euro|topics - Herta Müller

22/11/2008

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Müller, Herta

3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.

Evenimentul Zilei - Romania | 07/08/2008

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."

Romania Libera - Romania | 12/02/2007

Herta Müller on Romania's relationship with communism

On the basis of the results of an investigation by a commission of historians, Romanian Head of state Traian Basescu has officially condemned communism in Romania. In an interview with Ionut Chiva, the Romanian-German author Herta Müller describes this as an "empty gesture": "If we want democracy we must try to understand the mentality of democracy; we must build up an effective judicial system. How can we condemn communism if we still don't have access to Securitate files, for example my own file? Communism has perpetrated serious crimes of which we know nothing yet and which civil society will have to discuss in the future. It is not for Traian Basescu to condemn communism. A group of historians sent him a pile of documents on the basis of which he condemns communism as a 'criminal regime'. He did not feel the effects of the criminality of this regime; I did. It's naïve of him to make this symbolic gesture 17 years after the fall of communism. For me, this is nothing more than a meaningless spectacle."

Frankfurter Rundschau - Germany | 02/01/2007

Herta Müller on Romania's loss of memory

The Romanian-German writer Herta Müller complains that the EU has not put enough pressure on Romania to confront its past under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu: "Romania has made very little effort regarding confronting its past under Ceausescu's dictatorship. People act as if it had just disappeared into thin air. The entire country suffers from amnesia... Eight percent of the country's Orthodox priests worked for the secret service, the Securitate – they were spies wearing the habit. The same presumably goes for journalists, doctors, professors and lawyers, but we don't know who, and we're not supposed to, either. The reason for this is clear: the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu, his sentence after a quick trial, and his execution, which was engineered by the Securitate itself. The official version is that the secret service was dissolved after the so-called revolution, but its staff was secretly kept under pay. A number of former Securitate members passed directly into the newly founded secret service, while the cleverest of them used the fruits of blackmailing to carve out a cushy position for themselves in the free market economy."

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