Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923)

The article presents the socio-political and cultural context of Greater Romania from the perspective of a minority group, excluded from the main discourse both from the aesthetic and national point of view – the avant-garde artists, mostly of Jewish origin. Their articles, which were published in the most prominent Romanian avant-garde journal “Contimporanul” at the very beginning of its appearance, in the period of its militant artistic activism (1922-1923), were opposing the national-centric ideologies and growing anti-Semitic tendencies and were also trying to underline the important role that Jews played in the building of the Romanian culture. Moreover, the article proposes a general overview of Romania's cultural context after World War I, dominated by national-centric thinking and the need to find “national-specificity”. Such an atmosphere undoubtedly influenced young artists' attitude and the whole avant-garde movement in Romania, developed in the specific conditions of Romanian modernity, where the aesthetic and ethnic categories are often combined.