BERLIN, (AFP) - Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize, has said she was still haunted by the dictatorship she grew up in and that has inspired her work.
“I feel free now but these things have not been erased,” Mueller, 56, told reporters in Berlin, where she now lives. “I know what it is to be afraid every morning that by the evening you won't exist any more.””In your head it's not over, even if that time is over,” she said.
She said that she was one of the lucky ones, having made it out of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's regime to escape to West Germany in 1987. “I lived through 30 years of dictatorship,” Mueller, with jet-black hair, striking blue eyes and bright red lipstick, told a packed news conference. “There are lots of others who didn't make it.”Mueller's family came from Romania's German-speaking minority and her father was in the German SS during World War II, when Bucharest was allied to the Nazis.
Romania's post-war communist authorities under Ceausescu deported her mother to a forced labour camp in the Soviet Union, and the dictator's oppressive regime inspired much of Mueller's work. After studying literature between 1973 and 1976, Mueller was sacked from her first job as a translator in a machinery factory after refusing to work for Ceausescu's hated Securitate secret police.
After being refused permission to emigrate to West Germany in 1985, she was finally allowed to leave in 1987 after her barbed criticism of her native country's regime earned her death threats from the secret police.
Two years later, and 20 years ago this November, the Berlin Wall fell, and Ceausescu and his wife Elena were summarily executed by firing squad on Christmas Day the same year. “I felt (in 1987) that I could breathe and it was only when the dictatorship fell in 1989 and I felt I wouldn't be threatened any more,”Mueller said. |
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