Insula Humanitas The Pen is Mightier NICOLAE ODAGIU
1989 – hilst the other Communist satellite states are passing through a pacifist Velvet Revolution, Romania is facing a bloody Revolution which culminates with the trial and execution of the Ceausescu family on Christmas day. These events layered the base of what Romania is today. Shortly after, the entire state had to be reformed in order to permit the liberal ideas and concepts of democracy and capitalism to pass through. Along with this, the political and economic apparatus of the state had to be reformed, an ambiguous process which was slowed down due to power struggles and political crises along the way to design Romania as we know it today. Besides the steps that had to be taken into consolidating the new state, the first Prime Minister, Petre Roman, was interested in reconstructing Romania culturally due to the consequences of decades worth of communist propaganda, Ceausescu’s personality cult, and ideology. As a result, in the first cabinet of ministers, Walter Roman proposed Andrei Plesu for the candidacy of the Minister of Culture. Plesu, who until the Revolution spent his time in exile in Tescani, due to his implications in the Transcendental Movement, (for which he was excluded from the Communist Party in 1983), found himself in front of a significant task that required a subtle and professional approach. The main accomplishments of his office were the conversion of the Museum of Romanian’s Communist Party to the Peasant Museum, marking a return and an awakening of the national consciousness, as well as the metamorphosis of the main propaganda organ to a publishing house known as Humanitas.
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“Once Liiceanu took charge of the entire process of reviving the arts, a genuinely luminous kindle appeared.” Andrei Plesu, writer, philosopher and anthropologist, proposed Gabriel Liiceanu, another influential and fundamental philosopher that Romania has to offer, and one of Plesu’s closest friends, the candidacy for this new publishing house. Interestingly enough, the office of this ideological institution, which resembles the imposing Stalinist architecture of the Lomonosov University, was called Scanteia (Kindle) from the name of the main Newspaper of the Communist Party. The chosen name for the publishing house, Humanitas, was not aleatory. Liiceanu, who translated Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Romanian found the name for the publishing house in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, where he discusses the translation of paideia through humanitas for homo romanus, which means eruditio et institutio in bonas artes or cultivation and formation of virtues. Once Liiceanu took charge of the entire process of reviving the arts, a genuinely luminous kindle appeared. Liiceanu, in one of his latest interviews, talks about the difficulties of resetting such an institution with all of its employees who only had experience with editing politicized texts in favour of the Communist Party.
eurovisie | november | page 19
