Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească

Z. Ornea studies Romania’s far right in the 1930s. He shows its reach in politics, culture, and private life. He disputes the view that the years between wars were ideal. He shows how extreme ideas helped pave the way for total state rule.

This history of ideas is for readers of Romanian politics and culture. Ornea quotes long parts of the works he studies. These writers include Nae Ionescu, Nichifor Crainic, Eliade, and Cioran. He studies how they thought for or backed the far right. Their fame in culture does not spare their views from close study.

Ornea wrote much of the book before 1989. His Marxist roots helped shape how he saw the subject. So did his views as a social democrat. But he sought to study the past, not settle political scores. His work came before later public rows over Eliade’s fascist ties.

In its last years, Romania’s communist rule blocked the book. The state had turned toward a sense of national pride that scorned other nations. This echoed parts of the past Ornea studied. Those links made work on the far right a fraught political task. The climate after 1971 also made his left-wing stance hard to hold.

This edition has a preface by Marta Petreu.