Searching for Cioran

2. Sibiu, 1921–1928

2 Sibiu, 1921–1928 I could say of Sibiu or Paris what Akhmatova said of Leningrad: “my shadow lingers on your walls.” —Cioran, Cahiers, 921 I have sometimes known the “glorious frenzy” of which Teresa of Avila speaks when she describes one of the stages of divine union . . . it’s been so long ago, though! —Cioran, Cahiers, 51 My youth was desperate and enthusiastic; even today I suffer the consequences. —Cioran, Cahiers, 195 The town of Sibiu lies in a wide plain at the foot of the Făgăraş mountains, the natural border that separates Transylvania from Romania’s southern region, Muntenia or Wallachia . For most of its history, Sibiu has been a border town, its fortified walls raised to defend the margins of empires. It was known at first as Cedonia or Cibinium, one of twelve towns in the thriving Roman province of Dacia Felix, roughly coinciding with today’s Transylvania. Dacia was the Romans’ last major conquest—commemorated on Trajan’s column in Rome—and became the furthermost stronghold of an empire threatened by barbarian hordes from the North and the East.1 In the Graeco-Roman 42 The Romanian Life of Emil Cioran world, this region was considered the end of the civilized world, if not slightly beyond it. The poet Ovid, banished from Rome to Tomis (modern Constanţa) on the shores of the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus), lamented a fate that, to citizens of the ancient world, seemed worse than death. “I lie at the world’s end, in a lonely wasteland . . . Some places make exile / milder, but there’s no more dismal land than this / beneath either pole.”2 It was a shock from which he never recovered. In Sibiu, Cioran began consciously cultivating the feeling of inner exile from which he also never recovered, but which nevertheless fed the fires of his artistic inspiration. In the eleventh century, German colonists (known as Saxons) were brought in by the Hungarian king, Stephen I, and settled along the Transylvanian Alps. To create a buffer zone between East and West, they fortified a string of seven towns, which gave Transylvania its German name, Siebenburgen, the “land of seven cities.” Sibiu was one of them. The Saxons called it first Hermannsdorf (Herman’s village) and then Hermannstadt (Herman’s town), while the local population referred to it as Sibiu, a corruption of its original Roman name, Cibinium. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, the town continued to play a key defensive role in the wars between the Christian West and the Ottoman Empire. In 1241, Sibiu was plundered and destroyed by the Tartars. To prevent the repetition of such a disaster, the town’s rich German merchants ordered the building of even stronger fortifications around the city, which successfully withstood the attacks of the Turkish army in 1432, 1438, and 1442. With its thick walls, five bastions, and forty towers, Sibiu gained a reputation as the most powerful of Transylvania’s seven citadels. Five hundred years later, during World War I, as one of the farthest outposts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it had not lost its strategic importance. In the fall of 1916, when Cioran was five years old, the Romanian offensive against Austro-Hungary stalled in front of Sibiu, where the Romanian troops dug in for a long siege which ended only with the general Allied victory two years later. The town and the whole border area teemed with soldiers. It was so “full of soldiers” that an impressionable young boy remembered them in his old age.3 Though geographically marginal, Sibiu was both economically and culturally advanced. Medieval Sibiu became a flourishing trade center, counting nineteen merchant guilds and twenty-five craft guilds in the fourteenth century.4 The town has a long and distinguished cultural history: a hospital was built as early as 1292, and a library was founded in 1330, to which a printing press was added in 1528. There the first Lutheran catechism in the Romanian language was published in 1544. Sibiu’s first German-language school opened in the fourteenth century, a Jesuit academy opened in the seventeenth century, and a law academy was founded in the nineteenth century . The humanist Nicholaus Olahus was born in Sibiu. Humboldt and Darwin were Sibiu, 1921–1928 43 among the members of its Society of Natural Sciences founded in 1849. Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Johann Strauss gave concerts...