Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the «Terror of History» in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

Abstract

Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the «Terror of History» in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

This article analyses the alternative temporality visible in the rhetoric of the «Legion of the Archangel Michael», Romania's interwar fascist movement. It argues that, in line with its palingenetic ideology, the legionary movement adopted a temporal vision in which a timeless Romanian nation spanning both an immemorial past and an infinite future was made salient in an urgent present, interpreted as a «threshold» between the old and the new world. Thus oscillating between the seemingly opposing poles of revolution and eternity, this alternative temporality was responsible both for the attraction of a significant number of intellectuals to the movement, and for the Legion's typically fascist radicalism that justified and valorised violence as a form of «creative destruction» that would bring about the eschatological abolition of history and the establishment of a new order. These aspects are illustrated by focusing on the case of Mircea Eliade, one of the most prominent interwar Romanian intellectuals who became a legionary sympathiser. Making use of Eliade's notions of «sacred time» and its opposition to the «terror of history» as a conceptual framework, the paper analyses the correspondences between the legionary temporal vision and Eliade's visible preference for a transcendental, religious understanding of history, endowing it with meaning and allowing modern man to escape the meaninglessness of clock time.