.

Or marching inexorably towards annihilation:

A boredom of monotony making me recall a statement by Stephen King: “There's an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.”

One drawing by Steinberg seems to echo M.C. Escher's Eternal Stairs.

It is not always that Steinberg depicts life and aging as a staircase. The following image of a man whose memory who ha has been can easily be connected to someone of my own age. You exist on on a groundwork where you find the child, the youngster, the gainfully employed man, a family father. However, all these different roles fade away within your increasingly misty memory. You continue to exist, but the past slips away.

How weak characters seem to disappear and be erased is a another common theme by Steinberg. Like Kandor and Ebb's song in their musical Chicago – Mr. Cellophane.

Cellophane, 

Mister Cellophane should be my name.

Mister Cellophane:

"Because you can look right through me, walk right by me

and never know I'm there.”

A human being is made of more than air,

with all that bulk, you're bound to see him there,

unless that human bein' next to you

is unimpressive, undistinguished you know who.

Steinberg excels in his ability to portray personalities. Steinberg considers humanity in its various forms and variants, the impression they are making. 

As when he draws a party, something he often did:

A similar interest in drawing generalized human characters can be found in the large number of different couples he drew. Through such drawings he emphasized differences between man and women.

Steinberg was also able to find and satirize things that unite many of us, such as self-assertion and egoism, and depict how such leanings take different expressions, as in this parade of narcissists:

Saul Steinberg was born in 1914 in the Romanian town of Râmnicu Sărat, not far from the current border with Moldova and in 1932 he enrolled at the University of Bucharest to study architecture. However, after just one year he applied to the Polytechnic University of Milan from where he graduated as an architect in 1940, before that Steinberg had established himself as a cartoonist in the popular joke magazine Bertoldo.

There are a number of drawings that hint at Steinberg's great interest in architecture. It can for example be countless varieties of houses and bridges.

Sometimes memories of the Milan of his youth appear:

In several of Steinberg’s architecture-influenced drawings, I find an echo of Italian architecture as it took shape during the fascist regime (1923-1945), which, apart from some kitschy varieties, often appear to me as aesthetically pleasing.

Perhaps Steinberg also was fascinated by this style, though at the same time he hinted at its fascist connection.

Occasionally, Steinberg abandoned his strict, often minimalist interpretations of architecture and indulged in Victorian extravaganza:

 He liked to contrast overloaded confusion with aesthetic minimalism and often pointed out that one of his great artistic role models was Piet Mondrian.

While living in Milan, Steinberg drew extensively, both for Bertoldo and for various advertising companies, activities taht adversely affected his studies. However, he was able to concentrate more on them when, in September 1938, Mussolini's regime prevented Jews from taking part in a variety of activities, including journalism and Steinberg's contract with Bertoldo was ended. Below is the last drawing he in Italy published under his own name. 

The text reads: "With this perfect telescope I can see Europe, my city, and through the window I can see myself looking at the world through the telescope, while I am talking to you. However, I can't hear what I say." The humor is admittedly quite weird and I don't know if I understand the fun in it.

Steinberg liked Italy and planned settling there, but the heavy clouds of worry that began to cover Europe made themselves apparent there as well. Steinberg loathed and was frightened by the Fascist regime, and he had every reason to do just that. As a Romanian he was occasionally confronted with the nasty nationalism of Fascism, which already in the twenties became more and more tinted with an extremely unpleasant anti-Semitism.

However, despite the professional ban he could still place some drawings with Bertoldo, but then under an assumed name. Likewise, he continued to work with Italian advertising firms, which published his advertisements in the names of other cartoonists, generally in a style that could not be traced back to Steinberg, the payment was then being passed on to him.

He also made some frescoes for bars and restaurants, to me that emit a certain flavor of Mirós often whimsical art.

It is nowadays not so widely acknowledged that Romania, even before it became a reality in Germany, suffered from an extremely murderous variant of anti-Semitism. Even before the German Nazis began to systematically marginalize, attack and finally try to exterminate the Jews, the Romanian regime had on its own initiative initiated a murderous racist policy, all under the guise of extreme nationalism.

Chest-beating, self-asserting nationalism/patriotism is highly repugnant to me and this, parenthetically speaking, has made me loathe a political party like the Sweden Democrats, which finds its roots in Swedish Nazism, which during World War I was a minimal, abomination. However, nurtured by Swedish xenophobia a party like the Sweden Democrats has, with the use of other names and denominations, slowly but surely gained respectability and is now part of a governing coalition. People assure me that in spite of its despicable roots the party is now quite OK, but I still consider it to be an abomination and  its ideology based on the myth of Swedish superior distinctiveness makes me sick. The party’s obvious  jingoism is for example expressed in this “charming” depiction of two kids in a Swedish summer landscape, with the written declaration “Give us Sweden back”. Yuk!

Anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in wide circles of the Romanian population, especially after the establishment of the Kingdom of Romania in 1859. After the 1878 Congress of Berlin had specifically targeted Romania and demanded that its government had to guarantee equal civil rights for Jews and Roma it refused to do so. Just before he came to power in 1941, Ion Antonescu stated that

If we do not take advantage of the prevailing international and national situation and use it to purify the Romanian people, we will miss the unique opportunity that history now offers us ... I can bring Bessarabia [now Moldavia] firmly back to us and also Transylvania , but if we do not clean up among the population of Romania, we will have neither, because it is not any borders that make a people strong, but the homogeneity and the purity of the race. This will be my main goal.

As soon as he came to power, Antonescu started his ethnic cleansing which basically consisted of exterminating Jews and Roma with a ruthlessness that even Hitler was amazed by. On August 19, 1941, Germany's Führer stated:

When it comes to the Jewish question, it can now be stated with certainty that a man like Antonescu pursues a far more radical policy in this area than we have done so far.

Antonescu and his murderous henchmen saw to it that not only Jewish men were exterminated, but women and children as well. So far the German Nazi terror had murdered only Jewish men, though Himmler and Heydrich would soon remedy this by systematically ensuring that every Jew their underlings could lay their hands on was exterminated, regardless of sex, age and social standing .

When Romania was created, through the merger of the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, neither Jews nor Roma became citizens of this newly formed state (which was still subject to the Ottoman Empire). During the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), an unusually bloody story when the Russian Empire, under the pretext of protecting its Slavic brothers from Muslim oppression, tried to expand in the southwest. The European powers, fearing an increasingly powerful Russia, sided with the Turks, at same time as they tried to establish a line of “buffert states” through the foundations of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

When peace was concluded through the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Ottoman Empire agreed that Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia would become independent, on the condition that the Russian troops withdrew and peace was guaranteed by the powerful West European states. A prerequisite was that all citizens of these newly established countries would receive equal, statutory rights, regardless of ethnicity or religion. The Romanian parliament reluctantly removed the so-called constitutional article that prevented Jews and Roma from becoming citizens, but it forced these peoples to formally apply for citizenship, which required the approval of the Parliament in each individual case. Between 1866 and 1904, only 2,000 people of the Jewish faith were granted citizenship, of which 900 were veterans of the Russo-Turkish War.

Gradually restrictions against Jews eased and after 1924 they were guaranteed full citizenship. However, this ended in 1936 when a "revision" stripped 26 percent of the Jewish population of its citizenship and all Jews were taxed separately from other Romanians.

In 1940, Field Marshal Ion Antonescu forced the tolerant King Karol II to abdicate. Antonescu appointed himself as an autocratic Conducăto and entered into an alliance with Hitler's Germany. From 1940 to 1944 between 380,000 and 900,000 Romanian Jews were murdered, mainly in the districts of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. Steinberg's drawing shows the Emperor of Japan watching as Hitler, with Finland in tow, forces Mussolini, Hungary's Miklós Horthy and Romani’s Ion Antonescu to take part in what Steinberg already believed to be a suicide attack on the Soviet Union.

The main organizers of the Romanian mass murders of Jews and Roma were members of the Iron Guard of Romania, a nationalist, Fascist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic political movement that grew in strength during the twenties. Although its leader Corneliu Codreanu had been executed in 1938 on the orders of the anti-Nazi king Karol II, the murderous movement had grown steadily stronger.

Romania willingly participated on Germany's side in the Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union and as its army rapidly advanced against Soviet forces, while Jews and Roma were murdered and deported en masse. "Deportation" was a euphemism, part of a process which involved the mass murder of Jews before survivors were packed into so-called death trains, generally speaking more seldom transportation by rail, but long gruelling marches on foot towards the east. It is estimated that from July to September 1941, the Romanian army, in collaboration with the Iron Guards and Ukrainian militia, as well as  German Einsatzgruppen, murdered between 45,000 and 60,000 Jewish civilians in Bukovina and Bessarabia alone.

Death camps were established in Trasnistra. In collaboration with the SS Einsatzkommandos and pro-German Ukrainian militia, the mass murders continued in Transnistria and southern Ukraine, sometimes through outright massacres, sometimes through starvation. It was common for large numbers of Jews to be deported from the central parts of Romania and housed without warm clothing and food in strictly guarded pig pens and barns.

Romania is one of the countries that, together with its accomplices in France, has to bear the shame of largely single-handedly, though with support from Nazi Germany, carrying out mass murder of its own Jewish population. The picture below shows how a train makes a stop on its way from Iasi, where a huge massacre had taken place, to unload the bodies of those who survived, but died on their way to a Transnistria death camp.

The trilogy Night, Dawn and Day, written by Eli Wiesel, who was born in the town of Stighel, now located right on the border with Hungary, is a poignant testimony to the terrible abuses against the Romanian Jews.

So is Aharons Appelfeld’s memories of a terrible childhood. He was born in a village near the city of Chernivtsi, which is now in southwestern Ukraine, but which at that time was called Czernowitz and located in Romanian Bukovina. Appelfeld's memoir Story of a life is, among other things, about a brutal childhood during which the ten-year-old Aharon gets to experience how his mother is murdered, and then together with his father is interned in several different camps, or forced to wander to unknown destinations.

During such a death walk, Aharon loses his father. How this happened is strange history – the boy stopped to look in wonder at an apple tree. The caravan of starving frozen Jews moved on and the boy was forgotten, left behind. Perhaps his father was forced to trudge on, or at some point he too was murdered. Aharon does not know when and how. For a month or so, the boy wandered about in the woods, feeding on berries and mushrooms until he was taken care of by an apparently insane woman. When her wretched cabin collapsed in a violent storm, she chased away Aharon, who then, often at the risk of his own life, managed to make ends meet by toiling away at various farmsteads, all the while being forced to witness how other Jews were persecuted and murdered, all around him. .The story is told from a child's often confused and uncomprehending perspective and the forms of human evil it evokes become an almost unbearable reading, for example how live children are continuously thrown into the cages of rabid dogs, while amused guards watch them being torn to pieces and devoured.

Here follows Appelfeld's description of how he was captivated by the sight of the apple tree.

I don’t remember entering the forest, but I do remember the moment when I stood before a tree laden with red apples. I was so astonished that I took a few steps bac. More than my conscious mind does, my body seems to remember those steps backward. If ever I make a wrong moment, or unexpectable stumble backward, I see the tree with the red apples. It had been two days since any food had passed my lips, and here was a tree full of apples. I could have out my hand and picked them, but I just stood in wonderment, and the longer I stood there, the deeper the silence that took root in me.

Finally, I sat down and ate a small apple that was on the ground and was partially rotten. After I had eaten it, I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, the sky had already turned dusky. I didn’t know what to do, so I got up on my knees. This position, too, on my knees, I feel to this very day. Any time I’m kneeling, I remember the sunset that was glowing through the trees and I feel happy.

Perhaps the story might seem too be fantastic and fanciful. Hoever, a Jewish friend of mine, who survived the Holocaust among Polish farmers, who took care of him at the risk of his life, once stated: “Every Jew who survived that terrible time in the East has an incredible story to tell. That's why they survived. All the others, millions of them, died” Like Appelfeld, Norman Manea, together with his parents, was taken to a concentration camp in Transnistria and like Appelfeld’s, Manea's life was marked by his horrible camp experiences. In his autobiographical novel The Hooligan's Return, Manea describes how after his "return to life" he experienced what he calls the "Wonder of the World":

It was a time of extraordinary and sudden joy, rediscovering what I call the banality of life, the very basic things: food, clothes, school, especially.

For me, as a child, it was magic. It was a time of intense joy. And it was during that time that I was given my first book of fairytales. Nobody had told me fairytales before. Never. I received this book and I entered into another universe. It was a book by a great Romanian storyteller, semi-folkloric but with wonderful language — language that was not the language of the streets. I was mesmerized and in love. This period after the war and this first encounter with this book remained for me a mythical moment. From that time forward, I became an avid reader and read whatever I could get my hands on. 

One of the greatest poets of our time, Paul Celan, was born in Czernowitz. Along with 50,000 other Jews, he was in August 1941 on Antonescu's orders packed into a ghetto created in the marshlands outside the city. Two-thirds of them were then, between October and the beginning of the following year, deported to Transnistria, where most of them died.

After a period of studies in France, the nineteen-year-old Paul had returned to the parental home in Czernowitz and was almost immediately placed in a “labour camp”. During his absence, his parents were taken to the Bogdanovka concentration camp, established on the upper reaches of the River Bug in Transnistria. During 1941, 54,000 Jews and Roma were brought there. Paul's mother was murdered and his father died of typhus.

Paul Celan remained in the labor camp until Soviet forces occupied Czernowitz on March 30, 1944. In 1948 he emigrated to Paris, where he took his own life in 1970, drowning himself in the Seine. Celan's Todesfuge, which he wrote in German shortly after the war, is the most famous poem ever written about the Holocaust:

Black milk at daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margeurite
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margeurite
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then in smoke to the sky
you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams
der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

The rhythm, repetitions, and musicality of the poem are striking, remining me of the fact  in the middle of all the pitchdark barbarism in the concentration camps, there was music as well – in the form of orchestras and gramophones. When Jews were marched into the crematoriums of Auschwitz it was generally done to the accompaniment of the camp orchestra.  Below is a picture of Musikkapelle Mauthausen.

The prose of Primo Levi may be considered as a counterpart to Celan's poetry. Masterful descriptions of what, according to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, could be described, or expressed. The evil and human decay in Anus Mundi, the World's Arsehole, was so terrible that it calls all art into question:

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.

Anyway, there were both music and poetry within this unimaginable hell. Primo Levi wrote about Auschwitz::

The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal. The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget; they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. When this music plays, we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills 

Auschwitz survivors have remembered that the most popular melody, played by the Lager Orchestra and heard through the SS staff’s gramophones was  the Polish tango Ostatnia Niedziela, The Last Sunday, written by Jerzy Petersburski. A version sung by Mieczysław Fogg became, despite the general hostility to Poland, a big hit in Germany. Considering that it was played so often in Auschwitz, and in particular when people were forced to their death in the gas chambers, the chorus of the song takes on an unusually eerie meaning:

This is the last Sunday,
today we shall part with each other,
today we shall go away from each other,
for the rest of our life.
This is the last Sunday,
so don't stint it to me,
look tenderly at me,
for it's the last time.

Celan's musically sounding repetitions allude to Jewish beauty – to Shulamite King Solomon's favoured woman whose beauty is celebrated in the Bible's Song of Songs:

Turn back, turn back, O maid of Shulem! Turn back, turn back, that we may gaze upon you. “Why will you gaze at the Shulammite in the Mahanaim dance?” How lovely are your feet in sandals, O daughter of nobles! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master’s hand. Your navel is like a round goblet. Let mixed wine not be lacking! Your belly like a heap of wheat hedged about with lilies. Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like a tower of ivory. Your eyes like pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose like the Lebanon tower that faces toward Damascus. The hair upon you is like crimson wool, the locks of your head are like purple, a king is held captive in the tresses. How fair you are, how beautiful! O Love, with all its rapture! Your stately form is like the palm. Your breasts are like clusters of grapes. I say: “Let me climb the palm, let me take hold of its branches; Let your breasts be like clusters of grapes your breath like the fragrance of apples, and your mouth like choicest wine. Let it flow to my beloved as new wine gliding over the lips of sleepers.”

However, by Celan, Shulamith's golden hair is ash-grey, like the horrifying piles of gray hair of dead Jews that can be seen on display in Auschwitz. It was sold to be used as a sealing material for submarines, for mattrasses, wigs and various fabrics.

 The desired Beauty with golden hair is by Celan is not the Jewish Shulamite but the German maiden Margeurite who is coveted and finally destroyed by Faust in Goethe's epic, through which she has become the prototype of a wholesome, Germanic beauty. A romantic archetype. When Faust sees and addresses the lovely Margeurite for the first time, she snarls at him, but that doesn't cool his lust at all, quite the opposite. He turns to the personification of the Devil – Mephistopheles:

By Heavens, the child is lovely! I’ve never seen anything more so. She’s virtuous, yet innocently pert, and quick-tongued though. Her rosy lips, her clear cheeks, I’ll not forget them in many a week! The way she cast down her eyes, deep in my heart, imprinted, lies: How curt in her speech she was, well that was quite charming, of course! Listen, you must get that girl for me!

Unseen is Faust shortly afterwards sneaking in to her chamber and watches Margeurite braiding and tying up her hair. His gaze falls on her bed:

What grips me with its bliss! Here I could stand, slowly lingering. Here, Nature, in its gentlest dreaming, formed an earthly angel. Here the child lay! Warm life filled her delicate breast, and here, in pure and holy form, a heavenly image was expressed! And I! What leads me here? Why do I feel so deeply stirred? What do I seek? Why such a heavy heart? Poor Faust! I no longer know who you are. Is there a magic fragrance round me? I urged myself on, to the deepest delight, And feel myself melt in Love’s dreaming flight!

Celan’s commandant, a Master from Germany with blue eyes, plays with vipers and writes to his beloved Margeurite, who lives far away in a romantic Germany, the land of Goethe. His house is situated by the death camp. Like Höss' house in Auschwitz, memorably depicted in Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest.

Amon Göth, commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów camp, lived in a villa within the camp. In Schindler's List, Ralph Fiennes unforgettably depicted how Göth from his balcony shoots down his Jewish slaves, just for his own high pleasure. At the trial that led to Göth’s death by hanging, it emerged that he personally had shot at least five hundred people to death.

Celan’s commandant calls for his dogs, incites them, and orders his Jews to dig and play. They shall prepare themselves a grave in the sky. They will be destroyed, burned up, the smoke from their burnt flesh will rise to heaven.

Celan's wife, Gisèle Lestrange, illustrated most of her husband's poems and was able to capture their unique rhythm and often abstract imagery.

However, the artist who is most associated with Celan's Todesfuge is Anselm Kiefer, who on several occasions interpreted the poem on large canvases where, in addition to oil, he used materials such as asphalt, earth, lead, crushed glass, ash, dried flowers and other plant parts.

Celan, Appelfeld, Wiesel and Manea struggled throughout their lives with their memories of the death camps. Their entire worldview was shaped by them, became absurd and distorted. Another Romanian survivor, Dan Pagis, had also been taken to the hell of Transnistria in his early youth. In his poetry, he ironically depicts the incomprehensible, absurdity of forgetting what happened there - Something that can never be understood and, let alone remedied, as in his absurd poem Draft of a Reparations Agreement:

All right, gentlemen who cry blue murder as always,
Nagging miracle makers,
quiet!
Everything will be returned to its place,
paragraph after paragraph.
The scream back into the throat.
The gold teeth back to the gums.
The terror.
The smoke back to the tin chimney and further on and inside
back to the hollow of the bones,
and already you will be covered with skin and sinews and you
will live,
look, you will have your lives back,
sit in the living room, read the evening paper.
Here you are. Nothing is too late.
As to the yellow star: immediately 
it will be torn from your chest
and will emigrate
to the sky.

Saul Steinberg could avoid these infernos. However, Mussolini gradual approach to Nazi Germany became more and more and soon Italian Jews would also be sent to their death. Until 1943, however, Italian Jews lived without the threat of extermination. However, this changed when Italy capitulated in 1943 and German troops occupied large areas while allowing Mussolini to proclaim his SALO Republic in northern Italy, causing the murder of over 7,000 Jews coming from those areas.

As a Jew and a Romanian citizen, Steinberg could already in 1941 be extradited to Romania, something that would most certainly mean death for him. However, he had friends and relatives in the United States and hoped they could help to leave Europe. In April 1941 he was arrested as an "illegal/unwanted immigrant" and sent to Milan's San Vittore prison, four days later he was by train transported to Villa Tonelli in the small seaside resort of Tortoreto by the Adriatic Sea, north of Pescara. One of the many internment sites that the Fascists had established for "undesirable persons". Here, Steinberg drew his bed and his fellow prisoners, waiting to know if he would be sent to Romania, or allowed to emigrate to the United States.

Finally, a confirmation came from the American Embassy, ​​certifying that Saul Steinberg was allowed to pass through the United States with his expired Romanian passport and enter into exile in the Dominican Republic, one of the few countries that without any restrictions accepted Jewish refugees. The country's racist dictator Rafael Trujillo believed that European refugees could be used to limit what he considered to be harmful influence from the Republic’s neighbouring "Gallic-African" nation – Haiti, as well as “European blood” probably could invigorate and improve Dominican genetics.

On June 16, Steinberg was able to fly to Lisbon and from there travel to New York with the cruise ship SS Excalibur. Arriving in New York, he had to stay as a "transit passenger" for a week at Ellis Island before he could take a boat that took him across San Juan in Puerto Rico to the capital of the Dominican Republic, Ciudad Trujillo, named after the dictator, where he arrived on the thirteenth of July. Behind him he left a Europe helplessly plunged into the hell of war.  Sometimes the monstrosity of war and persecution appeared by Steinberg’s renderings of marching soldiers, ravenous black wolves and fleeing people. 

During his time in the Dominican Republic, Steinberg constantly tried to get permission to settle in the United States. His relative fame and success in Italy had enabled him to acquire an agent in New York, the Argentinian Cesar Civita, who managed to place his drawings in important magazines such as PM, Mademoiselle and above all in the prestigious The New Yorker. Below is Steinberg's first drawing for The New Yorker. 

The art teacher had asked his students to paint a centaur, a creature that is both human and horse, the student explains to the disgruntled teacher that this is exactly what she has done, although her centaur has human legs instead of a human head and torso. A quietly absurd humor that appealed to The New Yorker's publisher, and already that same year, Steinberg had more drawings published in the magazine. Even in the Dominican Republic, Steinberg had an almost immediate success. His cartoons were published in the country's largest, daily newspaper, La Nación, and he received several advertising assignments.

Nevertheless, Steinberg could not adapt himself to life in the tropics. He suffered in the heat, did not speak any Spanish and was scared and annoyed by the many the bugs that surrounded him in his apartment. He complained about his situation in letters he sent to his American cousins, Henrietta and Harold Danson, while Cesar Civita wrote to the authorities, certifying that Saul Steinberg could become an asset to American society. The Rumanian artist already counted upon a large network of contacts in the US and had more than enough income and assignments to support himself, without being a burden to anyone.

I find it quite fascinating that Steinberg spent some time in the Dominican Republic, a country I think I've gotten to know quite well and where we still have an apartment. When I am confronted with a picture by Steinberg, an abended house, I find that it looks almost exactly like such a house close to our Dominican home and which I pass every day I take my morning walk down there.

The efforts of Steinberg's American friends and acquaintances soon bore fruit. On June 28, 1942, he flew to Miami and the next day took a bus to New York, where he was received by his cousins. Steinberg had soon adapted himself to life in the United States without any difficulty whatsoever. Several of his works were soon exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and in November he was recommended by Harold Ross, The New Yorker's editor-in-chief, to the State Office of War Information and during the war Steinberg was sent on missions to China, India, North Africa and Italy. His humorous drawings of American soldiers' encounters with different cultures were widely published in The New Yorker and several other American magazines.

Steinberg left the army in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant. He could can now be considered as completely Americanised and his art and activities had undeniably acquired a typical American flavour. Steinberg's parents and sister had unexpectedly made it through war’s hardships and severe persecutions. He helped them out of the country and made them settle in Nice. He had visited them in Romania in 1944. It was the last and only time he was in the country after he had moved from there in 1933.

Although Romania has been tarnished by its willing participation in the hell of the Second World War, its reputation after its end has not been particularly good either – first came the controversial dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, followed by decades of financial and governmental crises during which the international interest in Romania was generally limited to skilled gymnasts, vampires, orphans, beggars, child prostitution and stray dogs. But Romania was and is much more than that, among other things, the country's intellectual strength has time and again fertilized and changed Western European culture. For example, the sculptor Constatin Brancusi revolutionized modern perceptions of art, the absurdist Eugène Ionesco changed its theatrical tradition and Mircia Eliade the History of Religions.

Before Fascism took their nation in its iron grip, the Romanians enjoyed an upsurge of a kind rarely seen, while foreign capital was willingly and abundantly invested in an ever-expanding industry. In 1857, oil had begun to flow from a land that was already unusually rich in a variety of minerals. Europe's first oil refinery was established in Ploiestri and a rapidly growing European car industry had made the continent thirsty for Romanian petrol. Even the great depression. which that hit the world at the end of the twenties, didn't affect the country particularly hard. The danger came mainly from the growing fanaticism and blood thirst of patriotically inebriated Fascists, a contributing reason to why so many artists and writers who had emerged during Romania's so-called intellectual golden age after World War I choose to leave the country and ended up in Paris, or the United States.

To get a somewhat superficial idea of ​​the creative powers that exploded in Romania during these times and how it was reflected in a number of artists who came to achieve fame elsewhere, I can as an example mention Marcel Iancu, an all-round artist who in Zurich together with Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara in 1916 founded the Cabaret Voltaire. These artists Dada concept and there new revolutionary, cultural perceptions eventually turned the traditional art world upside down, something it  has never fully recovered from. Below is one of Janco's painted versions of the cabaret and one of his many masks that combined Dada, European folklore, African sculpture, with caricatures and portrait art, as in the mask representing Tistan Tzara.

Like so many of his contemporary social revolutionaries, changers and shakers, Janco had many strings to his lyre, he was for example also a skilled architect.

Tristan Tzara, born as Samuel Rosenstock, was, like other influential art critics and artist friends, the Italian/Polish Frenchman Guillaume Appolinaire and Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, one of the founders of modern lyricism, where boundaries between image, sound and visual art were blurred into something that got people to look at the chaotic contemporary with new eyes. An art where advertising, kitsch and traditional art were stirred into a modernist witch's brew, as in Tzara's poem Assessment.

Tzara was influenced by a popular absurdist tradition created among Jewish Hashidim, Roma, and Romanian peasants, which had made Romanian artists easily and willingly ready to embrace artistic achievements and new trends in Germany and France in particular. There we find the illustrator André François (born Farkas) who worked in France and certainly influenced Steinberg's art.

The realist Avigdor Arikha was a very good friend of Samuel Beckett and made several portraits of the great absurdist, even of one of his spoons. Actually it was a silver spoon received by Beckett Samuel at his birth and whuich he later offered to Arikha's elder daughter, Alba.

Arthur Segal had been involved with the Dada group in Zurich and his art early approached abstraction.

Nevertheless, Segal was very versatile and uninhibited moved from genre to genre.

Another Romanian artist, who like Arikha, Segal and Brauner was Jewish, was Max Herman Maxy. Like Segal, he began as a cubist.

But he too often changed style and genre.

Maxy had in Romania been a childhood friend of Hedda Sterne and she followed him to Paris and later moved to New York, where she was accepted as one of the so-called abstract expressionists, who were then an unusually masculine bunch of painters, macho and hard-drinking. In Paris, Sterne had been close to the surrealists.

In New York, her art became gradually more abstract. 

She finally produced several, large canvases which in my opinion are her best and remind me of Mark Rothko's later artwork.

In 1944, Hedda Sterne married Saul Steinberg. Together they had a large network among the artists and authors in New York, several of them Jews who like them had fled the persecutions in Europe. A Jewish Romanian artist who meant a lot to them, but who during the war years managed to survive in France and afterwards remained there, was Victor Brauner whom Hedda Sterne had got to know during her years in Paris. He was foremost a Surrealist, one-eyed after another Surrealist, the hot-tempered Spaniard Óscar Dominguez, during an argument fatally had injured Brauner's left eye with a shard of a broken bottle. This happened when Victor Brauner had tried to protect his compatriot, the previously mentioned André François. It is a somewhat strange coincidence that five years earlier Victor Brauner had portrayed himself with a damaged eye (though in this case it had been the right eye).

In 1957, Dominguez killed himself by cutting open his arteries. Two years before Brauner did his self-portrait with a ruined eye, Domiguez had portrayed himself with a bleeding wrist, and two years later he did one of his most famous paintings of a lady playing the piano with her severed hands, something reminding  me of one of the Romanian Nina Cassian's many surrealist poems:

My hands creep forward on the hot sand

to unknown destinations;

perhaps to the shoreline,

perhaps to the arms from which they were severed

and which lie on the beach

like two decapitated eels.

Victor Brauner's distinctive surrealism influenced both Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg.

Below is a New Yorker cover by Steinberg which apparently mirrors Brauner's art.

Rightfully, the reader might be asking me why I in an essay about such a successfully Americanized artist as Saul Steinberg  devote so much space to the art and literature of Romania. I assume it is due to the fact that I in Steinberg have found a Romanian trait I think is apparent in the little I know about Romanian literature – namely a distinctive absurdism, which despite being firmly grounded in a complicated reality, more often than not slips into a dreamlike magical realism. Like Steinberg's reality-based art, which, like that of several other Romanian writers and artists, often transforms language and text into visual form.

We found this visual art of words in Tristan Tzara and a somewhat later example is the situationist and lettrist Isidore Issou, born Goldberg.

The special attitude of several Romanians to the language, especially among writers who spent most of their lives in exile, has been by Susan Sontag been highlighted in an essay about Eugène Ionesco. Although she dislikes Ionesco's dramas, Sontag notes his significance when it comes to what she calls the "banality of language". That language is in fact neither a tool for communication, nor an expression of the speaker's personality. Rather, it is a prefabricated thing, created by the speaker's surroundings. Moreover, s/he is generally completely ignorant of this fact and imagines that their language, their means of expression, is highly personal. Consequently, in his plays Ionesco treats and uses language as if it was a tangible entity, just like in Steinberg's pictorial world. At the same time, Ioenesco, like any true absurdist, views reality, and then also language, as if he were a stranger – looking "at the inside from the outside ".

However, according to Sontag Ionesco's discoveries concerning the nature of language and the use of them in his dramatic work is far from being unique and what's worse – compared to modern masters like Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett, Ionesco is little more than a dilettante, even at his best. His work lacks their weight and compassion. He demonstrates contempt for humanity, which, according to Sontag, is not a crime in itself, but disdain of ideas and human thought is simply embarrassing, especially if expressed by a man of limited talent. Sontag adds that she has nothing at all against works that seem to be nonsense, that seem to lack structure and thought, but precisely thereby reveal the "banality of banality".

 Several years ago I did with interest and fascination read the well-written epics by Panait Istrati and Zaharia Stancu, actually a clear and solid realism, far from any absurdism.

These were socially conscious authors who wrote with a strong sense of humanity. Stancu was an outspoken critic of Antonescu's dictatorship and his war of extermination against Jews and Roma,. His openly expressed disgust which the Fascist regime led to Stancu’s imprisonment during World War II. However, under Ceaușescu, he was hailed as a national treasure, elected president of the Writers' Union and became member of the Romanian Academy.

Another author favoured by the dictatorial Ceaușescu couple was Dumitru Popescu, who as secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee was responsible for state censorship.

Nicolae Ceaușescu was strongly critical of Stalinism and strove to show Romania's freedom vis-à-vis Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet regime, thus pursuing a policy involving a rapprochement with the West and loosening of Communism's grip on freedom of expression. However, this did not mean that state censorship was abolished. For example, possession of a typewriter required a state permit. Open regime resistance was punished; torture and executions occurred. At times, more than two million Romanians were housed in the country's prisons. The dreaded security police, the Securitate, eavesdropped, persecuted and controlled the citizens. At the same time, the Ceaușescu couple lived within a luxurious bubble.

At first, Nicolae Ceaușescu enjoyed some popularity, especially through his ability to assert the country's independence, but gradually the regime's persecution of dissidents and minorities became increasingly worse and the number of informers constantly increased.

The poet, philosopher and writer Dumitru Popescu described in his extensive memoirs how he often had to seek out Mr. and Mrs. Ceaușescu approval for publishing politically questionable works. With this in mind, it is somewhat strange that several years ago I came across a strange novel by Popescu, The Royal Hunt, which between the lines and within the framework of magical realism directed sharp criticism at Romania's dictatorial rulers and their willing minions. Perhaps the novel escaped his own censorship by taking place during the time when Romania suffered under the yoke of Stalinism, but that does not prevent its covert criticism of the Ceaușescu regime, which Popescu so publicly and willingly cherished.

As a matter of fact, the culturally influential Popescu, who behind his back was called "the God Dumitru", had been one of the creators of Ceaușescu's political line. In his memoirs, Popescu writes:

I don't want to shy away from any guilt and can thus readily admit that I initially admired Ceaușescu's qualities. Yes, I loved him. There were times when, through his shortcomings, he harmed the country. Nevertheless, both when he was good and when he was bad, he remained a brave, determined and ambitious patriot. In its own way, Romania dominated his entire consciousness. For this turbulent and sometimes frightening man, Romania remained his only love in the world.

As an example of the absurdist mood and narrative techniques present in several of the literary works produced under Ceaușescu, parts of the confusing, but still fascinating content of The Royal Hunt might be summarized. It is novel where everything gets mixed up. Humans and dogs, dissidents and decision-makers, killers and police are amalgamated in a macabre vision. In the end, the entire nation become dominated by a "rabies infection" reminiscent of the one found in zombie films where entire populations are transformed into bloodthirsty monsters. It seems as if the novel heralds the emergence of a human species that will flourish within a "new society". Perhaps a Bolshevik Utopia, which in reality is nothing but a dystopian Hell.

It begins with the murder of Patriciu, politician and chairman of the country's leading football club, "football is the religion of the century". Narrator is detective/prosecutor Tică Dunărințu, tasked with finding the killer, but he soon finds that the murder is connected to the murder of his own father. In the football stand where Patriciu used to appear he was generally accomapanied by the corrupt politician Moise, who Dunărințu suspects was his father's killer.

When Dunărințu with his car during a rainy dark night is traveling  through a deserted forest, it breaks down and he is provided with a lift from a passing car, carrying with it two mysterious passengers. Suddenly, the narrator changes identity and becomes a young man. One of the two women traveling in the back of the car. wonders if the boy is not afraid. He replies that he doesn't understand why he should be afraid. The woman then claims that he has all reason to be terrified since he is traveling with a woman who is about to murder a man who is already dead. The lady called the Schoolgirl, explains that she intend to kill Horia Dunărințu, the father of the detective/prosecutor whom the reader already has met. Horia had been her teacher. The woman will kill him in the woods of Pătârlagele and bury him there under the snow.

The new, young narrator then explains to the alleged murderer that he is well acquainted with her presumptive victim, but that he also happens to know that Horia is long dead and so is his murderer, Moise. Why murder the already dead? The narrator did not know Moise, but he has visited the grave of the famous politician, which is frequently called on by people who hated him and accordingly piss on his grave. He had since then heard that some nocturnal grave callers  had witnessed how Moises' rotting corpse rose from it grave and how the visitors attacked the grisly apparition with sticks and stones, before they fled the scene.

It is then told how the Dead have their own paths and roads below our paths and roads and that they drink water from our wells. The worst of the Undead are not allowed to stay under ground and  are sent back above earth, where they might poison the living, become transformed into smoke and thus penetrate the souls of the living making them act and speak according to their will, these monstrous ghosts may also turn into dogs, wolves, birds or even nettles.

The car arrives in a city that could be Bucharest. One of the ladies invites the narrator to her home for a cup of tea. In the meantime, the driver seeks out a mechanic, because his car has begun to malfunction, though on his way to the workshop the driver remembers that he has left his cigarette case with the lady who invite the narrator to tea. When the chauffeur arrives at the apartment, he finds his two former, female passengers murdered. The narrator is arrested. However, it is soon discovered that the ladies have been dead for two weeks, although the narrator states that he traveled with them the night before.

It is also revealed that not only the father of the previously mentioned prosecutor/detective Tică Dunărinţiu has been murdered – his mother has been raped by nine men who tried to force confessions out of her. Popescu's story gives the impression of utter chaos, which nevertheless seems to follow a pattern set by a sinister manager – the State, a criminal organization, God? Absurdism took/takes many forms in Romania. Sometimes it is clothed in ironically philosophical speculation, as in Matei Calinescu's Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter from 1969. The title, of course, alludes to the most peculiar nonsense novel of the eighteenth century, the more than normally puzzling The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I never managed to read to the end, it was far too strange and confusing far for my taste.

Calinescu's novel became an unusually popular book in Romania. I wasn't particularly impressed, it gave me the impression that, like Tristram Shandy, it was a concoction of different philosophies and speculations, presented in a somewhat crass "humorous" way. But, but, as an example of Romanian Dadaism, a brief summary may be in order.

The main character is an elderly Jew who wanders around Bucharest where he acts as an eccentric philosopher and beggar. Lichter spends his time in the city's parks and bars and preaches a doctrine that he says was revealed to him after he was struck by lightning. It blinded him while hitting him like a heavy stone, together with its deafening roar it burned his mouth and his insides felt as if they were on fire. Lichter suffered strange hallucinations – men with eagle heads, frogs and rats, some of which hissed at him with forked tongues. As silence once again settled around him Lichter realized that he now within himself incarnated three human stages; i) Circus – his clownish fall to the ground, followed by his ridiculous stomping around in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd of people within one of Bucharest’s parks; ii) Madness – the strange hallucinations, and finally iii) Perplexity– his awareness of and preaching about the arrival of God's Holy Flame.

The stage of Circus defined Lichter's performance as a clown acting with humorous nonsense, mixed with tears and tragedy, a stage that relentlessly led to loneliness, silence and an inability to communicate. However, then Madness reveals feeling as a liberation, which heals and unites Lichter's fragmented consciousness, thus a sense of unity is created within Lester’s mind, freeing it from any linguistic oppression, opening it towards what might be considered as a chaos of myths and fantasy, but in reality is an expansion of consciousness. The final stage in Lichter's development, and what should be an ideal for every human being, is Perplexity, a state characterized by darkness and silence in which one realizes that God actually exists, far beyond language, beyond being and non-being.

Lichter is immoral, he considers theft to be a protest against the tyranny of ownership and celebrates the difficult but generally misunderstood noble art of begging. He describes a Realm of Stupidity, which according to him is as a state of egocentric ownership, as opposed to freedom of being. Lichter considers the perpetually drunk and half-asleep Leopold Nacht as the only true philosopher he knows and the sole human being who fully agrees with Lister’s philosophy of life – namely that only one truth, indivisible and silent. Everything that is said is thereby a lie and existence itself a mistake, a sin.

In this, and in much else, Calinescu has much in common with the misanthropic Émile Michel Cioran, who considers the entire human existence to be a deplorable chimera, if not an outright abomination:

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.

This Romanian philosopher and writer whom Susan Sontag, unlike Ionesco, lifted to the skies, lived, like so many other Romanian writers, most of his life in exile in Paris. He wrote in French and it cannot be denied that in his aphorisms he reveals himself as a great stylist. Like several of Nietzsche's books, those written by Cioran also consist the agglomeration of a large number of aphorisms. Cioran argued that this suited him best because he opposed any kind of systematization, considering that free thought must include what could be perceived as contradictions and it was therefore that compilation of a number of mostly succinct, but occasionally even apparently contradictory  aphorisms could best convey his attitude to life, as a random, pitiful existence.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.

Cioran harboured an acute aversion to Hegel (and I agree with him there) resenting the philosopher's preaching that man would feel free if he were surrounded by a world created by himself. Cioran believed that this was exactly what Hegel accomplished and that he thereby contributed with inspiration to various social systems that enslaved and despised humankind.

Similar to Nietzsche, and just like him being the son of a priest, Cioran was well versed in the Bible, but with a disdain for organised Christianity, more inclined to approve of rebellious mystics and sympathetic to profound thinkers of Buddhism and Hinduism and their denial that human existence is good and beneficial. Cioran celebrated the stillness, the emptiness, the all-encompassing calm of nothingness. The idea of ​​progress, of success, did according to him “insult the intellect” and he considered that “the West” was nothing mor than "a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse".

I have never been particularly fascinated by collections of aphorisms; however ingenious they might be. Even masters like Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, who had a knack for scattering aphoristic pearls around themselves, did so together with quite a lot of nonsense. I find the compact nature of aphorisms tiresome, especially if I'm bombarded with them on page after page. I lose interest and resent the superior attitude of the authors, this repeated assertions of truths, many of which appear either self-evident or repulsive.

I suspect that Cioran admired Nietzsche's freedom of thought, his overturning of a happy idleness and comformism Like Nietzsche, Cioran worshiped music, celebrating its clarity and order. For Cioran, Bach's music was connected to the concept of God, something incredible, far beyond all that is trivial and human. In other words, true music is connected to, perhaps even identical with, God. Cioran stated that the "unusual", the so-called "genial" is not at all a criterion for perfection. Paganini's music was more surprising, more unpredictable than Bach's, but that did not make his more true, deeper or better than what was accomplished by this incomparable master.

The similarities to Nietzsche did not hinder Cioran from pouring complaints and resentments over him. He wrote that Nietzsche was naive. Obsessed with his own enthusiasm and exuberant language. A false iconoclast who viewed humanity from a distance, an almost pubescent outsider who through his ignorance of eroticism, filth and misery came up with the ridiculous idea that humanity could be improved by insight and independent thinking, when all knowledge is in fact an impossibility and even if it weren't, human knowledge cannot solve anything. If Nietzsche really understood the misery of human nature, he would have realized what a ridiculous thought, what a grotesque figment of his imagination his Superrman was. The only thing that mitigated Nietzsche's follies was his madness, which made him die happy, disconnected from the misery of human existence.

Cioran resembles Calinescu's Zacharias Lichter in the sense that he acknowledged his losershp and stated that it is better to live in the gutter than to be put on a pedestal. One wonders what Cioran, who was constantly tormented by insomnia, was doing in his gutter other than wallowing in pessimism and admiration of his own insights and vast reading. I hardly think that he, like Wilde, thought that even if we are all in the gutter, some of us are still looking at the stars.

No, Cioran is not my kind of philosopher, although he can occassionally come up with one or two admirably formulated thoughts. My suspiciousness of Cioran may also be based on the fact that I cannot avoid reading him with prejudiced coloured glasses.

At the age of seventeen, Cioran began studying philosophy at the University of Bucharest where he established a lifelong friendship with Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who, the latter was at the time an extreme nationalist and attracted the murderously patriotic Iron Guardand like Cioran he joined their ranks. After Cioran received a scholarship for studies at the Humboldt University in 1933, he also joined the Nazi Party while studying in Berlin. After the World War II, Cioran distanced himself from all his previous political sympathies. He regretted his connections with various ideologies and organizations and stated that fanaticism is the death of all conversation and free thinking. He declared "Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reason."

According to Cioran, Hitler had been a sinister and at the same time pathetic person. Against all odds, this madman managed to achieve everything he aspired to, but at the same time he destroyed everything around him. This made him a monster in a class of his own. The man was a bastard, but even his pathos, his conviction and idealism were monstrous. A loser who constantly talked about victory. Who believed his words and thereby walled himself up within his twisted optimism. Even as everything was collapsing around him, Hitler expressed an insane hope that his will and conviction would prevail, and this furthermore trapped him in  madness,  until the bitter end Hitler invented and carried out abomination after another. This is precisely why we can say that he, more than any other mortal, succeeded in realizing the dream of himself as Superman. He was an idiot though. To seek power, to obtain it and play the role of an incomparable leader, can only be accomplished with a large dose of stupidity, of boundless idiocy. With a cynical smirk, Cioran noted that all great historical events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen.

Well, maybe Cioran was right, but my doubts about him as a person and philosopher remain. Just as is the case with the leaders and founders of the Sweden Democrats, I believe that the old Nazi stripes are not going away. Cioran's philosophy breathes, in my opinion, a stale contempt for humanity. Just as Nietzsche's talk of blond beasts and rejuvenating war permeates his philosophy, there is much in Cioran that makes me turn against him:

”Only what proceeds from emotion or from cynism is real. All the rest is ‘talent”.”

”The strength of this Statesman is to be visionary and cynical. A dreamer without scruples.”

”With sufficient perspective , nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.”

”To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse – to behave with them like an undertaker.”

Cioran's friend Mircia Eliade, never publicly distanced herself from the fascist beliefs of her youth and furthermore expressed his admiration for the, in my opinion obnoxiously Fascist Italian rabble-rouser Julius Evola. Despite this, I cannot deny that Eliade's writings ahve meant a lot to me and aroused my admiration. My religious history studies have been inspired by his books on shamanism, yoga and Indian philosophy and not least his comprehensive knowledge of similarities between religious beliefs during all times and within almost every corner of the world. Perhaps they have not been 100 percent correct, but still – they are inspiring. In particular, I have been taken by his doctrine of hierophany, i.e. how the divine manifests itself in a delimited place, within an individual, or within a rite. Like several other Romanian thinkers/philosophers, Eliade was also a fiction writer and as such, like Popesco who despite his regrettable complicity with the dictatorship in his novels produced a veiled, imaginatively fantastic critique of the regime he lived under, Eliade was able to in his fictitious works to create a magic mirror of totalitarian regimes.

Eliade makes me think of my oldest daughter's friend Anca from Romania, who once asked Janna which novel about a dictatorship she found most interesting. When Janna answered Orwell's 1984, Anca had laughed and stated that something like that could not have been written under a dictatorship. When Janna wondered what she meant by that, Anka replied that 1984 was neither funny nor fanciful. When Janna asked Anka what she considered to be a good novel about a dictatorship, she replied that it was undoubtedly Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, which is true, funny and fantastic and therefore could not be published under Stalin.

From 1928 to 1931, Eliade studied at the University of Calcutta, visited ashrams, learned Sanskrit and married an Indian woman. A time that left deep traces in his continued life. In a book of fiction, Two Strange Stories, which he wrote about India, a sage explains:

No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own—whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes to do.

In one of the stories, Nights in Serampore, three European scientists travel deep into the jungles of Bengal and are there thrown into an alternate reality where they witness the brutal murder of a young Indian woman, not knowing if it really happened or not. In the second story, Doctor Honingberger's secret, a Romanian doctor disappears without a trace after searching for the legendary Shambalah through yoga techniques. These are well-written, thought-provoking short stories, but they are surpassed by The Old Man and the Bureaucrats.

In this novel the reader meets the retired headmaster Zaharia Farama who, like Zacaharia Lichter, spends his time wandering aimlessly around Bucharest and on various occasions visits bars and parks to tell endless stories about former students. The secret police, who listen to everything, everywhere, find that some of these people have become influential and when some of the stories turn out to contain troubling information, which can be proven, the police become increasingly interested in Zaharia and his stories. Finally, he is subjected to demanding interrogations. Zaharia proves to be unusually cooperative and revels in the attention. He tells with great enthusiasm his remarkable stories, which gradually become increasingly fantastic and impregnated with obscure Romanian folklore. The secret police imagines that the old man is a cunning adversary to the Regime, consciously hiding real conditions under a web of fantastic tales. However, the interrogator, a woman named Anca Vogel, understands the old teacher and realizes that there is a hidden meaning behind every story, each one of them to another story. Like Chinese boxes they open to one world after the other and at the end of the process an inner, all-encompassing truth is sensed.

Anca tells her colleagues that they should learn from the old man's stories and so should bureaucrats, politicians, writers and artists, if they did that everything would be better. Of course, Anca ends up in trouble when the police suspects that she has been caught in the sly traitor Zaharias' net and become part of the resistance movement as well. Eliade explained that the purpose of his little novel was to demonstrate a

a confrontation between two mythologies: the mythology of folklore, of the people, which is still alive, still welling up in the old man, and the mythology of the modern world, of technocracy. These two mythologies meet head on. The police try to discover the hidden meaning of all these stories. But they are also blinkered, they can only look for political secrets. They are incapable of imagining that there can be meaning outside the political field.

Among Zaharia’s stories is a description of how a gang of children and youngster meet in a basement of the apartment buildings where they live and down there find mysterious signs and stories. One of them discovers a way into an underground world where myths and legends become real. Inside this magic realm lives Oana, a giant girl who fell in love with a bull, who actually is another woman in disguise. A story leadsingme to the contemporary writer Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Nostalgia in which a group of wild children in an apartment building basement spellbound listen to a boy who tells them fantastic stories, while he seems to possess supernatural powers and unsuspected insights. When he finally proves, like every young man, to be able to fall in love with a girl, he falls out of favor with his formerly bewitched adepts. Here we find the entire enchanted world of childhood with its mysterious games, unbridled imagination, violence and friendship.

Even if it consists of apparently independent stories, Nostalgia is nevertheless a novel. It is held together by narrative threads leading into one story after another. Ever present behind all this is the Narrator, who can be identified with Mircea Cărtărescu. However, his is a discreet, fleeting presence, far from, for example, how the self-absorbed Knausgård figures in his celebrated autobiographical writings. Cărtărescu's stories pulse with a nostalgic shimmer. All of them are coloured by memories from his childhood and youth. Nostalgia takes place in a highly tangible and erotic light, characterized by the child's fear and wonder at things that it does not really understand, for example – erotic allure. The children's games and fantasies turn gradually, and almost imperceptibly, into violent longing, erotic obsession and a desperate desire for love, both ib its physical and psychological aspects. However, even this sphere is infiltrated by childhood fantasy and the reader soon does not know what is reality, or what is dreams.

A multi-coloured web of memories, music, reading fruits and dreams is created through Cărtărescu's lyrically nuanced and rich language, which with an easy and free flow gradually envelops the reader in a web of stories, characterized by a rich, often completely unexpected fantasy. It's like when Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, with the delightful allure of her fairytales, enchants the bloodthirsty, but sad and unhappy pascha.

In Nostalgia, perspectives shift, as do narrators and gender roles. In the story Twins, a man, is through transvestism and cruel manipulations of a capricious girlfriend ending up in a mental hospital, where he is interned in its women's ward. He has apparently turned into a woman and since the ending reveals that the entire story is written by him/her, the reader becomes aware that the sometimes distorted, but nevertheless clearly presented sequences emanating from a parallel reality were born out of a mentally ill brain – or, where they really that? All contexts are unclear. As in the other stories of Nostalgia, events take place in a dream world where everything happens against the backdrop of a highly tangible Bucharest and a carefully described everyday life.

It is not without reason that Cărtărescu makes me think of another of my favourite author of mine, namely Stephen King. He too, in all his unevenness, is a storyteller of God's grace, who, like Cărtărescu, often approaches the domains of Gothic horror literature, but is nevertheless firmly anchored in his contemporary USA, just as Cărtărescu moves in and out of his Romanian everyday life. By King, children's world and performances are also at the centre. I recently read his Fairy Tale, where a boy leaves a carefully described contemporary American small town, only to end up, through underground tunnels, in a dark fairyland, with mysterious creatures and strange cities. A world which, however, in a strange manner is connected his own, highly personal reality.

As a coda to his Nostalgia, Cărtărescu has placed his story The Architect, It begins quite mundanely with a young architect on the rise professionally acquiring a Romanian-made Dacia. In the morning before he leaves for work, he have the habit of sitting in his car and for a few minutes inhale its scent of fresh modernity. He dreams of a car-driven future together with his young, attractive wife. He still lacks a driver's license, but will soon start his driving lessons. While the architect sits there in his beloved vehicle, he fiddles and dials with various wheels and buttons. Suddenly the car horn starts to blare. It is impossible to shut off the rampant misery. Morning-weary neighbours begin to grumble at him. In a panic, the despairing architect flees to a car repair shop and before long a mechanic manages to silence the heartbreakingly blaring car horn.

The shock made the architect interested in the "music boxes" that in some countries became popular during the sixties. Instead of a usual signal, they triggered a piece of melody. I don't know if there were such devices in Sweden at the time, but during Italian vacations with my parents I often heard them contributing to the chaos of Rome and Naples. The architect becomes increasingly fascinated by these “musical devicea” and begins to spend his salary on acquiring them. It becomes an obsession. He starts tinkering with the music boxes on his own, figuring out how he might compose his own melodies. Finally, he gets a relative to install a keyboard and a sophisticated speaker system in the car, it does make the Dacia roadworthy, but the architect can now sit and tinker in his stationary car, oblivious to his wife, work and career. This is where the story, in true Romanian absurd fashion, moves into a completely different realm. Like a story by Borges, the architect's initially innocent distraction turns into something completely unexpected – a cosmic drama of vast, unlimited dimensions.

In accordance with the thoughts of philosophers and cultural critics, such as Nietzsche and Cioran, Cărtărescu depicts music as something otherworldly, beyond human comprehension. Cioran seemed to perceive Bach's music as the indicative of a superhuman power, just like Nietzsche. The latter is perhaps the best example of a philosopher/writer engulfed in the mystery of music. With a smile, I cannot help imagining Nietzsche grooving to ABBA's tunes. After all, he was a philosopher who constantly praised dance and music, believing that laughter and joy were the right attitude towards life and oneself.

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing
Thanks for all the joy they're bringing
Who can live without it? I ask in all honesty
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance, what are we?
So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me.

The presence of music deepened Nietzsche's life and became a unifying element of his entire poetic and philosophical madness. After his mental collapse, Nietzsche was in the hospital in Basel asked how he was doing. Nietzsche replied: “I feel well, but it is only in music that I can express my condition.”

Before he finally stepped into silence, Nietzsche spoke almost exclusively about music and until his death in 1900, it could happen that he unexpectedly got up and went to the piano, where improvised strange melodic loops. Apparently all Nitezsche could remember was music.

With Cărtărescu's architect, the music he creates grows to incredible dimensions – it transforms himself into a non-stop playing, creating monster, transforming his car, which becomes a part of him, changing the entire neighbourhood, the country and ultimately the Universe. Music is revealed in all its magnificence, like the final stanzas of Dante's Comedy, where God's love takes on that role:

Omai sarà più corta mia favella,

pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante

che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.

What little I recall is to be told, from this point on, in words more weak than those of one whose infant tongue still bathes at the breast.

A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;

ma già volgeva il mio disio e ‘l velle,

sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,

l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Here force failed my high fantasy. but my desire and will were moved already – llike a wheel revolving uniformly – the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Like Dante's Divina Commedia, Cărtărescu's Nostalgia is a dream about the author's life, thoughts and beliefs, and like Dante, Cărtărescu's attires his memories in lavish imagination and a dynamic, accessible language. However, if in his final words Dante makes divine Love shine brightest as the engine of the Universe, while Cărtărescu lets Music do so in an explosion of scientific and painterly words and terms.

Cărtărescu's Architect makes me think of the fate of the Russian composer Aleksandr Nikolaevich Scrjabin. Apparently independent of influential contemporary composers, Scrjabin developed a dissonant musical language that, without being atonal, transcended ordinary tonality, fully in keeping with his personal metaphysics. Scriabin was inspired by the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, an inclusive art work. To achieve this, Scrjabin made use of his synesthetic ability which made him associate colours to harmonizing tones in his personally applied system. To support this endeavour he constructed a scale in the form of a colour-coded circles, inspired by his theosophical beliefs.

 Another theosophist who tried to do something similar was the Czech Frantisk Kupka, though he tried to translate music into paintings.

Sometime before his death, Scrjabin was busy planning a never-before-seen, or unheard of, multimedia work, to be performed at a specific location within the Himalayan mountain range. This mammoth work would trigger “Armageddon, a grand religious synthesis of all the arts that would herald the birth of a new world.". Scrjabin left only a few sketches for this work - Mysterium.

Scrjabin gave his last concert on April 2, 1915 in Saint Petersburg. He received rave reviews and wrote

I completely forgot I was playing in a hall with people around me. This happens very rarely to me on the platform. I had to watch himself very carefully, look at himself as if from afar, to keep himself in control.

When he had returned to his apartment in Moscow, Scrjabin observed a small pimple on his right upper lip, it had been annoying him for a couple of months. On the 4th of April he suffered a violent fever attack. The pimple had turned into a pustule, then it became a carbuncle, a finally a furuncle. These were the symptoms of a painful local infection, caused by the often fatal bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. The wound around the growing furuncle looked like “purple fire”. When the boil was cut open it was already too late, it had poisoned Scriabin’s blood. On April 14, 1915, Scrjabin died of sepsis. He was only 43 years old and at the height of his career. In Europe, the Worrld War I raged for full – the Armageddon.

Cărtărescu's literary work is undoubtedly firmly rooted in the absurdist Romanian tradition, into which I was led through Steinberg’s art, but Cărtărescu's world, like Steinberg's, is firmly rooted in the present and is thus an example of how true art, however fantastic it may seem, speaks directly to us. And like Steinberg, who did not for a moment seem to doubt the validity of his art, its ability to touch us, Cărtărescu's novels are proof of his belief in the power of literature, in the power of language and the continuing ability of literature to fascinate us. The life-giving power of stories. A true guardian of Scheherazade's legacy.

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