Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives—"what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania". Cioran's first book, On the Heights of Despair (literally translated: "On the Heights of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission's Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Regardless, Cioran later spoke negatively of it, saying "it is a very poorly written book, without any style." Successively, The Book of Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Tears and Saints (1937) were also published in Romania. Tears and Saints was "incredibly poorly received", and after it was published, Cioran's mother wrote him asking him to retract the book because it was causing her public embarrassment. Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard—a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods. Cioran would later denounce fascism, describing it in 1970 as "the worst folly of my youth. If I am cured of one sickness, it is surely that one." Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and