COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

In a letter addressed to Nikolić from Rome on 21 January 1956, Lukas granted his approval to him to continue to publish Croatian Review, the most important Croatian political émigré periodical. Filip Lukas was the president of the most prominent cultural and literary institution, Matica hrvatska, from 1928 to 1945, but afterward he had to flee to Italy. Matica hrvatska printed this periodical from 1928 to 1945, but the new editorial board appointed by communists ceased publication. Nikolić respected the president of Matica in exile, and therefore asked him to use the name of Zagreb's Croatian Review. Lukas permitted him to continue to publish it, but only under one condition: that it would return to the homeland when Croatia freed itself of communist rule, in order to maintain the continuity of activity of the journal at home and in exile.

The letter was drafted in the context of press attacks against and persecution of Hans Otto Roth by the communist authorities after the establishment of the Petru Groza government in March 1945. These measures culminated in July 1948, when Roth was arrested and investigated for political reasons for six months along with other leaders of the German community in Romania involved in managing the General Savings Bank of Sibiu (Hermannstädter Allgemeinen Sparkasse) for his alleged mismanagement. The letter dated May 1950 was addressed to the Lutheran pastor Alfred Herrmann, an old friend who had been persecuted by the Nazi leaders of the German Ethnic Group of Romania for his socialist sympathies. Alfred Herrmann (1888–1962), former first pastor of Bucharest in the period 1937–1946, was one of the supporters of the new communist regime in the Evangelical Church of Augustan Confession of Romania (Weber and Baier 2015, 245). The document represents a critical reply to a series of letters received from Herrmann during 1950. In this letters Herrmann argued that he had supported the new regime because the church needed to embrace the so-called “peace movement” and to involve itself in building the new society. The Fight for Peace Committee was an institution created by the communist regime in Romania in order to enlist clergy of the officially recognised denominations and mobilise them for the achievement of political aims.

To answer the motives invoked by Herrmann, Roth claims that the aim of each Christian should be to oppose the use of violence “in any form.” From this point of view, peace represents an aim that the Church must naturally follow. At the same time, Roth argued against the idea that the Church should support the newly established communist regime because, according to him, the Church should become involved only in those “forms of social organisation” in which “love for our fellow men can truly exist.” He rejects the involvement of the Church in building the “new socialist society” through a subtle critique of the violent methods used by the communist regime to impose it. Ironically, Roth points out to Herrmann that a series of motives invoked by the latter to justify his support for the communist regime were similar to those presented to him several years before by Bishop Staedel, the pastor placed by the Nazis at the head of the Evangelical Church of Augustan Confession of Romania in 1941.

This document contributes to the understanding of the activity of the postwar Romanian exile community in the 1980s, especially regarding the correspondence and interaction between its most active members. During the communist period in Romania, the Romanians of the emigration were in general located at significant distances from each other, being settled on several continents: Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Africa. The most active of them founded organisations, associations, institutions, institutes, foundations, publications, and publishing houses in their countries of residence. The purposes of their efforts were to: represent the Romanian nation, its democratic values and principles, and to defend its interests until the collapse of the communist regime; to coordinate the activity of Romanians abroad to carry out activities that would help to restore the democratic system in Romania; to represent the exile community within democratic societies and solve its problems; to establish links with Western governments and international organisations; to collaborate with representatives of the other "captive nations" in Central and Eastern Europe to form a common front to unmask and remove communism. Such an approach was also that of Ion Dumitru, a personality of the exile community, who set up in the mid-1960s one of the most important publishing houses of the Romanian emigration. It was founded in Munich, where he settled in 1961, and was officially registered in 1976 as a printing company. The Ion Dumitru Publishing House published over eighty books by exiled Romanians, many of them extremely valuable for national culture and history. To acquire such volumes, the owner of the publishing house, Ion Dumitru, maintained an ample correspondence with those interested. A proof of these relationships is this letter, which Ion Dumitru addressed to Leonid Mămăligă on 8 August 1982. Leonid Mămăligă, who wrote under the name L.M. Arcade , was a personality of the Romanian exile community, in which he made a name for himself, in particular, through the establishment and coordination for more than thirty years (1958–1989) of the Neuilly-sur-Seine Cenacle. The purpose of this cenacle, unique in France during those years of exile, was respond to the need for a Romanian place to offer Romanian intellectuals outside the country the possibility of thematic meetings and discussions. Also, the cenacle represented a platform of expression for Romanian intellectuals in exile, which helped them to keep alive the Romanian identity abroad and to put Romanian culture in communication with that of France. At the same time, the cenacle stimulated the act of creation both in Romanian and in French, by supporting and promoting Romanian writing, as it had its own publishing house, Caietele Inorogului (The unicorn notebooks). As or the subject of the letter that Ion Dumitru addressed to Leonid Mămăligă, in it he talks about sending a package of books published by his publishing house for another well-known Romanian exile, Aurel Răuţă, a professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Aurel Răuţă was a notable personality of the exile community because of his publishing activity and the founding, among others, of the Asociația Hyperion (Hyperion Association) in Paris. This was a distribution platform for books by Romanians in exile. In ten years of activity, he distributed to Romanian emigrants more than 10,000 volumes, published at more than 130 publishing houses. The document in the Ion Dumitru Collection in the IICCMER archive is a copy in A4 format.

This document is an important source of documentation for the understanding and writing of the history of the Romanian exile community in the 1980s. It concerns the organisation that Romanians of the emigration established to unmask the wrongdoings of the communist regime in their native country to the West in the hope that they would find external support for the removal of communism in Romania. In particular, the document illustrates exile actions for the observance of human rights in Romania, as it testifies to the existence of a political body set up for this purpose, namely Liga Românilor din Exil pentru Drepturile Omului (The League of Romanians in Exile for Human Rights). It had its headquarters in Paris and was coordinated by Virgil Veniamin, who was a personality of the exile. A graduate of the Law Faculty of the University of Paris in 1930, he was a professor of international law and a lawyer, as well as being a distinguished member of a Romanian political party, the National Peasant Party. The establishment of the communist regime found him at home in Romania, which he left clandestinely in February 1948, settling in Paris. In exile, he was particularly noted for his activity as president of the Carol I Royal University Foundation and as a member of the Romanian National Committee, considered by its founders as the Romanian government in exile. In the 1970s he was involved in a major scandal in the Romanian exile community when he was accused of collaborating with the Securitate in Bucharest. Today, based on the documents contained in the file on him created by the former Romanian secret police, it can be ascertained that he was indeed an agent of influence of the communist regime within the exile community. The document kept in the Ion Dumitru Collection is a request sent by the collector to Virgil Veniamin on 23 February 1980, asking him to accept affiliation to the central section in Paris of Liga Românilor din Exil pentru Drepturile Omului (The League of Romanians in Exile for Human Rights) of a newly established West German section based in Munich, in which Ion Dumitru had been elected chairman. In response to this request, Ion Dumitru received a favorable reply from Virgil Veniamin. Both documents, in A4 format, can be found in the private archive of Ion Dumitru at IICCMER.