Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

I had never heard of this year's Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Herta Mueller. She defected from Romania to West Germany in the 1980s and writes in German.

In her essay Securitate in all but name, she describes the difficulty in obtaining the security dossier on her after the fall of Communism and her behavior that created the thick file.

The description of her harassment in Romania is a chilling flashback from an earlier time of life behind the Iron Curtain. She describes how Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, tried to recruit her to spy and how she refused. After her refusal, they made her life a living hell, including a brief detainment and constant surveillance by both strangers and acquaintances. She published her first work, Nadirs, largely as a protest against the situation.

The book was well received in West Germany, where she eventually obtained asylum. She details how the Securitate tried to smear her as a spy in the Romanian immigrant community in Germany, while denouncing her as a traitor at home.

In one of the most chilling personal details in the essay, Mueller writes about a friend, who came to visit her in Germany. This woman had shown her much kindness when she first began to get into trouble with the Secret Police in Romania. During the German visit, Mueller discovered that this friend had been sent to spy on her and she confronted her about it. The friend admitted that, yes, that's what she was doing, but only because she needed cancer treatment. Mueller accepted her explanation and forgave her, but then a few days later she caught the friend with a duplicate key to her apartment. She ordered the woman to get out and was left wondering if the woman's earlier kindness and friendship in Romania simply hadn't been staged.

But perhaps what is most chilling in this essay is the difficult time Mueller encountered in trying to obtain her dossier. When she finally does get it, she discovers that most of it has either been redacted or forged. And she points out what has occurred all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union-- the Old Secret Intelligence agencies never really disbanded, but just continued to function under new names. The people who still work there have no interest in being identified or prosecuted. And so, her files were heavily edited to protect the still-employed guilty.

Congratulations to Ms. Mueller. In a life that no one could envy, she has produced great art and managed to induce Cold War flashbacks of ghosts that never really go away.