Global News Journal

Nobel winner says Ceausescu’s spirit lives on in Romania

Brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu has been dead for 20 years, but Romania remains dominated by his henchmen, the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for literature says.

Herta Mueller, a small, raven-haired writer who grew up in Romania and now lives in Germany, is in Stockholm to receive her award.  She is a reticent speaker, but her message — born from experiencing the bitterness Ceausescu’s repressive regime — is powerful.

“There is a legacy in Romania, a legacy of dictatorship,” Mueller says through a translator. “The former Securitate and the former party nomenclature are very closely networked in Romania and through privatisation they have managed to occupy almost all the key positions in society.”

Mueller is dressed in all in black, the only colour being a splash of bright red lipstick against her pale face. She is known for works such as “The Land of Green Plums” — dedicated to friends killed under Ceausescu’s Communist rule — and “The Appointment”, in which a Romanian woman sews notes saying “Marry Me” into men’s suits bound for Italy. Mueller is pessimistic about the future of a country she left in 1987, two years before the fall of the old regime.

“What Romania needs is a civil society,” Mueller says, flanked by a vase of bright yellow roses and a host of microphones. “But a civil society has to evolve and to do that it needs the right conditions. Romania does not have those conditions.”

Even the feared secret police, the Securitate have made a return, she says. “The new secret service … took on 40 percent of the old secret service. The people in that apparatus have acquired a second life.” Questions at the press conference are dominated by her experiences of life in a dictatorship. Has she talked with former East Germans who suffered under the Stasi? “Yes,” she says, but she sees a difference between the DDR and Romania.

In Romania, “you can’t see who did what. No responsibility has been taken,” she says. And what about other regimes? China for example? As one might expect from a writer praised for her courage, Mueller pulls no punches. “There is this great discrepancy as far as China is concerned.

Merkel ally insult of Romanians, Chinese an internet scoop

In the “old days” of journalism, before the rise of the internet, an alert journalist might pick up on a politician’s gaffe in the middle of an election speech or somewhere on the campaign trail and publish or broadcast a story with the potential to change the dynamic of a race.

Nowadays, it could be instead the political opponent or citizen journalists armed with cell phone cameras or small hand-held cameras who can upset the applecart with a YouTube videos, blog or website report documenting a serious verbal blunder.

It’s a lesson that Juergen Ruettgers, the conservative state premier of Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia and a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has now painfully learned.

Ruettgers apologised late on Friday for insulting both Romanian workers and Chinese investors at a campaign rally in the depressed working class city of Duisburg late last month (story here) as the row over his remarks escalated. Ruettgers, who has a track record of statements criticised as xenophobic, suggested at the rally in Ruhr River industrial city that the Romanian work ethic was inferior to Germany’s and he also made derogatory remarks about Chinese investors.