Henri Stahl

[2] According to Henriette Yvonne Stahl, her grandfather was originally active in the Kingdom of Greece, in service to King Otto, before being taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire.

[3] He owed his relocation to Wallachia (an autonomous subject of the Ottomans) to the intercession of Prince Barbu Dimitrie Știrbei, who employed him as a Dragoman of the court.

[3] By the time of Henri's birth, Joseph had had a lengthy career in publishing, with phrasebooks for German, French or Romanian, beginning with the 1853 Kleine Walachische Sprachlehre.

[20] Iorga's academic press of Vălenii put out his 1909 Curs complect de stenografie cu vocale ("Complete Course of Stenography, Vowels Included").

[21] His son Henri Jr, who followed him on such excursions, recalls: "He had the special gift of being able to converse with simple people, old and young alike, winning them over with his own matching simplicity, addressing them in their own language, in the very spirit of their mentality.

"[22] As literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu notes, Stahl and Iorga were both conservative adversaries of 20th-century modernization, who disliked popular culture and feared the growth of the petite bourgeoisie.

[24] Occasionally, Stahl returned to fiction writing, producing Un român în lună, the found manuscript of space exploration: a newspaperman chances upon a mysterious text, which turns out to be the stenographic account of a Romanian voyage to the Moon.

[28] As noted in 1998 by cultural journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu, Un român în lună can indeed be considered important for the emergence of Romanian science fiction, but it is also "negligent" and "inferior" to its Western models, from Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne.

[30] Sevastos pointed out that Stahl's "social criticism" was of the "aggressive" kind, quoting a passage in which the narrator reads Iorga's initials, "dear as they will once be to all Romanians", into the lunar surface.

He met Iorga's opposition, who asked him "to forget the moon and stars" and write a new book using the style around the first chapter, in which Stahl depicts life in turn-of-the-century Bucharest.

[31] Therefore, Stahl's literary debut was in 1910 with Bucureștii ce se duc ("Vanishing Bucharest"), serialized in Iorga's Neamul Românesc journal,[23] then bound together as a volume issued in Vălenii.

[32] Iorga later described Stahl, alongside Ion Agârbiceanu, Romulus Cioflec and Dumitru C. Moruzi, as Neamul Românesc's leading prose writer.

Stahl sees modern Bucharest as a playing ground for handmaidens and their aroused admirers, riddled with "moronic" pastimes such as binge drinking and visits to the City Morgue.

[39] However, Stahl was contracted by Romanian National Party leaders to record their February 1911 meeting with the constituents of Arad, Békés and Csanád counties, which doubled as a protest against Magyarization policies and for universal suffrage.

[41] He left notes on the "natural bond between the people and the leaders", and found the Partium peasants to be exceptionally polite, as well as "fair, intelligent, and proud".

[44] Losing consciousness, he was dragged away and rescued by his peasant batman,[43] and was under treatment at Gerota hospital when Iorga dedicated him an encomium in Neamul Românesc (September 23, 1916).

[48] Stahl eventually returned to the occupied capital after the Romanian armistice (April 1918), and had to watch resentfully as the German Army embarked on a campaign of hasty requisitions.

During the late 1910s and early 1920s, he was vice president of the Deputies' Assembly corps of stenographers, in which capacity he taught free lessons in stenography to university students.

[10] In interwar Greater Romania, Stahl expanded the focus of his investigations and interviews, with trips to mountain localities such as Breaza and Covasna,[43] and resumed his literary work, in the eclectic newspaper Cuget Românesc.

[12] He was a Marxist theoretician, seen by Ioanid as one of "worldwide value" and a "classic of Romanian sociology",[53] whose semi-legal activities in the Socialist Party of Romania resulted in prosecution at the Dealul Spirii Trial.

[12] Returning to Romania in the 1930s, Voinea primarily worked as a radio journalist, and was the theoretical voice of the reformist and pro-Western Romanian Social Democratic Party.

[60] From 1931 to 1944, Henriette was married to the poet-translator Ion Vinea, and notoriously shared his passion for hard drugs, which inspired her to write violently modernist novels.

This occurred during the Nazi-allied dictatorship of Ion Antonescu (to which his son Voinea was structurally opposed),[12] while the Stahl children had come under official investigation, to decide whether the racial laws applied to them.

[59][72] Harassed by Securitate agents[73] and prevented from publishing until the 1960s (during which interval he had to work in systematization), Henri H. Stahl was eventually allowed to join the editorial staffs of Biblioteca Historica Romaniae and Viitorul Social.

[75] His earlier affair with Maria Costin had produced a son, Paul H. Stahl;[53] trained in sociology and art history, he escaped to France in 1969, to teach at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.