Financiarul

Herta Muller, the winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, used her upbringing under Nicolae Ceausescu”s oppressive regime in Romania as her main source of inspiration. She was born in August 1953 in the traditionally German-speaking Banat region of Romania.

After studying literature between 1973 and 1976, Muller was sacked from her first job as a translator in a machinery factory after refusing to work for Ceausescu”s hated Securitate secret police. It was at this time that she decided to devote her life to literature, but she refused to publish her first book Niederungen (Nadirs) in Romania because of attempts by the authorities to censor it.

The manuscript, describing vividly the drab life under Ceausescu”s regime, was smuggled into West Germany, where it was published in 1984, with Germany”s Spiegel magazine pronouncing her a “discovery”. After being refused permission to emigrate to West Germany in 1985, she was finally allowed to leave in 1987 after her barbed criticism of her native country”s regime earned her death threats from the secret police.

Two years later, and 20 years ago next month, the Berlin Wall fell, and Ceausescu and his wife Elena died by summary execution by firing squad on Christmas Day the same year. Muller, 56, now lives in Berlin and her works are little known outside the German-speaking world.

The Berlin International Literature Festival described her work as being focused on the non-conformist life in the smallest unit of the dictatorial state, as well as observations from her childhood and village life and family. The novel Reisende auf einem Bein (Travelling On One Leg) portrays the difficulties of settling anew in foreign surroundings.

Alongside other novels about the Ceausescu regime like Herztier (Land of Green Plums) and Heute waer ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment), she has also written a series of political essays. Beside the prizes for her debut, she has received the European Literary Prize “Aristeion”, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Kleist Prize, and the Kafka Prize.

Now she has added the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize to her accolades. In a 2007 column in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, Muller said that Romania was “afflicted by collective amnesia” about its communist past, calling Ceausescu “the most evil dictator” after Stalin “with a personality cult to rival North Korea”s”. In an interview, in 2007, with Romania Libera daily, Herta Muller said that while in Romania, she had a more direct access to the Western world as she read many books at the Goethe Institute of Bucharest.

“All books released in Austria, Germany and Switzerland could be found at the library here and even if not all were available for the public we knew several librarians who could give it to us. So we used to read them almost at the same time with the rest of the world. It was an advantage from many viewpoints and especially as social and political analysis. I knew about the 1960-1968 but I didn”t agree with all the ideas of that time. I used to read many social-political essays, I was interested in that aspect.,” the writer said in 2007.

“I believe dictatorship had a role in our development, because the lack of freedom makes you aware of the responsibility that you have not to compromise yourself. The literature I was reading helped me a lot in this respect,” Muller said.

According to Herta Muller, in Germany “people noticed, by my accent, that I was coming from somewhere else and were looking at me in a condescending way. I don”t exactly remember if it was Cioran who said that an emigrant loses everything but his accent.

I don”t mind it anyway.” The public condemnation of communist is to Herta Muller “an useless, slightly ridiculous gesture. (…) We, if we want democracy, have to fight with mentalities, create an efficient justice and how could one condemn communism when the files are classified and I don”t know what”s inside of them, inside my file? Communism is the author of crimes we will no nothing about. How many people died at the border? Nobody knows that.

There are many sectors involved and that”s what civil society should do. It is not Basescu who can condemn communism. He was given a pile of papers and he declared communism a criminal regime. But that”s something that not him witnessed, but that I witnessed,” Herta Muller told Romania Libera in 2007.