Herta Müller's novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me" - an excerpt

Everything I have I carry with me.
Or: everything that's mine I carry on me.
I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or somebody else's. The pigskin suitcase was a gramophone box. The dust coat was from my father. The town coat with the velvet neckband from my grandfather. The breeches from my Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees from our neighbour, Herr Carp. The green gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret silk scarf and the toilet bag were mine, gifts from recent Christmases.
The war was still on in January 1945. Shocked that, in the depths of winter, I was to be taken who-knows-where by the Russians, everyone wanted to give me something that would be useful, maybe, even if it didn't help. Because nothing on earth could help. It was irrevocable: I was on the Russians' list, so everyone gave me something - and drew their own conclusions as they did. I took the things and, at the age of seventeen, drew my own conclusion: the timing was right for going away. I could have done without the list being the reason, but if things didn't turn out too badly, it would even be good for me. I wanted away from this thimble of a town, where all the stones had eyes. I wasn't so much afraid as secretly impatient. And I had a bad conscience because the list that caused my relatives such anguish was, for me, tolerable. They feared that in another country something might happen to me. I wanted to go to a place that did not know me.
Something had already happened to me. Something forbidden. It was strange, dirty, shameless, and beautiful. It happened in the park with all the alders, away at the back, beyond the short-grass hills. On the way home, I went to the centre of the park, into the round pavilion where, on public holidays, the orchestras would play. I remained seated for a while. The light pierced the finely-carved wood. I could see the fear of the empty circles, squares, and quadrilaterals - white tendrils with claws linking them. It was the pattern of my aberration, and the pattern of the horror in the face of my mother. In this pavilion I swore to myself: I'm never coming back to this park.
The more I tried to stop myself, the quicker I went back – after two days. To my rendezvous, as it was called in the park.
I went to my second rendezvous with the same first man. He was called THE SWAN. The second man was new, he was called THE FIR. The third was called THE EAR. After that came THE THREAD. Then THE ORIOLE and THE CAP. Later, THE HARE, THE CAT, THE SEAGULL. Then THE PEARL. Only we knew which name was whose. We played at wild animals, I let myself be passed along. And it was summer in the park, and the birches had a white skin, and the green wall of impenetrable foliage was growing among the jasmine and elder bushes.
Love has its seasons. Autumn put an end to the park. The wood became naked. The rendezvous moved with us to the Neptune. Next to the pool's iron gate was its oval sign with the swan. Each week, I met the one who was twice my age. He was Romanian. He was married. I am not saying what his name was, and not what my name was. We arrived separately: the woman at the cash desk, behind the leaded window of her booth, the shiny stone floor, the round central column, the wall tiles with the water-lily pattern, the carved wooden stairs – none of these must realise we'd arranged to meet. We went into the pool and swam with all the others. Only at the saunas did we finally meet.
Back then, shortly before the camp - and as would also be the case from my return until, in 1968, I left the country - any rendezvous would have meant a prison sentence. Five years, at least, if I'd been caught. Many were. After a brutal interrogation, they were taken straight from the park or the municipal baths to the jail. From there, to the prison camp next to the canal. I know now: no-one came back from the canal. Anyone who did was a walking corpse. Had aged, was ruined, was no longer fit for any kind of love.
As for in the camp – I'd have been dead, if caught in the camp.
After the five years in the camp, I strolled daily through the commotion of the streets, rehearsing in my head the best things to say, if arrested. CAUGHT RED-HANDED: against this guilty verdict I prepared a thousand excuses and alibis. I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself in words. I just pack myself differently each time I speak.
In the last summer of the rendezvous, to extend my walk home from the park with all the alders, I happened to enter the Church of the Holy Trinity on the main ring road. This coincidence was fate. I saw the times that were coming. On a pillar, next to the side altar, stood the saint in the grey cloak, his collar was the sheep that he carried round his neck. This sheep round his neck is silence itself. There are things you don't speak about. But I know what I am speaking about when I say that silence round your neck is not the same as silence in your mouth. Before, during, and after my time in the camp – for twenty-five years I lived in fear, of the state and of my family. Of a double fall, that the state might lock me up as a criminal, and the family disown me in disgrace. In the crowded streets, the display cases, the windows in trams and houses, the fountains and puddles, for me, became mirrors. I looked at myself, disbelievingly, feared I might be transparent, after all.
My father was an art teacher. And I, with the Neptune in my head, winced as if I'd been kicked if he used the word WATERCOLOUR. The word knew how far I'd gone already. My mother said, at the table: Don't stab the potato with your fork, it will fall apart, use your spoon, you use your fork for the flesh. My temples were pounding. How come she's using the word flesh when it's potatoes and forks we're talking about? What kind of flesh does she mean? My rendezvous had reversed the meanings of flesh for me. I was my own thief, the words came up unexpectedly and caught me.
My mother and especially my father, like all Germans in the town, believed in the beauty of blond plaits and white knee-length socks. In the black rectangle that was Hitler's moustache, and in us Transylvanian Saxons being part of the Aryan race. My secret, viewed purely physically, was the worst abomination. The Romanian involved meant I'd had relations with a non-Aryan, too.
I wanted away from this family, even if it meant going to a camp. I just felt sorry for my mother who couldn't see how little she knew me. Who, when I was away, would think of me more often than I of her.
In the church, beside the saint with the sheep of silence round his neck, I had seen the white alcove with the inscription: HEAVENS SETS TIME IN MOTION. When I packed my case, I knew: the white alcove had worked. This was now time in motion. I was also happy I didn't have to go off into the war, into the snow at the front. With foolish courage, I obediently set about packing. There was nothing I refused to include. Leather puttees with laces, breeches, the coat with the velvet neckband – none of these things suited me. Time in motion was what it was all about, not clothes. Whether with these clothes or others, you become an adult anyway. The world isn't a fancy-dress ball, it's true, I thought, but no-one who, in the depths of winter, has to go to the Russians can possibly look ridiculous.
Two policemen – a Romanian and a Russian - took the list from house to house. That was the patrol. I don't know any more whether, in our house, they uttered the word CAMP. And if they didn't, which other word - apart from RUSSIA - they did utter. If they did, the word camp didn't frighten me. Despite the war, and the silence of my rendezvous round my neck, I was still – at seventeen – enjoying a bright foolish childhood. Words like watercolour and flesh got to me. My brain was deaf to the word CAMP.
That time at the table with the potatoes and the fork, when my mother caught me with the word flesh, I remembered playing as a child down in the courtyard, and my mother shouting from the veranda window: if you don't come up to eat right now, if I have to call you again, you can stay where you are. Because I stayed down another while, when I did come up, she said:
You can pack your satchel now and go out into the world and do what you like. As she said this, she dragged me into the room, took the small rucksack and stuffed my woolly cap and jacket into it. I asked: Where am I supposed to go, though? I'm your child, after all.
Many people think packing is a matter of practice, you learn it automatically, like singing or praying. We had no practice, and no suitcase, either. When my father had to go to the front, to join the Romanian army, there was nothing to pack. As a soldier you're given everything, it's part of the uniform. Apart from for travelling away, and against the cold, we didn't know what we were packing for. You don't have the right things, so you improvise. The wrong things become what's needed. What's needed is then the only thing that's right, but only because you have it.
My mother brought the gramophone from the living-room and put it on the kitchen table. Using the screwdriver, I made a suitcase from the gramophone box. The rotary mechanism and the turntable I removed first. Then I filled the hole where the crank handle had been with a cork. The velvet lining remained where it was, red as a fox. Nor did I remove the triangular plaque with the dog beside the horn and HIS MASTER'S VOICE. At the bottom of the case I placed four books: Faust, a cloth-bound edition, Zarathustra, the slim volume by Weinheber, and the eight-centuries-of-poetry anthology. No novels, because novels you read just once, then never again. My toilet bag went on top of the books. In it were: 1 flacon of toilet water, 1 flacon of TARR aftershave, 1 shaving soap, 1 hand razor, 1 shaving brush, 1 styptic pencil, 1 piece of hand-soap, 1 pair of nail-scissors. Beside the toilet bag I placed: 1 pair of woollen socks (brown, already darned), 1 pair of knee-length socks, 1 red-and-white checked flannel shirt, 2 pairs of ribbed underpants. At the very top, to prevent it being squashed, came my new silk scarf. It was self-coloured – claret - but checked, shiny here, dull there. With that, the case was full.
And then my bundle: 1 bedspread from the divan (woollen, a bright-blue and beige check, gigantic – but it didn't keep you warm). And rolled into it: 1 dust coat (a pepper-and-salt check, already very worn) and 1 pair of leather puttees (ancient, from the first World War, melon-yellow, and with straps).
Then my haversack with: 1 tin of ham, Scandia was the make, 4 slices of buttered bread, a few left-over cookies from Christmas, 1 canteen of water with a beaker.
My grandmother then put the gramophone suitcase, the bundle, and the haversack near the door. The two policemen had said they would come at midnight, that was when they'd fetch me. My luggage was ready by the door.
Next, I put on: 1 pair of long underpants, 1 flannel shirt (a beige-and-green, check), 1 waistcoat with knitted sleeves, 1 pair of woollen socks, and 1 pair of bocanci. The green gloves from Auntie Fini lay on the table, at the ready. I tied the laces on the bocanci and suddenly remembered that years ago, on holiday up on the Wench, my mother had worn a sailor suit she'd made. In the middle of a walk in the countryside, she'd let herself fall in the long grass and pretended to be dead. I was eight at the time. The fright of the sky falling down into the grass. I closed my eyes in order not to see it swallowing me. My mother jumped up, shook me, and said: Do you like me? As you see, I'm still alive.
The laces on the bocanci were tied now. I sat down at the table and waited for midnight. And midnight came, but the patrol was late. Three hours were to pass - which was almost intolerable. Then they were there. My mother held the coat with the velvet neckband up for me. I slipped my arms in. She was crying. I put on the green gloves. In the wooden passageway – right where the gas-meter is – my grandmother said: I KNOW YOU'LL RETURN.
I didn't mean to remember this sentence. I took it with me into the camp, without thinking. I had no idea it was accompanying me. But a sentence like that is independent. It worked in me, more than all the books I took with me. I KNOW YOU'LL RETURN became my heart-shaped shovel's accomplice, and the angel of hunger's adversary. Because I did return, I have the right to say: a sentence like that keeps you alive.
It was 3am in the night of 14-15 January 1945 when the patrol came to fetch me. It was getting colder, -15º C. We drove in a lorry with a tarpaulin hood through the empty town to the exhibition hall. It was the Saxons' festival hall. And now the collective camp. Almost 300 people were squeezed into the hall. On the floor were mattresses and straw palliasses. Cars arrived all through the night, from the surrounding villages too, unloading people who'd been rounded up. By morning, there were almost 500. Counting was a waste of time that night, no overview was possible. In the exhibition hall, the lights burned all night. People were running round, looking for people they knew. They told each other that joiners were being commandeered at the railway station, they were nailing plank beds, made of new wood, into livestock wagons. That other workmen were installing iron stoves in trains. And that others were sawing toilet holes out in the floor. Eyes were opened wide as people spoke, quietly and a lot; and closed as they cried, quietly and a lot. The air smelled of old wool, of the sweat of fear, of a fatty roast, vanilla biscuits and schnapps. A woman removed her scarf. She lived in a village, for sure: her hair was in a double bun at the back of her head, held in place at the centre by a semicircular comb. The teeth of the horn comb disappeared in her hair. Of its curved edge, two corners showed only, like tiny pointed ears. With these ears and the fat bun of hair, the back of the woman's head resembled a sitting cat. I sat like a spectator among upright legs and piles of luggage. For a few minutes, sleep numbed me and I dreamt:
My mother and I are in the cemetery, standing at a new grave. In the middle of it, a furry-leaved plant, half the height of me, is growing. On the stalk is a capsule with a leather handle, a small suitcase. The capsule is open, the breadth of a finger, is lined in fox-red velvet. We don't know who has died. My mother says: Take the chalk from your coat pocket. I don't have any, I say. When I reach into the pocket, there is a piece of tailor's chalk. My mother says: We have to write a short name on the case. Let's write RUTH, no-one we know is called that. I write RUHT, as in here lies.
It was clear to me in my dream that I had died, but I didn't want to tell my mother that yet. I started when an elderly man with an umbrella sat down on the palliasse beside me, came close to my ear and said: My brother-in-law wants to come too, but the hall is guarded on all sides. They're not letting him. We've not left town yet, and he can't come here and I can't go home. On each silver button on his jacket a bird was flying, a wild duck or, more likely, an albatross. I say that because the cross on the decoration on his chest, when I leaned further forward, became an anchor. The umbrella stood like a walking stick between me and him. I asked: Are you taking that with you? Sure it snows there even more than here, he said.
We were not told when, and how, we would have to go to the station from the hall. Would be allowed to go, as I saw it, because I wanted to leave – at long last – and even if it was in the livestock wagon, with a gramophone box and a velvet neckband, and to go to the Russians. I no longer know how we got to the station. The livestock wagons were high. I have forgotten the boarding procedure, too, as we spent such long days and nights travelling in that wagon, it was as if we'd always been in it. I no longer know, either, how long we travelled. I thought travelling for a long time meant getting far away. As long as we're travelling, nothing can happen to us. All is well, as long as we're travelling.
Men and women, young and old, with their luggage at the head of their plank. Speaking and not speaking, eating and sleeping. Bottles of schnapps were passed round. Here and there, once the travelling was something we were already used to, attempts at cuddling started. You looked with one eye, and, with the other, looked away.

31/08/2009

Securitate in all but name

Twenty years after Ceausescu's execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.

Update October, 8th: Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009! Here you can read an excerpt from her latest novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me" ("Atemschaukel").

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.
In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer's hands. "No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises," he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o'clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor's form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.
My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor's form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant. Andrei Plesu was infuriated and sent his secretary to cancel all bookings at the hotel. The hotel manager lied that it was the receptionist's first day at work and that she had made a mistake. But the secretary knew the lady, she had worked in the reception for years and years. The manager replied that the "patron", the owner of the hotel, was a former Securitate man who, unfortunately, would not change his ways. Then he smiled and said that by all means the NEC could cancel its bookings with him, but that it would be the same in other hotels of the same standard. The only difference being that you wouldn't know.
I checked out. After that I didn't notice anyone else following me. Either the secret service had backed off, or they worked professionally, i.e. unnoticed.
In order to know that a shadow was needed at six o'clock, my phone must have been tapped. Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, has not disbanded, just given another name, the SRI (Romanian Information Service). And according to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher. And the remaining 60% are retired and living on pensions that are three times higher than those of everybody else, or they are the new architects of the market economy. Apart from jobs in the diplomatic corps, a former spy in today's Romania can attain any post.
Access to files, the Romanian way
Romanian intellectuals were as uninterested in seeing the secret files opened as they were in all the crushed lives around them, or in the new arrangements of the party's top brass and secret service officers. If, like me, you have publicly demanded access to files year in year out, you start to get on the nerves even of your friends. This was another reason why, for years, the Securitate files were not in the hands of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (the tongue-twistingly named CNSAS), which was grudgingly set up in 1999 at the instigation of the EU, but with the new-old secret service. They controlled all access to files. The CNSAS had to submit applications to them; sometimes they were granted, but mostly they were refused, even for the grounds: The file applied for is still being worked on. In 2004 I was in Bucharest in order to lend weight to my repeated application for file access. At the entrance to the CNSAS I was puzzled to find three young women in mini-dresses with plunging necklines and shiny neon tights, as if this were some erotic centre. And between the women stood a soldier, a machine-gun slung over his shoulder, as if this were a military barracks. The head of CNSAS pretended not to be there, even though I had an appointment with him.
This spring a group of researchers happened upon the files kept on the Romanian-German authors of the "Aktionsgruppe Banat". The Securitate had a specialised department for each minority. For the Germans, it was called "German Nationalists and Fascists", the Hungarian section was called "Hungarian Irredentists", the Jewish one "Jewish Nationalists". Only Romanian authors had the honour of being placed under the observation of the department of "Art and Culture".
Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: "Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment" in my book "Nadirs". Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a "circle of German-language poets", which is "renowned for its hostile works".
The file is a botched job by the SRI on behalf of the old Securitate. For ten years they had all the time in the world to "work" on it. You could not call this cooking the books, the file has simply been emptied of all substance.
The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. For two years I sat with four bookkeepers in the office. They worked out the wages of the workers, I turned the pages of my fat technical dictionaries. I didn't understand the first thing about hydraulic or non-hydraulic presses, levers or gauges. When the dictionary offered three, four, or even seven terms, I went out onto the factory floor and asked the workers. They told me the correct Romanian word without any knowledge of German – they knew their machines. In the third year a "protocol office" was established. The company director moved me there to work alongside two newly employed translators, one from French, the other from English. One was the wife of a university professor who, even in my student days, was said to be a Securitate informant. The other was the daughter-in-law of the second most senior secret service officer in town. Only those two had the key to the file cupboard. When foreign professionals visited, I had to leave the office. Then, apparently, I was to be put through two recruitment tests with the secret police officer Stana, to be made suitable for the office. After my second refusal, his goodbye was: "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river. "
One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place had been taken by an engineer, and I was no longer allowed into the office. I couldn't go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, I defiantly sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase that joined the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I wasn't working. The office staff walked past me in silence. My friend Jenny, an engineer, knew about what was happening to me. Every day on our way home I explained it to her in detail. She came to me in the lunch break and sat down on the stairs. We ate together as we had done before in my office. Over the loudspeaker in the yard we could always hear the workers' choruses about the happiness of the people. She ate and cried for me, I didn't. I had to be strong.
On the third day I installed myself at Jenny's desk, she cleared a corner for me. On the fourth day too. It was a large office. On the fifth morning she was waiting for me outside the door. "I am no longer allowed to let you in the office. Just think, my colleagues say you are a spy. " "How's that possible," I asked. "But you know where we're living," she reasoned. I took my dictionaries and sat down on the stairs again. This time I cried too. When I went out onto the factory floor to ask about a word, the workers whistled after me and shouted: "Informer". It was a witches' cauldron. How many spies were there in Jenny's office and on the shop floor. They were acting on instructions. There were orders from above to attack me, the slander was meant to force me to resign. At the beginning of these turbulent times my father died. I no longer had a grip on things, I had to reassure myself that I really existed in the world, and began to write down the story of my – these writings formed the basis of the short stories in "Nadirs".
The fact that I was now considered a spy because I had refused to become one was worse than the attempt to recruit me and the death threat. I was being slandered by precisely the people that I was protecting by refusing to spy on them. Jenny and a handful of colleagues could see the games that were being played with me. But those who knew me less well could not. How could I have explained to them what was going on, how could I have proved the opposite. It was completely impossible, as the Securitate knew only too well, and that is exactly why they did it to me. They knew, too, that such perfidy would be far more destructive than any blackmail. You can even get used to death threats. They are part and parcel of this one life we have. You can defy anxiety to the depths of your soul. But slander steals your soul. You just feel surrounded by horror.
How long this situation lasted, I no longer know. It seemed endless to me. It was probably just weeks. Finally, I was sacked.
In my files this period is covered by just two words, a handwritten note in the margin of a surveillance protocol. Years later, at home, I related the attempt in the factory to enlist me as a spy. In the margin Lieutenant Padurariu wrote: "That's correct."
Then came the interrogations. The reproaches: that I wasn't looking for a job, that I was living from prostitution, black market dealings, as a "parasitic element". Names were mentioned that I had never heard in my life. And espionage for the BND (West German Intelligence Service) because I was friendly with a librarian at the Goethe Institute and an interpreter at the German Embassy. Hours and hours of fictitious reproaches. But not only that. They needed no summons, they simply plucked me off the street.
I was on my way to the hairdresser's when a policeman escorted me through a narrow metal door into the basement of a hall of residence. Three men in plain clothes were sitting at a table. A small bony one was the boss. He demanded to see my identity card and said: "Well, you whore, here we meet again." I had never seen him before. He said I was having sex with eight Arab students in exchange for tights and cosmetics. I didn't know a single Arab student. When I told him this, he replied: "If we want to, we'll find 20 Arabs as witnesses. You'll see, it'll make for a splendid trial." Time and again he would throw my identity card on the floor, and I had to bend down and pick it up. Thirty or forty times maybe; when I got slower, he kicked me in the small of my back. And from behind the door at the end of the table I heard a woman's voice screaming. Torture or rape, just a tape recording, I hoped. Then I was forced to eat eight hard boiled eggs and green onions with salt. I forced the stuff down. Then the bony man opened the metal door, threw my identity card outside and kicked me in the rear. I fell with my face in the grass beside some bushes. I vomited without raising my head. Without hurrying I picked up my identity card and headed home. Being pulled in from the street was more terrifying than a summons. No one would have known where you were. You could have disappeared, and never shown up again or, as they had threatened earlier, you could be pulled out of the river, a drowned corpse. The verdict would have been suicide.
No interrogation is mentioned in the files, no summons, and nothing about being pulled in from the street
This is what the file states on 30 November, 1986: "Notification of every journey that Cristina undertakes, to Bucharest and other places in the country, must be given in due time to Directorate I/A (Internal Security) and III/A (Counterespionage)", so that "permanent control may be maintained." In other words, I could not travel anywhere in the country without being shadowed, "to carry out the necessary control measures re. her relationships with West German diplomats and West German citizens. "
The shadowing varied according to their intentions. Sometimes you didn't notice it, sometimes it was conspicuous, sometimes it became aggressive and brutal. When "Nadirs" was due to be published by the West Berlin publishers Rotbuch, the editor and I had arranged to meet in Poiana Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains to avoid attracting attention. We travelled there separately as winter sports enthusiasts. My husband Richard Wagner had gone to Bucharest with the manuscript. I was to follow the next day by night train, without the manuscript. Two men met me in train station, wanting to take me away. I said: "I'm not coming unless you have an arrest warrant ." They confiscated my ticket and my identity card and said, before disappearing, that I should not leave that spot until they returned. But the train pulled in and they didn't come back. I went out onto the platform. This was the time of the great electricity saving effort, the sleeping car was standing in the dark at the end of the platform. You were only allowed to get on shortly before departure, the door was still locked. The two men were there, too, walking up and down, they jostled me and pushed me to the ground three times. Dirty and confused I picked myself up as if nothing had happened. And the waiting crowd looked on as if nothing had happened. When, finally, the door of the sleeping car opened, I pushed my way into the middle of the queue. The two men got on as well. I went into the compartment, undressed partly, and slipped on my pyjamas so that if they pulled me out, I would look conspicuous. As the train pulled away, I went to the toilet and hid a letter to Amnesty International behind the sink. The two men were standing in the corridor, talking to the conductor of the sleeping car. I had the lower bunk in the compartment. Perhaps because I'm easier to snatch from there, I thought. When the conductor came to my compartment, he handed me my ticket and my identity card. Where had he got those, and what did the two men want from him, I asked. "Which men," he said, "there are dozens of men here."
I didn't sleep a wink all night. It was foolish of me to get on the train, I thought, they'll throw me off somewhere in a snowy field during the night. When dawn arrived, my anxiety abated. They would have used the dark to stage a suicide, I thought. Before the first passengers awoke, I went to the toilet to retrieve the hidden letter. Then I got dressed, sat down on the edge of the bunk and waited until the train arrived in Bucharest. I got out of the train as if nothing had happened. Not a word about this in the file either.
The shadowing had consequences for others too. A friend was first noticed by the secret service during a reading from "Nadirs" at the Bucharest Goethe Institute. His details were taken, a file on him was opened and he was under surveillance from then on. This information comes from his file, no mention is made of it in mine.
The secret police came and went as they pleased when we weren't at home. Often they would deliberately leave signs: cigarette butts, pictures removed from the wall and left on the bed, chairs moved. The most uncanny incident of this kind lasted weeks. First the tail, then the paws, and finally the head was cut off a fox skin lying on the floor, and laid on the fox's belly. You couldn't see the cuts. I first noticed the tail lying there while cleaning the apartment. I still thought it was accidental. It was only weeks later, when the hind paw had been cut off, that I began to get the creeps. Until the point when the head was also cut off, the first thing I would do on coming home was to check the fox skin. Anything could happen, the flat was no longer private. At every mealtime you would wonder if the food had been poisoned. There is not a word about this psychological terror in the files.
In the summer of 1986 the writer Anna Jonas visited us in Timisoara. In a letter – which is enclosed in my file – from 4 November 1985, to the Romanian Society of Authors, she and other authors protested against the fact that I was not allowed to travel to the Book Fair, to the Evangelical Church Day, and to my publishers. The visit is accurately documented in my file, and there is a "telex" from 18 August 1986, to the border authority instructing them to search her luggage "thoroughly" on her leaving Romania, and to report their findings. In contrast, the visit of the journalist Rolf Michaelis from Die Zeit is missing. After the publication of "Nadirs" he wanted to conduct an interview with me. He had announced his arrival by telegram and trusted that he would find me at home. But the telegram was intercepted by the secret service, and Richard Wagner and I, knowing nothing, had gone to see his parents in the country for a couple of days. Two days running he rang our doorbell in vain. On the second day three men were lying in wait for him in the little room housing the rubbish chute, and brutally beat him up. The toes on both his feet were broken. We were living on the fifth floor, the lift wasn't working due to a power shortage. Michaelis had to crawl on all fours down the pitch-dark stairwell and onto the street. The telegram from Michaelis is missing from the file, although there is quite a collection of intercepted letters from the West. According to the file his visit never took place. This gap shows, too, that the secret service has erased the actions of their officers, so that no one can be held responsible as a result of file access – they have seen to it that the post-Ceausescu Securitate has become an abstract monster.
This is also how I explain to myself that no reference can be found in my file to another bizarre incident: I was already living in Berlin when I was called to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. I was shown a photo of a Romanian man unknown to me, who had been arrested in Königswinter as a Securitate agent. My name and address were in his notebook. The agent was suspected of travelling in Germany to carry out murders.
Rolf Michaelis wanted to protect us and didn't write about these attacks until we had left Romania. From the files I know that this was a mistake. Not silence, but publicity would protect us in the West. My file also reveals that surreal criminal proceedings were prepared against me for "spying for the BND". It was thanks to the reaction to my books and the literary prizes in Germany that this plan was never realised and I was not arrested.
Rolf Michaelis could not call us prior to his visit as we had no telephone. In Romania you had to wait years for a connection. We, however, were offered one without having applied. We refused, as we all knew that a telephone would be the most practical listening post in our small flat. When you visited friends who had a telephone, it had to be put in the fridge immediately and a record played to cover the voices. As is turned out, our refusal of the phone was pointless, as half of the file material I was given resulted from our flat being bugged.
Richard Wagner's file contains the "Nota de analiza" of 20 February 1985, which documents when neither of us is at home. "Similarly, special apparatus was installed in the flat, which delivers data of operative interest." The plan to install bugs can also be found in his file. Holes were drilled in the ceiling of the flat below, and in the our own floor. In both rooms the bugs were concealed behind the cupboards.
The monitoring protocols are often full of empty brackets because the music from the records disturbed the bugging. But we let the music play because we believed that the secret service was working with directional microphones. We never thought that we were being bugged day and night. True, during interrogations you were always confronted with things the interrogators couldn't possibly know. But as Romania was so poor and backwards we assumed that the Securitate couldn't afford modern bugging equipment. More to the point, we also thought that although we were state enemies, we were hardly worth such expense. For all our anxiety, we remained naive and thoroughly clueless about the level of surveillance.
The Securitate investigated the occupation, workplace and political trustworthiness of each and every occupant of our ten-storey tenement block and kept personal files – probably in order to recruit spies in the neighbourhood. Those who until then had escaped the attentions of the secret service, were stamped as "NECUNOSCUT" (unknown).
The bugging protocols are daily reports. The bugged conversations were summarised, but all "subversive" bits were transcribed word for word. Unknown visitors merit question marks in the margins and instructions to establish their identity. The bugging protocols also are incomplete.
One of our closest friends was Roland Kirsch. He was living round the corner from us and came to see us almost daily. He was an engineer in a slaughterhouse, took photographs of everyday dreariness, and wrote prose miniatures. In 1996 his volume "Traum der Mondkatze" (the dream of the moon cat) was published in Germany. It was published posthumously, because in May 1989 he was found hanged in his flat. The neighbours now say that they heard several loud voices in his flat on the night of his death. I do not believe it was suicide either. In Romania it would take days of running around to sort out all the formalities for a funeral. In suicide cases a post mortem was a matter of course. But Roland Kirsch's parents were handed all the relevant papers within a day. He was buried quickly and there was no post mortem. And there is no mention of a single visit from Roland Kirsch in the fat envelope of bugging protocols. His name is deleted, this person has been erased from existence.
The tangle of love and betrayal
My file at least answered one painful question. A year after my departure from Romania, Jenny came to visit in Berlin. Since the time of the harassment in the factory she had been my closest friend. Even after I was sacked we saw each other almost daily. But when I saw her passport in our Berlin kitchen, and the additional visas for France and Greece, I confronted her directly: "You don't get a passport like that for nothing, what did you do to get it?" Her answer: "The secret service has sent me, and I was desperate to see you again." Jenny had cancer – she is long dead now. She told me that her task was to investigate our flat and our daily habits. When we get up and go to bed, where we do our shopping and what we buy. On her return, she promised, she would only pass on what had been agreed between us. She lived with us, wanted to stay for a month. With each day my distrust grew. After just a couple of days I rummaged through her suitcase and found the telephone number of the Romanian consulate and a copy of our door key. After that I lived with the suspicion that in all probability she had been spying on me from the outset, her friendship just part of the job. After her return, I see from the file, she delivered a detailed description of the flat and of our habits, as "SURSA (source) SANDA".
But in a bugging protocol from 21 December, 1984, a note in the margin, next to Jenny's name, reads: "We must identify JENI, apparently there is great trust between them." This friendship, which meant so much to me, was ruined by her visit to Berlin, a terminally ill cancer patient lured into betrayal after chemotherapy. The copied key made it clear that Jenny had fulfilled her task behind our backs. I had to ask her to leave our Berlin flat at once. I had to chase my closest friend out in order to protect myself and Richard Wagner from her assignment. This tangle of love and betrayal was unavoidable. A thousand times I have turned her visit over in my mind, mourned our friendship, discovering to my disbelief that after my emigration, Jenny had a relationship with a Securitate officer. Today I am glad, for the file shows that our intimacy had grown naturally and had not been arranged by the secret service, and that Jenny didn't spy on me until after my emigration. You become grateful for small mercies, trawling through all the poison for a part that isn't contaminated, however small. That my file proves that the feelings between us were real, almost makes me happy now.
The expansion of tradition through libel
After the publication of "Nadirs" in Germany, and as the first invitations came, I was not allowed to travel. But when these were followed by invitations for literary award ceremonies, the Securitate changed its strategy. Having been out of work until then, it came as a great surprise when, in the late summer of 1984, I was offered a teaching job, and on my first day of work I received the recommendation from the head teacher that was the requirement for travelling. And in October 1984 I was actually allowed to travel. I was also permitted to receive literary prizes in person on the two occasions that followed.
The reasoning behind this lenience, however, was malicious: instead of being considered a dissident among my colleagues at the school, as I had been until then, I was to be seen as profiteering from the regime and, in the West, suspected of espionage. The secret service worked intensively on both, but in particular on the "agent" persona. Spying staff were sent to Germany on a smear campaign. The plan of action of 1 July 1985, states with satisfaction: "As a result of several journeys abroad, the idea was planted among some actors at the German State Theatre in Timisoara that Cristina is an agent for the Romanian Securitate. The West German stage director Alexander Montleart, temporarily at the German Theatre in Timisoara, has already voiced his suspicions to Martina Olczyk from the Goethe Institute and to employees at the German embassy in Bucharest."
After my emigration in 1987 they stepped up the pressure to "compromise and isolate" me. A "Nota de analiza" from March 1989 reads: "As part of the operation to compromise her reputation, we will work with Branch D (disinformation), publishing articles abroad or sending memoranda – that appear to come from the German emigre community – to several circles and authorities with influence in Germany." One of the spies appointed to this job is "Sorin", "for he is said to have the literary and journalistic leanings necessary to execute the plan of action." On 3 July 1989, department I/A sends a "report" to the Securitate HQ in Bucharest. The Romanian writer Damian Ureche has written a letter, in accordance with their instructions, in which Richard Wagner and I are denounced as spies. There follows a request to HQ to authorise the letter. A dancer from one of the folklore ensembles, who was travelling to Germany, was to pass it on to Radio Free Europe and the ARD (the West German public broadcaster).
The most important "partner" in Germany for smear campaigning was the Association of Banat Swabians. As early as 1985 the Securitate note with satisfaction: "The leadership of the Association of Banat Swabians has made negative comments about this book ("Nadirs"), also in the presence of representatives of the Romanian Embassy in Germany." This is strong stuff. Since the publication of "Nadirs" the Association had waged a character assassination campaign against me. "Fecal language, urine prose, traitor, party whore" were the comments typical of their homespun "literary criticism". I was a spy, they alleged, I had even written "Nadirs" at the behest of the Securitate. While I was sitting on the concrete steps of the tractor factory, the Association had obviously been in cahoots with the embassy staff of the Ceausescu dictatorship. I, on the other hand, would never have dared set foot in that embassy, for fear of never leaving it alive. In view of these relations with Ceausescu's diplomats it is hardly surprising that throughout all those years the Association never uttered one critical syllable. In collaboration with the regime it carried on the sale of Romanian-Germans, unconcerned that the Federal Republic was paying as much as 12,000 DM for each emigrant. Nor did it seem to mind that this human trafficking was a considerable source of hard currency for the dictatorship.
As part of their little agreement with the regime, they shared a hatred of me and joined in the business of libel. I became public enemy number one and, as their permanent target, a vital part of the Association's identity. To libel me was to prove one's love of the homeland. The Association libelled me as a new way of nurturing tradition. The only time the Association seemed used the term "spy" was to blacken my reputation. My file reads: "Because of her writings which put the Banat Swabians in a bad light," persons from this circle outside of Romania had "isolated and embarrassed" me. And: "Using the means at our disposal, our organs have participated in this campaign." My file says: "Compromising material should also be sent to Horst Fassel, at the address of his institute, requesting that it be disseminated." The institute in question is the Danube Swabian Institute in Tübingen, which Fassel headed at that time. Before that, in the eighties, he was editor of the Banater Post.
In their reports the spies led the Romanian secret service to believe that the Association in Germany had a significance that it never actually had. Despite the geographical distance, it had a similar level of dependence that a secret police informant has to his or her case officer, the same pressure to obey, the same fear of being dropped and exposed in the West.
One of the most diligent informants was "Sorin", who as early as 1983 snooped on the Timisoara group of authors. An acquaintance, who has seen the file on his now-dead father, learned from the code which is attached to the name of a spy on each report, that by 1982 "Sorin" had already delivered 38 such reports. In my file which contains 30 spy names, "Sorin" is one of the leading protagonists. A plan of action launched on 30 November 1986, expressly states that "Sorin" was to be given the task of prying into any plans I was hatching and which relationships I was cultivating in Romania and abroad. The chief editor of the culture section of the Bucharest paper New Way, once visited us in Timisoara accompanied by Walther Konschitzky. In the bugging protocol for that day Lieutenant Padurariu, who always interrogated me, noted in the margin the identification of this visitor: "Sorin".
During the dictatorship this "Sorin" was travelling regularly to Germany and, like so many spies, emigrated before the fall of Ceausescu. He became the cultural consultant of the Banat Association from 1992 to 1998. After his position in the Munich HQ was axed, he has continued to carry out his function on a voluntary basis.
The Association has never cared about the spies in its own ranks. Since its founding in 1950 it has created its imaginary homeland of brass band music, traditional costume parties, cosy peasant cottages and hand carved wooden gates. It has always turned a blind eye to dictatorships under Hitler or Ceausescu. Leading figures in the National Socialist population in the Banat were among the Association's founders.
These days the Association refuses to investigate the Securitate's influence on its own ranks, with the excuse that the matter is statute-barred. That is not acceptable in view of its political weight in Germany. Although fewer than 10% of Banat Swabian emigres are organised in the Association, throughout the years it has had representatives on broadcasting boards and in cultural institutions. After my arrival in Germany, radio journalists said that they had run into problems after featuring me on their programmes because the Association had intervened. Furthermore, all these years it has been one of the switch points for processing emigration applications from Romania, which it has occasionally sought to prevent. The Banat tried to block emigration application by the literary critic Emmerich Reichrath, whose reviews went beyond their narrow horizons. Before leaving the country I, too, received letters from "fellow Banat Germans" in Germany, saying: "You are not welcome in Germany." At the transit home in Nuremberg the Association had its office next door to that of the BND. A stamp from the Association was imperative for processing immigration formalities. I was received with the sentence: "German air won't be good for your health." I had a heavy cold after an overnight journey to the border on the trailer of a tractor. It was February.
Behind the next door, at the BND, the reception was even more brusque. Today I know why. The Securitate's smear campaign had succeeded: "Did you have dealings with the Romanian secret service?" My answer: "It had dealings with me. There's a difference," did not impress the civil servant. "Leave that for me to decide, that's my job," he said. "If you are on an assignment, it's not too late to say so now." While everyone else left this office after a few minutes with a "harmless" stamp, Richard Wagner and I were interrogated for several days, together and separately. While my mother received her certificate of naturalisation automatically, we were told for months that "thorough research was needed". It was grotesque. On the one hand the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned us against the Securitate's threats: Do not live on the ground floor, do not accept gifts while travelling, do not leave cigarette packs on the table, never enter a house or a flat with an unknown person, buy yourself a fake pistol, etc. On the other hand the suspicion that I was an agent hampered my naturalisation.
I ask myself why the BND held me in suspicion but didn't get wind of the numerous spies in the Association and among the emigres. Probably the BND also trusted the information coming from the Association. That is why Germany today is a cosy reserve for Securitate spies. When you compare the files on the Banat group of authors with one another, they are riddled with spies: "Sorin", "Voicu", "Gruia", "Marin", "Walter", "Matei", and many more. They are teachers, professors, civil servants, journalists, actors. No one has ever bothered them. They couldn't care less about the debate on the Stasi, which has continued since the fall of the Wall. They may all be German citizens, but they remain impenetrable to the German authorities. Their spying activities are extraterritorial in this country. And unlike the Stasi spies, the Securitate spies were not cut off from their case officers after reunification, because these now hold positions in the new Romanian secret service. The German Bundestag financed the Association's work during and after the dictatorship. Has anyone ever demanded an investigation into the entanglement of its staff with the Romanian dictatorship?
In 1989, after Ceausescu's fall, I thought that the smear campaigns against me would finally be over. But they continued. In 1991 I even received threatening phone calls in Rome while on a bursary at the Villa Massimo. And the Securitate's letter campaign has apparently taken on a life of its own. When in 2004 I was awarded the literature prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, not only did the Foundation receive piles of letters containing the usual slander, this time the action took on grotesque proportions as even the chairmanship of the Bundestag, the then leader of the federal state of Baden-Württenberg, Erwin Teufel, the chairman of the jury, Birgit Lermen, and Joachim Gauck, who was to give the award speech, received letters denouncing me as an agent, a member of Romania's communist party, and a traitor. Birgit Lermen's phone rang at a quarter to midnight, on the dot of 12, Bernhard Vogel, the chairman of the foundation received a call, and at a quarter past, Joachim Gauck's phone was ringing. Smears and threats with the Nazi party anthem blaring in the background. These calls were made on a nightly basis until the police eventually traced the caller.
The doppelganger from the falsification workshop
In my file I am two different people. One is called "Cristina", who is being fought as an enemy of the state. To compromise this "Cristina" the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (disinformation) fabricated a doppelganger from all those ingredients that would harm me the most – party-faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this doppelganger. It was not only sent after me wherever I went, it also hurried ahead. Even though I have always and from the start, written only against the dictatorship, the doppelganger still continues on its own way. It has taken on a life of its own. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the doppelganger is still wandering about. For how much longer?
*
This article was originally published in Die Zeit on 23 July, 2009.
Herta Müller was born in Nitzkydorf in Romania in 1953. In 1987 she emigrated to Germany with her ex-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. In 2004 she won the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Her latest novel "Atemschaukel" was published by Hanser Verlag this month. She lives in Berlin.

Translation: Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen

AN EVENING WITH HERTA MULLER (18.08.07)
(2007-08-17)
Herta Muller is one of the most appreciated writers in Germany. She has represented Germany on shortlists for the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in Romania, in the Swabian community in the Banat region in the west. She pursued German language and culture studies in Timisoara, and then took up a job as a translator in a car factory. Muller’s refusal to collaborate with the Securitate secret police led her to lose her job, and she earned a living by giving private German lessons, before emigrating to West Germany in 1987.

Since her literary debut in 1982, Herta Muller has published more than 20 books which have been translated into many languages. Virtually every year has brought her an important literary award, such as ‘Ricarda Huch’, ‘Kleist’, ‘Joseph Breitbach’ and the ‘IMPAC Dublin Literary Award’. Many newspapers columns have been devoted to her name. The prestigious TEXT+KRITIK literary magazine even dedicated an entire issue to her.

20 years of life in Germany has not clouded Herta Muller’s reflections on Romania, which she continues to draw upon. She says that, quote: “The most overwhelming experience for me was living under the dictatorial regime in Romania. And simply living in Germany, hundreds of km away, does not erase my past experience. I packed up my past when I left, and remember that dictatorships are still a current tropic in Germany.” Herta Muller’s need to write also came to life under a dictatorship. “I’ve had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it’s as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live”, the writer once told a journalist.

The Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest invited Herta Muller to read excerpts from her latest book translated into Romanian by Nora Iuga, entitled ‘A lady living in the chignon’. This is a collage-poem, whereby Muller cut out words, or even syllables from Romanian magazines and combined them in a variety of ways. She even made illustrations for some of them. However, her interest in collage-literature dates back some 10 years, while on a vacation abroad. She replaced ordinary postcards with words or syllables cut out from magazines. This is how her book of collage poetry came into being. It was entitled “Is it Ion or not” and was published by the Polirom Publishing house in 2005. This is the writer’s first book to be published in Romanian. Here is Herta Muller herself talking about her relationship with Romanian:

”I was very happy to see that my Romanian collages came out well. Just using scissors to make them was great and I felt that language was at my disposal throughout the job. This was my small game with Romanian, but I couldn’t write in Romania. Having words at hand and feeling their underlying meanings is different. I have an average person’s command of Romanian and I believe Romanian’s most beautiful aspect is the daily language I learnt when working for the car factory. Somebody asked me today what it was that I have learnt from the avant-garde and I answered I learned a lot more from folk songs. When I first heard Maria Tanase she sounded incredible to me, it was for the first time that I really felt what folklore meant. Romanian folk music is connected to existence in a very meaningful way. However, German folklore was not at all inspiring for me.”

Herta Muller had a rather belated contact with Romanian, when she was already 15. In her native village from Banat (Western Romania), Nitschidorf, nobody spoke Romanian. She was amazed to find out how different the two languages were from one another, how contradictory they could be sometimes. Herta Muller.

“Metaphors are much more sensual in Romania and go straight to the point. And that direct image suits me better than what my mother tongue German, offers. That was one of the main reasons why I wanted to learn Romanian. I am very sensitive as far as Romanian goes, but my Romanian vocabulary is not that rich. And it is hard to express yourself if your vocabulary is poor. I remember when I met Emil Cioran in Paris, he told me he refused to speak Romanian ever since he had come to France, yet as he grew old he dreamt in Romanian and he just couldn’t help it. Here is this language pouncing upon me and I just cannot protect myself from that, he told me.”

The two languages, the writer told us, look differently even at plants. In Romanian, “snowdrops” are “little tears”, in German they are “maiglockhen”, that is “little May bells”, which means we’re not only speaking about different words, but about different worlds. Romanians see a falling star and say that someone has died, with the Germans you make a wish when you see the falling star. That is why when translating the collage-poems of the volume entitled “A Lady Living in the Chignon”, Nora Iuga has many times made brave alterations. Nora Iuga.

“Whenever we read a collage we feel inclined to call it an experiment. Yet such collages cannot be called experiments. Even if there is a considerable amount of the absurd in those collages, each of them has a profoundly human content. These poems appeal to man and speak about the things people live and feel. Behind this stylistic exercise, grave and very serious poetry is hidden. I was used to this kind of writing because, although I did not write collages, I like to nurture the absurd and the ludic, and here Herta and I are very close to each another. And Herta’s artistic instinct is amazing – she told me not to be too particular about the meaning of the words, as this could give rise to catastrophe. She gave me all the freedom I needed and I brimmed with joy at that, as I rewrote about 50% of the text.”

For her collage texts, Herta Muller created a special table for herself and arranged a whole library, ordered alphabetically. The collage very much resembles life, Herta Muller says, as the random plays a crucial role in this respect. You’re looking for a word and come across another, which all of a sudden seems more appropriate, more appealing. Then you paste them on cardboard and the poem is ready, you cannot change anything. That is what Herta Muller likes best about the collage: once made you cannot change any of it, and that’s what brings the collage as close to life as possible. You cannot bring back the past, you cannot wipe away the poem just as you can with an ordinary poem.

Aside from the two volumes we’ve been talking about today, “The Lady Living in the Chignon” and “Is It Ion or Not”, three additional volumes of Herta Muller’s poetry have been translated into Romanian: ”The King Bends and Kills” and “The Heart’s Animal” as well as “Quite Long Ago The Fox was the Hunter”.

17/01/2007
Romania's collective amnesia
Romanian-German writer Herta Müller on the tenacity of Romania's corrupt secret service.

Romania tried to meet the requirements of EU entry. Economically, people are doing well in some regions. It's only in the areas of corruption and justice that Brussels continues to issue warnings. But in one area that affects all others, the EU has unfortunately demanded nothing and Romania has basically done nothing: the working through of the dictatorship. In Romania, they're pretending that it disappeared into thin air, the whole country is afflicted by collective amnesia. Even though it was home to the most abstruse dictatorship in eastern Europe and after Stalin, the most evil dictator, with a personality cult to rival North Korea's.

Ceausescu was a choleric with a grade four education, who always took a tank of bath water with him during his surveyance trips through the country, a parvenu with water taps and gold cutlery with a real weakness for palaces. He had the oldest part of Bucharest, the heart of the city, razed to the ground. His family clan and secret service had everything under control, including the Church. Eight percent of the Orthodox priests were paid directly by the secret service: security services in cowls. It won't have been much different among journalists, doctors, professors, lawyers. But we don't know that and we're not supposed to find out. The Securitate survived.

The reason is simple: Securitate was responsible for Ceausescu's fall, his conviction in a turbo trial, his execution against the dirty wall of a military barracks. Officially the secret service was disbanded after the so-called revolution, but the employees continued to be paid on the sly. One part of the Securitate passed seamlessly from the old into the newly founded secret service. And the smarter part used its blackmail capital to worm its way into the market economy.

Knowledge from secret service archives was and is the seed capital for immense wealth of very dark and half-dark origin. That's why corruption extends into the highest government circles today. Its offshoots permeate the country in the form of every-day corruption, in which the old mentality works with new methods. In the hospitals, for instance, it's as miserable as it ever was: everything is deficient and it goes without saying that one bribes the chief surgeon and cleaning lady.

Seventeen years after Ceaucescu, the Securitate's archive was still being managed and manipulated by the old personnel in the new secret service. This January 1, the 1.6 million dossiers were finally handed over to the file authority (CNSAS), which was founded in 1999 to much teeth-chattering. Whether that will change anything? Years ago, laws were passed regulating the viewing of files. But every law remained ineffective and the authority a cover-up which had to petition the secret service on a daily basis. It, however, remained its own master, will full control over what got out and what not. Occasionally it explained that a file was still being "worked on." Sometimes, when somebody had to be publicly and quickly discredited, very surprising dossiers surfaced.

The authority changed the information that it gave out to me. At first, there were files on me; then they told me they were gone. It is said behind closed doors at the authority that the most explosive files are still categorised as "secret".

During the dictatorship, people escaped over the border daily. Many never made it to the West, they disappeared, were probably shot. There are countless border deaths, entire cemeteries, and their relatives don't know what happened to them, who is responsible. The assassinations of "enemies of the state" both in the country and abroad, even suicides and murders staged as car accidents remain locked up in the files and the perpetrators walk free. And with them, the countless informants, the hired and voluntary spies.

This is why it comes to surreal scenes with perpetrators and victims. A former dissident gets a job in the public service and is summoned for a swearing in. And when he opens the door, his former Securitate interrogator is standing there to receive his oath on the democratic constitution.
Or a former political prisoner applies for a loan at the savings bank in a town. The bank director who tells him that the loan has not been granted was once his prison director.

In Brussels, they'll say the former prisoner should go to another bank. If there's a bank in the town, the EU criteria are fulfilled. The question is: who's the director?

*

This article originally appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on January 2, 2007.

Herta Müller is a Romanian-German writer who emigrated to the West in 1987 and has lived in Berlin since. She has a number of German and international literary prizes to her name.

"I was born in Romania. I grew up there and I lived there until I was 32. I left Romania in a rather complicated state of mind. I wrote my first books in Romania. My first book was "Niederungen" [“Lowlands”], which is about a child's view of the German Banat [a region in western Romania]. In that book, and in others, the central topic is the dictatorship. I knew nothing else. I'd seen nothing else. And I continued with that topic."

"I have no other landscape other than the one I know, the one I came from. [My] literary characters reflect what happens to the human being in a totalitarian society or system. And I believe this is not a topic that I chose, but rather one that my life has chosen for me. I don't have that freedom of choice. I cannot say: 'I want to write about that thing, or about that other thing.' I am bound to write about what concerns me and about the things that won't leave me in peace."

"I believe there is a kind of literature throughout the world, the literature of biography that runs in parallel with extreme events, in parallel with the authors' lives. For example in the 1950s, the gulag was present in Eastern Europe in certain forms. [Or] for instance, the labor camps. And then we have the national-socialist era, Hitler's time, the destruction of the Jews, a topic which many authors have described in parallel with their own biographies.... I believe this type of literature exists everywhere, from Cuba to China."

-- Translated by Mircea Ticudean

Quotes
What others have to
say about Herta Müller:

• "Herta Müllers hellhörige lyrische Prosa ist durch die Schule der Todesangst gegangen. Man sieht durch sie das Weisse im Auge der Macht und jene grellen Farben der Existenz, die unterm Verpackungsdesign der Gewohnheit verborgen sind. Dichtung, die nicht als Gelenkstelle einen Schmerz hat, ist langweilig. Hier ist er alles andere als ausgesprochen: Er ist physisch da." - Andrea Köhler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (21/4/2001)
• "In the wake of atrocities perpetrated in the name of nation and race, individuals were forced to form their identities not only without but against these categories, erecting subtle defenses in the face of unrelenting oppression. The novels of Romanian-born writer Herta Muller have brought this struggle to life for ordinary men and women." - Jason M. Baskin, Chicago Review (Winter/2002)
• "Seltsam und liebenswürdig ist diese Autorin, die im literarischen Leben Berlins bisweilen mit verschmitztem Lächeln anzutreffen ist; doch in ihren Essays verschlägt es dem Leser das Lachen. Hier schreibt jemand, der an die Gerechtigkeit glaubt und der jeden Satz zum Zeugen dafür aufrufen möchte, wie es wirklich war in dem Land, in dem an jeder Straßenecke die täglichen Lügen aus den Staatslautsprechern bellten und in dem die Regierung die Wintertemperaturen im Wetterbericht um zehn Grad erhöhte, auf dass die Genossen Bürger nicht so froren." - Michael Naumann, Die Zeit (5/2/2004)
• "Herta Müllers Werk -- und das hohe Wort ist inzwischen sehr wohl angebracht -- ist ein unübersehbarer literarischer Erinnerungsposten in der Geschichte des politischen Terrors. Das Unsägliche von alltäglicher Angst in diktatorischer Gesellschaft, von Arrest, Folter und Mord auf eigentümliche Weise buchstäblich zur Sprache zu bringen ist die Kunst dieser Autorin. Mit den Augen der Opfer schaut sie auf die politischen Herren der Furcht und nennt sie beim Namen. Sie ist einer der bedeutenden dichtenden Zeugen unserer unseligen Epoche." - Michael Naumann, Die Zeit (20/8/2009)

Review Links and Quotes
What others have to
say about Herta Müller's books:

• Nadirs - stories, 1982 (Niederungen, translated by Sieglinde Lug (1999); University of Nebraska publicity page;Amazon: US, UK, Deutschland)
  • "With her individualistic style, the author turns the texts into prose poems. The poetry clashes with details used to describe fear, for example, in suppressed sexuality as a signum for the inability of communication in fascist Romania" - Irena E. Furhoff, International Fiction Review 30/1-2 (2003)
  • "Müller creates a singular voice that is both brutally honest and dreadfully sad. The observations are made with fearless simplicity, making the acrimonious verbal assaults of the adult family members conspicuous and as painful to the reader as they would be to a child. (...) Owing gratitude to Lug’s splendid translation, Nadirs is a grave, yet compellingly told series of vignettes which should force readers to look as much within themselves as within the text." - Brian Budzynski, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring/2000)
  • "Unübersehbar: der Etüden-Charakter dieses und anderer Stücke. Eine junge Autorin übt, prüft das Material, sucht den eigenen Stil. (...) In den scheinbar nur sprachverliebten Stilübungen, die Herta Müllers Texte auch sind, steckt mehr Sozialkritik, als der erste Leseblick merkt." - Rolf Michaelis, Die Zeit (24/8/1984)
• Barfüßiger Februar - prose, 1987
  • "Insofern ist Barfüßiger Februar auch ein Dokument der Zerrissenheit, es erzählt von der Unmöglichkeit, sich hier heimisch zu fühlen (.....) Herta Müller hält Distanz zu den Menschen, von denen sie erzählt; fast immer meidet sie das Possessivpronomen." - Marina Münkler, Die Zeit (11/3/1988)
• Traveling on One Leg - novel, 1989 (Reisende auf einem Bein, translated by Valentina Glajar and Andre Lefevere (1998); Northwestern University Press publicity page; Amazon: US, UK)
  • "(A) superb short novel (.....) The action in this volume may be slight, but Irene's innermost consciousness -- where the political has indeed become the personal -- is magnificently portrayed." - William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review (21/2/1999)
  • "Die magische Beschwörung der Provinz als andauerndem psychosozialen Zustand beleidigt den Leser, der sich auf der Höhe der Zeit wähnt, in der er lebt, getragen von der allgemeinen Erwartung eines zukünftig noch größeren deutschen Glanzes. Irenes Westen leuchtet nicht. Sie ist mit der Passivität der Randständigen geschlagen, hier wie dort, in Kreuzberg und in Nitzkydorf." - Günter Franzen, Die Zeit (10/11/1989)
• Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger - novel, 1992; Hanser publicity page; Amazon: Deutschland
  • "Niet alle mededelingen in De vos was de jager, een roman van Herta Müller over het leven onder Ceausescu's schrikbewind, zijn even helder als de regel van dat lied. Müllers tekst, ofschoon pas na de ineenstorting van het communisme ontstaan, lijkt op de geheimtaal die burgers in een dictatuur hanteren: alleen ingewijden kunnen de vele weglatingen in gedachten aanvullen en de metaforen decoderen." - Anneriek de Jong, NRC Handelsblad (4/2/1994)
  • "Doch Herta Müllers Kunst der Vergiftung durch Worte ist weitaus hexischer; am perfektesten da, wo sie Töne, Farben, Geruchsspuren in den Leser hineinträufelt, daß er sich unmerklich im Gewebe eines Alptraums gefangen findet. Es ist die Qualität der Lyrikerin, die Worte jenseits ihrer griffigen Bedeutung ineinanderfügen kann, um einen Magnetismus zu erzeugen. (...) Eine solche Pinzetten-Prosa ist mehr als jede erzählerische Epik abhängig von der haargenauen Exaktheit ihrer Bilder. Herta Müller aber 'verpatzt' viele, wodurch sie zur Preziosität verkommen (.....) Das Ergebnis ist nicht nur ein wenig wenig; es ist ein verdorbenes Buch. Herta Müller hat ihre Leser abgespeist, nicht ernährt." - Fritz J. Raddatz, Die Zeit (28/8/1992)
• The Land of Green Plums - novel, 1994 (Herztier, translated by Michael Hofmann (1996); International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award (1998); Northwestern University Press publicity page, Metropolitan Books publicity page, Hanser publicity page; Amazon: US, UK, Deutschland)
  • "The Land of Green Plums is a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania. (...) Ms. Muller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality." - Larry Wolff, The New York Times Book Review (1/12/1996)
  • "Muller's true achievement lies not only in her superb evocation of Ceausescu's Romania, but also in her recreation of the exile experience. After the characters have escaped to Germany they still feel tormented by their previous lack of freedom. The Land of the Green Plums avoids the cool irony of much eastern European fiction." - Madeleine Byrne, Quadrant (6/1999)
  • "By paying careful attention to the slightest nuances of life in Romania the book also gives an accurate description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism. (...) Miss Müller has construced a novel that violates every rule of what was expected of a novelist in communist Romania. It also might be said that the book goes against neary every expectation of what passes for a novel today in America. It eschews plot. What is happening line by line, page by page, outweighs any interest in what is going to happen next." - Thomas McGonigle, The Washington Times (17/11/1996)
  • Glossen
  • The Second Circle
• The Appointment - novel, 1997 (Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm (2001); Metropolitan publicity page; Amazon: US, UK, Deutschland)
  • "The narrator's resistance to the conspiratorial logic of the regime is most effectively expressed in Muller's meandering stream of consciousness narration. The sheer chaos of her narrative -- in which the numerous infidelities, betrayals and deceits that constitute the story's various threads are confusingly entwined in the narrator's mind -- is the source of the novel's overwhelming bleakness, more so than the fate of any particular character. (...) Detached from family, loved ones, even the world around her, Muller's narrator teeters on the edge of madness. Her tale, though haunting, offers the reader little insight. Muller's psychological acuity makes The Appointment both more and less than a fable" - Jason M. Baskin, Chicago Review (Winter/2002)
  • "Wenn das sprachliche Material insgesamt im Vergleich zu den vorangegangenen Büchern ausgedünnt erscheint, so erklärt sich dies gewiß auch daraus, daß Herta Müller erzählerisch zu beglaubigen hatte, daß das Ganze aus der Perspektive einer Frau ohne größere Bildung erzählt wird. Problematischer ist, daß die gesamte Erzählung im Topos der verkehrten Welt fundiert erscheint, den die Erzählerin auch selbst bemüht. Im mundus perversus aber hat die Frau, die hier von ihrer vergeblichen Glückssuche erzählt, von Anbeginn keine Chance, und so schwankt denn auch der gesamte Roman unentschieden zwischen Sozialkolportage und literarischer Totalitarismuskritik hin und her." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (14/10/1997)
  • "Like Müller's previous novel, which also depicted a world of paranoia, neurosis and confusion, The Appointment is not easy reading. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether we are reading about people driven mad by a mad regime or people who may not have had all their marbles in the first place. (...) Whether or not this novel resonates on a deeper level, it certainly manages to spatter us with a disturbing array of symptoms." - Merle Rubin, The Los Angeles Times (10/9/2001)
  • "(A) brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. (...) Its pain is all the creepier because of the indeterminacy of what happens and has happened to her." - Richard Eder, The New York Times (12/9/2009)
  • "Müller is also resistant to forms of order that provoke an automatic and possibly false response; The Appointment is a book whose plot is not so much convoluted as it is devoid of apparent direction. (...) Given the intensity of the situation it seeks to capture, it makes sense that The Appointment is difficult to read. But what's unfortunate is that it's also not very rewarding. (...) The Appointment is more a test of endurance than a pleasure. One could argue that this is precisely the point, given the duress and despair Müller seeks to capture, but duress in and of itself does not make a novel." - Peter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review (21/10/2001)
  • "Responding to a world of unbearable cruelty and senseless petty theft, The Appointment strives to find words to bare the bleakest truths. It is a cryptic message from inside a nightmare that pleads with a reader, "Marry me." " - Steven G. Kellman, San Francisco Chronicle (23/12/2001)
  • greekworks.com
• Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame - poetry, 2000
  • "Herta Müller hat ein bitterböses und tieftrauriges und absurd heiteres Poesiealbum komponiert. Nicht wenige der poetischen Miniaturen aus dem beschädigten Leben, die es enthält, gehören zum Besten, was sie bisher geschrieben hat." - Ernst Osterkamp, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (18/8/2001)
• Der König verneigt sich und tötet - essays, 2003 (Hanser publicity page; Amazon: Deutschland)
  • "Ein Buch wie dieses entzieht sich der literarischen Kritik. (...) Gemessen an solchen Forderungen, zeigt die Prosa dieses Bandes einige Stärken und nicht wenige Schwächen." - Heinrich Detering, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (7/10/2003)
  • "Die hier versammelten Essays kreisen um den Wunsch, zu Papier zu bringen, was noch die empfindlichste Geschichtsschreibung des vorigen Terror-Jahrhunderts nicht vermag: die Überlebenstechniken in einer Schreckensherrschaft vorzustellen, die zwischen stiller Anpassung, Wegducken und Schweigen oder Flucht in gemeinsame seelische Selbstvergewisserung unter Dissidenten liegen." - Michael Naumann, Die Zeit (5/2/2004)
• Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen - collages, 2005 (Hanser publicity page; Amazon: Deutschland)
  • "Nur zögernd trennt man sich daher vom schönen Schein der Gebilde, um ihrem Wortlaut zu folgen; es will nicht zwingend erscheinen, die Texte buchstäblich zu lesen, statt sie nur anzuschauen. Doch die Lektüre fördert Einblicke in die Konstruktion und Eigenart poetischer Texte überhaupt zutage.(...) Das Buch kann Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftlern, besonders den poststrukturalistischen Dekonstruktivisten unter ihnen, zur professionellen Analyse empfohlen werden; es eignet sich aber auch als Anregung für große und kleine Leute, die Freude am spielerischen Umgang mit der Sprache haben oder sie wecken wollen: Schnipseln Sie doch mal!" - Wulf Segebrecht, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (29/9/2005)
  • goldmag
• Atemschaukel - novel, 2009 (translation forthcoming; information page at new books in german; excerpt; Hanser publicity page; Amazon: Deutschland)
  • "Gegenwart ist hier zu einem bloßen Erinnern geworden, das sich selbst nicht begreift. (...) Dass die Bücher im Koffer den Untergrund bilden für die wenigen anderen Utensilien, ist ein frühes Signal des Romans für die subversive Kraft der poetischen Sprache, der ein überragendes Denkmal gesetzt wird. (...) So kann der ganze Roman als ein sprachwirkliches Sinnbild begriffen werden: die 'Atemschaukel' als energetisches Erinnerungszeichen. Zugleich zeichnet Herta Müller die Initiation eines Schriftstellers nach und stiftet dazu an, die Sprachkunst Oskar Pastiors zu verstehen als das, was sie zunächst ist: existentielle Poesie und nicht Sprachspiel." - Michael Lentz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (4/9/2009)
  • "Ein historischer Roman ist diese Atemschaukel definitiv nicht. Nach Erklärungen für das, was geschieht, sucht die Autorin auf fast schon akribische Weise nicht. Es ist eher so, als suche sie in der Erniedrigung aller die Würde des einzelnen. Und diese scheint ihr nur durch eine Erhöhung der Sprache möglich zu sein." - Ina Hartwig, Frankfurter Runsdschau (20/8/2009)
  • "Geht das, ein Buch über das Grauen aus zweiter Hand? Es geht, wenn die Sprache selbst eine gültige Realität herstellt. Jede Wahrnehmung, die auf dem Papier Bestand haben kann, ist in der Sprache noch einmal erfunden worden. (...) Dieses Buch ist eine Axt. Herta Müller hat für den Schrecken des Hungers Worte gefunden, die das Fleisch von den Knochen säbeln. Sie sind detailgenau wie die hundert Sorten Asche, Schlacke und Lagerstaub und unbarmherzig wie der weisse Hase, der den Tod auf die Wangen malt." - Andrea Köhler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (25/8/2009)
  • "Müller är inte intresserad av politik i det hänseendet, och har aldrig varit någon diktare som indignerat ägnar sig åt rättvisemärkt samhällsengagemang i konventionell mening. Istället omvandlar hon, här med Pastiors hjälp och i enlighet med sina egna litterära metoder i tidigare böcker, de faktiska betingelserna och händelserna till en historia om individens tillblivelse i och genom språket." - Martin Lagerholm, Svenska Dagbladet (19/9/2009)
  • "Entstanden ist ein Dokument der Einsamkeit in einer Welt ohne Liebe, ohne Hoffnung und ganz gewiss auch ohne Glauben. (...) Atemschaukel hat diesem Kritiker den Atem verschlagen." - Michael Naumann, Die Zeit (20/8/2009)
  • "Denn jetzt, 15 Jahre nach ihrem jüngsten Roman Herztier und einige Jahre nach dem definitiven Ende der Nachkriegszeit, legt Herta Müller einen neuerlichen Nachkriegsroman vor, der gerade aufgrund jener poetischen Verfahren, für die Herta Müller stets so gerühmt wurde, kraftlos und schal, ja in manchen Passagen von peinigender Parfümiertheit ist. (...) Es ist wie verhext: Jeder Versuch einer poetischen Überhöhung und Intensivierung -- so betörend er in den früheren Müller-Romanen ausgefallen sein mag -- wirkt hier abgeschmackt und formelhaft." - Iris Radisch, Die Zeit (20/8/2009)
  • Berliner Zeitung
  • Berner Zeitung
  • Deutschlandradio
  • Frankfurter Neue Presse
  • literaturkritik.de
  • poetenladen.de
  • Der Tagesspiegel
  • taz