Tangled and Troubling Legacy Pushes Romanians Further to the Right

It seemed a slam dunk: a proposal to rename an avenue running through the center of Romania’s capital that honored a World War II fascist functionary convicted of war crimes.

Diana Mardarovici, the Bucharest city councilor who had proposed changing the street’s name, figured nobody at City Hall would object to removing a tribute to someone who had been involved in confiscating money, jewels and property from Jews and in other crimes for Romania’s Nazi-aligned government.

“I thought this would be peanuts, a piece of cake,” Ms. Mardarovici recalled. “Surely, I thought, we all agree that Nazis are bad.” Her proposal last year never even made it to a council vote.

“My colleagues on the City Council are not Nazis. My colleagues don’t hate Jews,” she said. “But they feel that admitting past crimes by people they see as heroes takes away from their national identity.”

The episode was one of several abortive efforts in recent years to banish street names, statues and other honors accorded to Romanian fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, some of whom were the country’s best-known writers and intellectuals, celebrated for developing Romanian culture and opposing communism.

Mircea Vulcanescu, whose name Ms. Mardarovici wanted to remove from the street, was a philosopher, sociologist and economist who, though convicted of war crimes after World War II, is still widely lauded as a luminary of Romanian culture.