Freshly minted Nobel-for-Literature laureate Herta Müller is an ethnic German of Romanian extraction. Like lots of prominent folks who rose to prominence under the Eastern European communist regimes, she was the subject of security service observation and, like many from minority communities, she was doubly an object of suspicion. She detailed her attempts to access her former Securitate files in Die Zeit last July, now translated over at Sign and Sight. It’s worth quoting at some length:
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.
….
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… Hours and hours of fictitious reproaches. But not only that. They needed no summons, they simply plucked me off the street.
….
My file at least answered one painful question. A year after my departure from Romania, Jenny came to visit in Berlin… 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… 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”.
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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.
In December, 1989, it took a week to overthrow Ceausescu, ‘try’ him, put a bullet in his head, and bury him in a mis-marked grave at the edge of Bucharest. A scant few days before his death, he’d addressed massed crowds from the balcony of the People’s Palace (above). These things can seem awfully fast when they happen. Perhaps it’s no surprise that rooting out the societal consequences takes longer–very long indeed.
