Petre Țuțea – Socrates of Romania
Petre Țuțea, the Socrates of Romania, as most people called him, was a doctor of philosophy and economics. Of all the lecturers, Petre Țuțea was the one who was most listened to, one might even say enjoyed, by the whole room. His speeches were real lectures on philosophy, general culture and spiritual enjoyment. In addition to his oratorical talent, Țuțea sprinkled his exposition with certain words of wisdom, which lowered the eyebrows and opened the hearts of all.
He had done his doctorate in Germany and managed to make himself understood even in matters of pure philosophy. A connoisseur of the great ancient philosophers – Plato, Plutarch, Socrates, etc. – he juggled with all the modern philosophers, especially the German ones, Hegel, Kant and Nietzsche. He took part in all the discussions about the day’s exhibition, and the meeting became interesting because of what Petre Țuțea said, not because of his confession.
He was also a first-class journalist. Țuțea also worked for Nae Ionescu’s newspaper “Cuvântul”, where Mihail Sebastian and other journalists of different political persuasions also worked. I say this to remind you once again that Nae Ionescu did not make publication in his newspaper conditional on the political orientation of his collaborators, but on the value of the ideas with which they enriched the content of the newspaper.
The truth is that Nae Ionescu, like Țuțea, cannot be compared to anyone but himself. (…)
In 1940, when our minister in Moscow was Grigore Gafencu, Petre Țuțea was the economic attaché of this legation. During the Legionary Government, he worked briefly in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We cannot count him among the legionary doctrinaires.
Petre Țuțea was tall, stocky and always in a good mood. It could be said that he was the most comprehensive mind in the Aiud prison in 1964. He was arrested much later than the other legionaries. Nevertheless, prison life had worn him down. Many of his teeth were missing and he had difficulty pronouncing certain words. I saw him a few times at lunch. It took him a long time to chew cartilage, tendons, tails and other such ‘by-products’, as they called such scraps in prison, used for the table of the damned. Sometimes, if he hadn’t finished eating in the allotted time, he would ask the guard to bring the canteen into the cell. Often he was not allowed to do so and had to give up the rest of his food.
After his release, he wanted to publish some of his manuscripts, but he had no access to a publisher. Because he did not want to bow down, he was subjected to all kinds of harassment. It went so far that he was accused of speculation. All sorts of despicable methods were used against him, drawn from the bottomless bag of the Securitate, in order to compromise him in public.
(Ion Antohe – Crucifixion in Romania after Yalta, Albatros Publishing House, Bucharest 1995, pp. 452-453)