Searching for Cioran

4. Berlin, 1933–1935

4 Berlin, 1933–1935 In Berlin, in Munich, I was frequently in ecstasy—I lived as never before on the summits of my life. Since then, I have only experienced imitations. —Cioran, Cahiers, 579 [1968] In the 1930s, as today, a Humboldt fellowship was one of the most prestigious awards given by the German government to promising students from abroad, on a par with Rhodes scholarships to Oxford.1 That Cioran was chosen for the honor is a measure of the intellectual promise he was felt to have, even by his sorely tried professors. He was going to study philosophy in German universities, still then widely regarded as the fountainhead of all serious, systematic philosophy, even though logical positivist and linguistic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein had begun the mighty shifting of philosophical inquiry that signaled the birth of a modernism in Berlin, 1933–1935 83 philosophy, parallel to the modernist revolutions that were already occurring in art, music, and literature. What Cioran did with his fellowship time in Germany shows his attraction to these new directions—even as it illustrates the difficulty of aligning him persuasively with any one of them. Once again, he was his own man, and being his own man was, once again, the essence of his philosophy. But he was not the only philosophical egotist in Berlin in 1933. To arrive in Berlin in that year to begin post-graduate work in philosophy was an even more dramatically (in)auspicious beginning than the young Wordsworth’s arriving in France in 1792 to improve his French. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party had won the parliamentary elections that March, and by the fall, when Cioran arrived, Hitler was in the first full swings of his ruthless consolidation of parliamentary powers into full-fledged dictatorship . We may say Cioran became an “existentialist” in Germany in 1933–35, but it was an existentialism spawned in the cradle of Nazism. Wordsworth could say, famously, of himself in the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” What paraphrase could we make for Cioran: Shame was it in that dawn to be about, and to be young was very dangerous? Nor did Cioran resist the temptations. Yet he had known the risks: the year before he left Romania he had written to his brother about his desire to study, in Germany, philosophy of culture, history, and philosophical anthropology—especially “the German problem”—but he knew it would not be easy: “we had the misfortune to finish [university] when the economic and social situation is tragic.”2 Although he started out earnestly enough in the systematic vein, he soon—as he had already started to, in Bucharest—broke with the great systematic traditions of Kant and Hegel, which strove to produce coherent accounts of all existence, from the nature of the universe to the individual psyche, and he embraced, instead, what he called, at first, “abstract indiscretion.” The phrase is perfectly Cioranian: cheeky yet funny, accurate yet vague. Its signature appears on almost every page of his mature and immature works: he is indiscreet about serious philosophical and religious matters. For example, when he wrote, soon after his return to Romania, “Jesus was the Don Juan of agony,” he is being irreverent, funny, and deadly—or at least consistently—serious.3 He began, of course, where a generation of rebels had already begun, by reading Nietzsche. And yet Cioran is a less “Nietzschean” philosopher than he at first appears ; he does not fit well into that pigeonhole. Equally, he was enamored of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a less well-known figure than Nietzsche, but one with greater personal attractions for the young Cioran. Simmel is one of the founders of modern sociology; along with Max Weber and others, he organized the German Society for Sociology. His 1908 book, Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation, is regarded as one of the modern discipline’s cornerstones. Yet Simmel was much more 84 The Romanian Life Emil Cioran philosophical than we imagine (most) sociologists today to be, and at the same time much more “sociological” than we imagine (most) philosophers to be. This mixture of disciplines—always a danger in academia, even in today’s “interdisciplinary” university—probably accounts for some of Simmel’s lack of academic success, even though he was one of the most popular teachers...