When Dictatorships Fail to Deprive of Dignity: Herta Muller's "Romanian Period" (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Herta Müller and the Currents of European History
German Life and Letters, 2020
Ten years on from the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and thirty years after German reunification and the fall of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania is a fitting moment to revisit Herta Müller's work and place it within broader intellectual, geographical, and historical horizons than has hitherto been attempted. It is also time to reconcile the public intellectual with the literary author. For it has long been clear that Müller's aesthetically innovative and highly acclaimed novels, essays, and collages stand as a testament to the major upheavals of twentieth-century European history. Drawing on her Romanian-German upbringing, overshadowed by the Second World War and Stalin-era deportations, and on her adult negotiation of the oppression of Romanian Communism and the shock of arrival in 1980s West Berlin, Müller has created a body of work which thematises guilt, trauma, alienation, flight, and resistance. Her works concern themselves with the experiences of common people-often at the margins of society or excluded from the narratives of ypolitical history yet caught up in historical currents-and promote awareness of the huge cost in terms of suffering and upheaval paid by them for the decisions made by their rulers. Yet Müller's self-adopted role as moral voice and her willingness to make broad historical comparisons over the past three decades have often met with controversy. Her outspokenness in criticising European governments for their hypocrisy and negligence with regard to human rights abuses have, for example, found relatively little resonance, while her attacks on the failure of nations such as Romania and Serbia adequately to process the history of
Construction of Romanian Society in Herta Muller's "The Passport"
Herta Muller, in The Passport, explores the history of Romania and rewrites it in a way that her characters clearly portray the repressed life of Romanian people within a society where money is recognized as God and human beings are presented as objects. Muller's attempt to represent the socio-political scenario of Romania and the hollowness of society proves efficacious in revamping one's ideology which was firstly adopted by willingness. The concept of ideology is guided by the bourgeoisie ideology which helps in constructing the base and superstructure of a society in The Passport. The study highlights Muller's questioning about the hollowness of society's base and superstructure resultant of totalitarianism; a devastating force to crush common man's life in The Passport.
Arhivele totalitarismului (Bucharest), nr. 104-105, 3-4 (2019), 2019
This article examines the "morally correct" narrative on the communist past which became dominant in early post-communist Romania, and which focused on the former secret police, the Securitate, as a key actor under the former regime. This narrative framed the epoch 1945-89 as a period of confrontation between innocent victims and the secret police, and trivialized as morally incorrect any attempt at redefining the much more complex relation between rulers and ruled under communist rule..
Marietta Sadova: Fascist Identities and Political Compromise in Communist Romania
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Historia, 2022
After a brief period of liberalization in 1956, cultural politics in communist Romania went through an ideological radicalization between 1958 and the early 1960s, which led to intimidation campaigns, arrests, trials, and condemnations of several groups of interwar intellectuals. Director and actress Marietta Sadova was convicted in the 'Noica-Pillat' trial in March 1960. This paper aims to unravel the complex interaction between culture and politics through a qualitative analysis of Marietta Sadova's case study. The focus will be on the Securitate's surveillance, coercion methods, and narrative construction on one hand and the artist's surviving fascist identity, compromises made to survive, and the validity of cultural niches of existence on the other. The theoretical and methodological apparatus is built on new historiographical approaches to communist repression, including the ability of the secret police to construct and politically instrumentalize guilt narratives. The results suggest that the interaction between the interwar intellectuals and the communist authorities was neither unidirectional nor unitary but multilayered and mutually depended on negotiations and concessions, as well as on the secret police agents' newly acquired methods of creating and repressing 'hostile' social networks.
Acta Musei Napocensis. Historica, 2021
The present study aims to analyze the relationship between the so‑called ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals (socialized and educated in prestigious cultural groups in the interwar society) and the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, from three perspectives: repression, re‑education, and social reinsertion. The main argument is that all three phases corresponded to Politburo’s political approaches directly related to the evolution of internal or international political events of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sources used are the Securitate files of the persons convicted in the ‘Noica–Pillat trial’ from 1960. The research method is qualitative analysis combining an institutional approach of the Securitate files with a case study. Consequently, the article focuses on the case of Constantin Noica, a prominent Romanian intellectual. He was sentenced to prison in 1960, pardoned in 1964, and later used by the regime in power service. The Securitate used Constantin Noica’s friendship with Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade to attract prestigious intellectuals back to Romania and enhance the nationalist orientation of the regime through philosophy.
“Anxieties of the Nomos : Fascism, Communism and Legal Discontinuity in Post-War Romania”
The Communist takeover in Romania continues to be one of the privileged topics in historical and political investigations of Romanian really existing socialism. Indeed, the question of the rise to power of the communist movement is not only a puzzling historical process raising a manifold series of political, legal and sociological issues, but also a fundamental nexus in the symbolic construction of the memory of the communist regime. Accordingly, creating a coherent historical narrative of this period is a pivotal task for approaching the structure of the system of communist power as much as it is an exercise in representing discursively the origins of Romanian socialism. This paper aims to further problematize the existing historical narratives of communist takeover in Romania by addressing the question of legal (dis)continuity between the communist regime and the authoritarian dictatorships of the 1940s. Drawing on the legal paradoxes entailed by the concept of ‘state of exception’ as present in the work of Giorgio Agamben, I seek to explore the ambiguities of the legal framework in force at the time of the communist takeover. In doing so, I shall focus on the legal strategies employed by the communist movement in legitimizing the new legal order as well as in obfuscating the continuities with its legal past. In a first part I shall offer a synoptical reading of the Romanian post-war historical context. Secondly, I shall put under scrutiny three legal dynamics, namely the process of constitutional reform, the post-war trials and the criminal law policies devised by the emerging regime. In a third and last part I shall critically question the communist strategies in breaking with the past. By this investigation I intend to bring under a new light the complicities at work - on one hand - between law and politics, as well as between authoritarian and communist dictatorships, on the other. I thus seek to engage with the contemporary consensus representing communism as moment of rupture in Romanian legal history.
Traces of the Power of the Proletariat Dictator in Herta Müller‘s Herztier
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Arts and Humanities 2021 (IJCAH 2021), 2022
The peculiarity of the novel as a work of imaginative narrative prose is its element of continuity. The fictional world reaches the reader because of the narrator's mediation. Therefore, the narrator is the most crucial element for readers to understand the story in the novel. This article examined the traces of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the novel Herztier by Herta Müller, which the first-person narrator mediated. By using Stanzel's narrative theory, this study focused on two problems. The first one was the description of the power system of the proletariat dictatorship in Herztier. The second one was the description of the characters' suffering caused by the dictatorial power system of the proletariat in Herztier. Using the content analysis method of the narrative situation in Herztier, an overview of the traces of dictatorial power in Romania was obtained through the narrative of the first-person narrator. The narrative of the first-person narrator in Herztier showed that her narrative of the proletarian dictatorship's power system and the suffering of society caused by the practice of the proletarian dictatorship system was obtained from the experience and testimony of the narrator.
Book reviews: Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice
Memory Studies, 2019
called their monograph Romania Confronts Its Communist Past "a testimony and an analytical exercise" (p. 1). The monograph is indeed a testimony to how historical memory was finally restored in Romania, the last Warsaw Pact country led by a Marxist-Leninist government to overthrow communism. Memory, history, and trauma are the main concerns of the authors' analysis. The monograph is divided into six chapters. While the first, more general chapter, "Judging the Past in Post-Traumatic Societies: Romania in Comparative Perspective," illustrates what Avishai Margalit called "an ethics of memory," Chapters 2 to 5 follow a strict chronology. Chapter 2 ("Romania before 2006") describes the Romanian political scene between 1989 and 2006 and Chapter 3 ("Coming to Terms with the Past in Romania: The Presidential Commission") explains how the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR), whose President was Tismăneanu himself, was set up and worked. Chapters 4 ("Reactions to the Condemnation and Political Rearrangements after 2007") and 5 ("The Report's Aftermath: Interpretations, Polemics, and Policies") survey the aftermath of the political life of a society that has made efforts to come to terms with its past. The last chapter, "Romania and the European Framework of Dealing with the Communist Past," poses questions on the former Soviet bloc's new ideosphere almost 30 years after the demise of communism, when "[c]ritical intellectuals seem to have lost much of their moral aura and are often attacked as champions of futility, architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers" (p. 166). The "umbrella concept" of the book is "decommunization," "a means of dealing with the past both historiographically and publicly," offering legal, financial, and institutional measures and acknowledging responsibilities about dictatorship (pp. 8-9). The authors strongly believe in societies' need to keep historical memory alive, without attempting to sanitize those pages of history which were shameful. They oppose the idea that dealing with the past can be "an obstacle to the progress of democratization" (p. 10) and in their view, the 663-page Final Report of PCACDR was "moral therapy" through knowledge that exorcised "the spectres of the past by accessing nonmythicized truths" (p. 24). Issues pertaining to memory are the volume's main concern, hence its numerous reflections on the paradox of the "schizoid" communist regime that both "resented memory" and cultivated its traces: Securitate (the secret police) gathered thousands of transcripts, documents, and reports (p. 104). The Romanian Revolution started with people chanting "Down with Ceauşescu!" in Timişoara on December 18, 1989. On the same day, 17 years later in the Romanian Parliament, Traian Băsescu, then President of Romania, condemned "the illegitimate and criminal" communist regime (p. 6). He described the "path of overcoming the past," emphasizing that Romanians could leave behind "the state of social mistrust and pessimism in which the years of transition submerged" them only on condition that they genuinely examined their "national conscience" (p. 34, original emphasis). Băsescu characterized the communist regime as "forty-five years of national humiliation, persecution of minorities, ruin of the peasantry, exploitation of the proletariat, destruction of autonomous thinking, and the harassment of intellectuals" (p. 75), naming Romanian institutions of violent repression: Securitate, the party apparatus, party control commissions, and propagandistic committees (p. 75).