Professor Ernest Bernea and the reasons for his detachment from the Legionary Movement

In the Canal camps I was able to clarify the last questions about the Legionary ideology that had haunted me for ten years. In Aiud, in the first prison, I spoke with one of the most intelligent legionary commanders, who had only begun to enlighten me, followed by many discussions with young intellectuals, with whom we completed each other’s questions, which had become more and more serious. Everywhere I went, I met legionaires who refused to discuss the legionnaire’s ideology, precisely because they had begun to see its utopia beneath its bombastic veneer and could not help but recognise its failure.

“Too much suffering had accumulated, they said, to give up so easily by simply confessing one’s sins. The rest of us just couldn’t admit it, the inability to take responsibility for failure. Or this stupid criterion that some doctrinal claims of the past, compromised before the whole civilised world, would retain their value because those of us involved in the Legionary Movement had spent too much time in prison.

The stupid idea of an unjustified sacrifice, carried out by Codreanu or Sima for propaganda purposes and provoked by assassinations or other deliberate and premeditated violence, had left in the minds of those who refused to discuss it confusions that could keep them in some ignorant fanaticism for the rest of their lives.

At the Peninsula, God gave me one of the people who would gladly complete my principles of life and with whom I would clarify very sensitive questions about the Legionary ideology.

Ernest Bernea was a professor of ethnology and sociology and the author of many specialist works. But Ernest Bernea was not only a professional man, he was a man of higher concerns, a man of strict civic discipline, but also a passionate family man. If you knew him and tried to discover in him, through daily conversations, the legionaire he had been or perhaps still was, you would find almost nothing. On the contrary, contrary to what he had heard from Codreanu, he was able to discover the esteem in which Jewish and other ethnic scholars held him. He went far beyond narrow-minded politics, and if one expected political prescriptions for the present or the future from him, one had to be patient and clear-headed.

He made broad statements from which the interlocutor, if he had the necessary apperceptive baggage, understood that the civilised world does not allow intolerance, violence and murder. Within a week or two I saw that in discussions he preferred people without prejudices and avoided the rigid ones.

Two fortunate coincidences allowed me to enter into the professor’s most intimate, most radical convictions and to prolong political analyses longer than with others.

The first was the place of freedom in political thought and discussion. He was pleased to see this in me, but he warned me that I was too young and that I might have troublesome conflicts if I took this approach with all the legionnaires. So there was a certain caution or restraint in him too, as I had seen in Aiud in the legionary commander who thought like Bernea, both of them of exceptional quality.

The second coincidence, which at first sight seems trivial, was to bring us closer together and open up an unreserved sincerity. From the very first day we met, and I had barely told him what I knew about him, he asked me if I knew anyone with the same name who had been in the camp in 1938. When I confirmed that he was the lawyer Constantin Bontaș, my cousin, he got very excited and explained why.

I found out that the teacher, like my cousin, had grown up and had studied as a child of the troops, a fact they had discovered in the camp and an argument for us to be friends. As intellectually well-informed people, they understood when they met in the camp that the Legionary Movement had become too tight and rigid a corset for them and many others.

They both decided to distance themselves from the Legionary Movement, then in the camp, and were released together with a large number of prisoners[1]. The professor was deeply saddened and thoughtful when I told him how quickly my cousin had died, after volunteering to go to the front. He had sought political rehabilitation after the shame of what had happened in 1940, culminating in the rebellion, and had arrived too early to meet his father, who had died in Mărășești in the First World War.

Continuing his recollections, the professor recounted the drama of the situation after the uprising.

– “In fact, the tragedy of the movement began in 1938, and this beginning of the end was brought about by the congress in Tg. Mureș, a real explosion of legionary madness, towards revenge, violence, assassinations, programmed on executioners and victims. After the uprising, I consulted Mircea Vulcănescu, who had always refused to join the movement because he was against terror, and I had his sincere and friendly encouragement to come under Antonescu’s umbrella. I simply felt that I was becoming a free man. In the last five or six years, I had the feeling that I was being taken away morally without being asked, because of all the assassinations and provocations that were directed against us. I thought about it and I wrote again that I never wanted to hear from the Legionaries again”.

– “Professor, if there were ten or fifteen condemned Legionaries present at our meeting, would you repeat what you said to me?”

– “If I didn’t know each one of them, and each one’s ability to understand, I wouldn’t have a discussion with them. It is not only the ignorance of some, but also the fanaticism of others that is based on ignorance. They know what they were told 15 years ago, that democracy is no good either. I don’t allow myself to have discussions except with those who have understood the problem themselves and are clarifying some issues. With the oppression we are suffering, we must not make enemies of each other, time will clarify everything”.

– One of the arguments, somewhat speculative in favour of the quality of the Legion’s ideology, concerns the adherence to the movement of many of the leaders of the post-World War I generation. It is clear that you are part of the elite group of young people who joined between the wars. After many years of discussion and research, I have an answer to this question, but I don’t know if it’s enough, and I’d very much like your answer.

– The answer is an analysis, there are many aspects and many reasons that influenced the adherence to the movement. Mircea Vulcănescu, a friend of the endless discussions during the Antonescu period, with whom I myself wanted to clarify these issues, had a way of simplifying and saying: the more mystery and philosophy you put into a question, the more you get bogged down. The historical experience of the extremes, both left and right, was simply lacking. The experience of democracy did exist, but in economic terms it was identified with capitalist liberalism, which, in addition to its positive effects (which were insufficiently appreciated and edified in the 1920s), had many negative aspects that were only belatedly resolved. Democracy was thus seen to have its bad sides, but the extremes were not even aware of the limits of the horrors they were unleashing. The world of 1920 did not suspect that the loss of human freedoms and rights meant the loss of the best of thousands of years of historical experience. On the one hand, the extreme right (and the extreme left) presented attractive ideals as a superficial sign, but behind them lay intolerance, violence, murder and totalitarianism. The experience of the extremes was in its infancy and offered society only illusory idealisms, but the experience of the extremes as state power was not historically complete in all respects. But there are many facets to the question. The elite youth who joined did not believe that democracy could solve social problems, which had multiple causes. They did not believe because, lacking historical experience, they dreamed of an absolute, miraculous solution, and elements of irrational existentialism intervened. Codreanu, inspired by Mussolini, said “we will build a country like the sun in the sky”, and on holiday he set up a camp with 100 young people, in a village without a church, and he built it for them. The elite was ecstatic about this action, which won over the village electorate, and did not understand the utopian aspect when the method was related to all the needs of a state. Let us not forget, however, that there were many more of the elite who understood the utopias of the extremes from the outset and rejected them”.

I was embarrassed to ask the professor if he had worked out his problems with Mircea Vulcănescu, or even under his influence. But if I had asked him, I’m sure he wouldn’t have hesitated; he had a high opinion of Vulcănescu, who, although influenced by the right (without extremism), was a philosopher and an enlightened independent in politics. Throughout the Antonescu period, they spent much of their free time in political discussions, and the professor would always quote him in discussions with me, using him as an argument.

I was happy to have met Bernea, and that his one-time friendship with my cousin had opened up the self-containment and reserve I had seen in him towards others who just wanted to know him. He had many problems with his health and his sense of professional worth, many studies he had started were lost, and he suffered much for his family.

There were a few friends at Peninsula who had gained the professor’s confidence and we spoke openly. But he was also courted by the Legionaries who wanted to rebuild the Movement. I was often present and noticed the evasive answers or the evasive assessments of the professor, which made some of them leave with their convictions. They usually argued by renouncing violence, as if they were making a great promise for the future. I think that, in the end, the methods of repression and annihilation of the communist regime that we all had to endure in the camps and prisons were the ultimate proof that these methods morally and politically compromise any regime, so that any so-called ‘justification’ that the legionnaires put forward for the murders they committed remained an aberration.

– “But otherwise, they said, the movement remained valid: education for national values, for human character, for the edification of the Orthodox faith”.

The professor had his way of talking to these people, and when we were alone, he would explain and admonish us, saying that the legionnaires of the middle level and below were convinced that the ideals they wanted to advance were and were only those of the legionnaires, that they were legionnaire creations. If you disabuse them of this belief, they will have no choice but to become Communist men.

– You”, he told us, “talk as if you were in a democracy, there are not so many of them and they are not so fanatical, who knows how many of us will understand democracy, by then, and especially then, the few who will be left will understand that the desires mentioned (without violence) are shared by the majority of the parties, which also have the advantage of not being compromised by assassinations and totalitarianism”.

Once again, I understand that it is not easy to accept failure and that, in addition to discernment, one needs common sense and the courage to take responsibility.

However, to what we discussed with the professor, those of us who wanted to draw clearer conclusions added that the orthodoxy of the Legionaries (or of any other Christian form) is not the same as that of the parties of the West, Christian-social, etc. In the Legionary Movement, orthodox activism of a fundamentalist type, or often with elements of traditional political mysticism through the commemoration of the Legionary departed at meetings was practised. It thus became a political sectarianism, with distortions of the Christian essence.

Much was possible then, in the historical experience of Romanian society up to that time, which I have already mentioned, but it would not be possible in another, more developed society.

As for the education of Romanians, which is also part of the so-called spiritual revolution, it can only be conceived under the control of the whole society, through the Parliament.

Any kind of education by one party or organisation, in opposition to the majority of other parties, tends towards dictatorship and intolerance.

(Andrei Bontaș, The Lost Chronicle of a Found Man, National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 110-115)

1. It is about the separation from the Legionary Movement that took place in the Vaslui camp in the spring of 1939, at the request of the Carlist authorities.