Book Insider: The Passport by Herta Muller

Winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller was born into a household of German-speaking Romanians, a minority group in a remote village in Banat who were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945. Müller’s mother was sent to serve five years in a labor camp in the Ukraine. From 1973 to 1976, Müller attended the university in Timisoara (Temeswar), majoring in German and Romanian literature. She soon joined a circle of dissident young German-speaking authors known as the “Aktionsgruppe Banat,” opposing the new Romanian dictator, Ceausescu. From 1977 to 1979, Müller found work as a translator at a manufacturing company. When she refused to be an informant for the secret police, she was dismissed, and afterward she was continually harassed by the Securitate. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Müller spoke powerfully about this period in her life:

“[The Securitate man] called me stupid. [He] said I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch. . . . I stopped writing. I put down the pen and went to the window and looked out onto the dusty street, unpaved and full of potholes, and at all the humpbacked houses. . . . On Glory Street a cat was sitting in a bare mulberry tree. It was the factory cat with the torn ear. And above the cat the early morning sun was shining like a yellow drum. I said: N-am caracterul—I don’t have the character for this. I said it to the street outside. The word CHARACTER made the Securitate man hysterical. He tore up the sheet of paper and threw the pieces on the floor. With his briefcase under his arm he said quietly: You’ll be sorry, we’ll drown you in the river. I said as if to myself: If I sign that, I won’t be able to live with myself anymore, and I’ll have to do it on my own. So it’s better if you do it.“