---
title: "Eugen Relgis"
chunk: 5/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Relgis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:21.362889+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== World War II, persecution and departure ===
Eugen Relgis was still active on the literary scene during the first two years of World War II, before Romania formalized its military alliance with the Axis powers. The Phoney War caught him in France, but he returned to Romania shortly after, exposing himself to persecution by the growing Romanian fascist movements. In February 1940, he gave a retrospective lecture, republished by the newspaper L'Indépendance Roumaine, on the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Another book of his political prose, Spiritul activ ("The Active Spirit"), saw print the same year.
The emergence of antisemitic and fascist regimes (see Romania in World War II, Holocaust in Romania) signified the beginning of Relgis' marginalization. During the short-lived National Legionary State, established by the Iron Guard fascists between 1940 and early 1941, the author lived in seclusion. His Biblioteca Cercului Libertatea was banned in 1940, but Relgis secretly moved the books into a stable. After the Guard fell from power, the Ion Antonescu dictatorship still included Relgis on a nationally circulated list of banned Romanian Jewish authors, but Relgis continued to write. His texts of the time include a posthumous praise of his pacifist disciple Iosif Gutman, the son of a Bucharest rabbi, who had been killed during the Bucharest pogrom. The essay was planned as part of Rabbi Gutman's volume Slove de martiri ("Notes by Martyrs"), which, although anti-Guard, was not given Antonescu's imprimatur. Relgis was however able to publish an article in the Jewish-only magazine Renașterea Noastră, on the occasion of Iosif's yahrtzeit, where he compared the Gutmans to Laocoön and His Sons. Relgis' own son fled Romania in 1942, and settled in Argentina.
A final period in Relgis' Romanian activity came after the August 1944 Coup toppled Antonescu and denounced Romania's Axis alliance. In 1945, he was dedicated a public celebration at the Jewish Cultural Institute, which included a speech by Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran. Slove de martiri was eventually published that year, and a revised Romanian edition of Petru Arbore saw print in 1946. Also then, he completed work on an essay about Nazism, The Holocaust and sexuality: Eros în al treilea Reich ("Eros in the Third Reich"). Relgis was again active in the political press, lending his signature to several independent newspapers: Sebastian Șerbescu's Semnalul, Tudor Teodorescu-Braniște's Jurnalul de Dimineață etc. He described himself as diametrically opposed to the process of communization, as well as to the Soviet occupation of Romania.
With refugee status, having reportedly been singled out for arrest by the Romanian Communist Party officials, Relgis departed from Romania in 1947, shortly before the communist regime took hold. After a brief stay in Paris, he spent some time in Argentina, with his son and his female companion Ana Taubes. He later went to Montevideo, in Uruguay, where he lived the remainder of his life. At home, his works were included in an official Publicații interzise ("Works Forbidden from Publishing") list, published by the communist censorship apparatus.
During his last decades, Eugen Relgis dedicated himself to sociological research and political activism. He embarked on a series of university lectures, which carried him throughout Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. In 1950, he founded an international anarchist archive in Montevideo, reportedly one of the few political libraries in South America at the time of its creation. The effort was supported by the exiled Spanish anarchist Abraham Guillén, and received documentary funds from Europe, but reputedly drew suspicion from Uruguay police forces, and was consequently shut down.