The contradictory biography of Vintila Horia

Romanian-German writer Richard Wagner defends Romanian author Vintila Horia [1915-1992] who, like Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, was sympathetic to the fascist cause. As a consequence, after the war newspapers like L'Humanité used Securitate material to keep Western audiences from reading his works. "True, Horia wrote articles like 'The Fascist Miracle' in the 1930s, and must be held accountable for them. But what have the inspired historical novels he wrote in the 1960s, which have Ovid, Boethius or Platon as their protagonists and whose main theme is exile as a form of existence, to do with all that. It's as if we were to ignore Heidegger's 'Being and Time' simply because he got involved with the Nazis, or not publish Celine's 'Journey to the End of the Night' because of his 'Bagatelles pour un massacre' and his role in Vichy. ... The Horia case is also an instructive example of the difficulties of defining a new canon after the end of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe."

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