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— Studies on Fin-de-Siècle Transylvania  —

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index of Projects:

This project, as all other Sourcebooks of mine, are intended to reduce the unbelievable lack of sources related to this field.

My PhD dissertation explores the intellectual sources of the Romanian right wing movements in Fin-de-Siècle Transylvania. Started as a conflict among local notabilities, accentuated by various crisis of modernity, and enriched by various influences from Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest and other European university centres, the decline of traditional Romanian elite offered the background for a new radical movement. This movement took advantage from the post war political crisis and became prevalent in the early ’30, leading to the mainstream of Romanian extreme right of the ‘40s. My thesis follows the story of Octavian Goga. He became the national poet in 1905, a national symbol in 1910, a controversial figure in 1912 because of the public fight between “the steeled youth” and the “decrepit old“ politicians, a promising politicians in Greater Romania, and, 1938, prime minister. His public activities and various debates in which he take position make him an ideal central character in analysing the Fin-de-Siècle sources of the Romanian right wing movement.

This story should relativize the nationalist accent of the history of Transylvania and revaluate the interpretation of Romanian antisemitism. On the one side, Transylvanian Romanians, far from being isolated from the rest of the Habsburg Empire or from Europe, they actively and creatively participated in what is now called Fin-de-Siècle culture – a culture deeply influenced by the “Germanic ideology,” an anti-modern Weltanschauung that offered the background of the widespread radicalism triggered by the First World War.

Further, my interest is to break the parochial mind settings that still govern the historical studies in Romania. On the one hand, it is about the artificial split between “modern” and “contemporary“ history for which the First World War is a definite border-stone. On the other hand, the fortuitous rupture between history and literary studies, in Romania, let aside for both disciplines a significant amount of political literature, article written by Romanian writers.  These sources are of a great value as far as many of these writers played an outstanding political role — and Goga is one of the extreme examples in this sense.

The history of O. Goga gives me the opportunity to overview the cultural life of Transylvania from the late 19^th century until the ’30 in a comparative manner. Different public debates (scandals) in which he was involved, political fights in which all the public figures acted or reacted, offer the chance of reconstructing a cultural “thick description” of Transylvania and to analyse the change happened after its unification with the Romanian Kingdom. Using the current bibliography on Fin-de-Siècle, I follow the growth of radical movements on the background of disillusions and crises of modernity, the emergence of modern antisemitism and populism not as phenomena restricted to a country or region but as European experiences. Following the various intellectual and/or cultural influences, my attempt is to reinterpret the history of emergence of extreme right movement in its original broader context and, at the same time, to follow the very  illustrative story of a poet who became prime-minister, the first prime-minister who issued the antisemitic and racial lows in Romania.

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P.S. Your comments, questions and discussions are more than welcome. The floor is open.

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