Ceausescu scourge wins Nobel
Romanian writer Herta Muller says she still can't believe she won this year's Nobel Prize for literature in recognition of her work about the dark side of state Communism.
Friday October 09 2009
HERTA Muller, a fierce critic of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his secret police state, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday -- almost 20 years after the leader met his end at the hands of a firing squad.
"I am stunned and still cannot believe it," said the author, who was forced to emigrate from her native Romania in 1987. Since then Ms Muller, who writes in German, has lived in Berlin.
The timing of the award was significant, suggesting that the Swedish Academy was trying to honour the literature of resistance to dictatorship.
"Twenty years after the end of the East-West conflict an author has been recognised who insists that the inhuman sides of state Communism must stay in our memory," said a spokesman for Carl Hanser Verlag, which publishes the German-language books of Ms Muller.
For years the writer was spied on by the Securitate, forced out of a job, brutally interrogated and her work censored.
Even when she and her husband Richard Wagner, also a writer, moved to West Berlin she found herself under threat from informers and agents.
At least one of them -- she recently found out from her old Securitate files -- was a close friend. The harassment is chronicled in her latest book, 'Atemschaukel', which is translated as 'Everything I possess I carry with me'.
The theme of life under dictatorship runs as a common thread through her literary work. She was brought up in Nitchidorf, a German-speaking community in Timisoara county in western Romania.
The German minority was closely monitored by the communist authorities and key positions were infiltrated by members of the secret police. (© The Times, London)
- Roger Boyes in London
Irish Independent
