The quintessence of moral bankruptcy

After the German-Romanian writer Herta Müller levelled criticism at the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) in Berlin for inviting two former Securitate spies to a cultural event, a parliamentary enquiry has been set up to assess the quality of the ICR. Müller protests in the daily Evenimentul Zilei against the misuse of her criticism by Adrian Paunescu, head of the cultural commission in Romania's Senate, who himself was court poet to Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. "For me, Paunescu is the quintessence of moral bankruptcy, the personification of cultural prostitution under the dictatorship. In my opinion, the only thing for him to do after the fall of communism was to shut up for the next 50 years. It is difficult to find an artist as guilty of the moral disaster of the Ceauşescu era as Paunescu. ... My protest was not aimed at the ICR as an institution, nor at the achievements of its director. That was never my intention. ... If my protest is now to be used by Paunescu and others like him, then my message has been inverted."

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