The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller
A “File Story” of Cold War Surveillance
Author: Valentina N. Glajar Series: Culture and Power in German-Speaking Europe, 1918-1989
An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance.
Hardcover
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Summary
An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance.
Description
An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance."Herta Muller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Muller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Muller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceausescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Muller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain.This book is an in-depth investigation of Muller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Muller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.
Critic Reviews
The richness and interdisciplinary character of Glajar's work make it equally appealing to surveillance studies scholars, Cold War historians, and Romanian and German studies specialists. JOURNAL OF ROMANIAN STUDIES
Scholars of Müller's work, students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and general audiences interested in memory studies, reading and un-coding archived Cold War surveillance files, and Cold War surveillance tactics in the communist Romanian context will find a treasure trove in this monograph. GEGENWARTSLITERATUR
In this excellent volume, Valentina Glajar painstakingly reconstructs Müller's "file story." It is a complicated picture and a fascinating one. . . . The volume is of interest not only to Müller specialists but also to all who are interested in the history of Romania and indeed of the Cold War period in eastern Europe. SEMINAR
Reading this book, with its detailed analysis and description of various kinds of surveillance, one is sometimes put into a position that bears an uncomfortable relationship to that of a secret police operative. After all, until recently no one but a member of the secret police would have had access to this information, which was based on significant long-term invasions of Herta Müller's-and many other people's-privacy. MONATSHEFTE
Overall, this is both a gripping account of surveillance and a model for how to build accessible and insightful analysis out of secret police archives. Glajar makes a sprawling and obscure written record graspable and interesting to her reader without accepting it at face value, and has therefore produced a study that will have an appeal far beyond the academic community interested in Müller. OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES
This fascinating book is an excellent example of what its author calls a "file story," which she defines as "a form of 'remedial' life writing, one that unravels skewed life segments coded and recorded in secret police files and recovers them through a multilayered biographical act.". . . The material in a Securitate file, sensitively interpreted as it is here, thus gives us a unique understanding of surveillance, that basic instrument of oppression in communist societies. SLAVIC REVIEW
About the Author
VALENTINA GLAJAR is Professor of German at Texas State University.
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