Tag Archives: Romania

The Price of Freedom

The novel “The Price of Freedom” by the French-speaking author Matéo Maximoff recounts the life of a group of Roma in Moldova in the first half of the 19th century, at a time when this ethnic group was still living as slaves in what is today Romania. As the title of the book already indicates, the struggle for the freedom of the Roma – as shown by the example of the characters in the novel – is the central theme of the book.

Young Istvan, the main character of the book, works as a clerk and librarian in the court of the rich landowner Andrei. He owes this position, which is unusual for a Rom, to the fact that Andrei, who is ruling his estate as a mostly benevolent patriarch, recognized the intelligence of the young Istvan early on and promoted him. Istvan grew up together with Andrei’s sons of about the same age and thus, compared to the situation of his family and the other Roma who work for Andrei, achieved a “privileged” position. This, however, has no legal effect on his status as a slave and personal property of the landowner; as a slave, he is always at the mercy of his owner. This special position isolates him both from his own community, where on the one hand he is respected but also viewed with suspicion, and also from the community of free people with which he lives on a daily basis.

Another outsider in this environment is Yon, who is not only the landlord’s energetic right-hand man, but also his illegitimate son – a secret that is known to Istvan. Yon’s competent and energetic work distinguishes him from the legitimate sons of the landowner. While the Roma fear him as the powerful and sometimes ruthless representative of Andrei – he can impose severe punishment at any time -, Yon knows very well that he can never achieve a position that would be in line with his great energy and ambition; this position will be reserved for Andrei’s legitimate sons. The two outsiders Istvan and Yon have an occasionally conflict-ridden relationship, but one that is also based on mutual respect. Since they have known each other since childhood, a strange friendship, characterized at the same time by rivalry, has developed over the course of time. The role that both have to play as outstanding representatives of their respective social groups is simply too contradictory to get along without the tensions that become more and more apparent as the book progresses.

Maximoff chooses a clever introduction to his story: the book starts with the big market day in springtime. During this occasion, slaves are also sold and bought. Yon buys a group of Roma, including Lena, a girl that he obviously intends to turn into his lover. To protect Lena from Yon’s stalking, Istvan, who got Andrei’s blessing for this, gets engaged to Lena – which not only annoys Yon very much, but also fills Istvan’s lover Rayka with great jealousy. She had hoped that her relationship with Istvan would lead to marriage and sees her prospects threatened. Rayka’s jealousy is at the beginning of a fateful and dramatic chain of actions that culminate in the flight of Istvan, his family and a few other Roma; an escape that is of course not simply accepted by Andrei and his people, who suspect that Istvan murdered one of Andrei’s sons.

During their flight, the Roma group around Istvan faces an outlawed group of Roma who live in the remote mountains and who have realized their dream of a free life without oppressors. After initial reluctance, they accept Istvan and his group because of his honesty, courage and cleverness and let them join their community.

In the looming “showdown” between Yon – supported by the military, which is involved in the search for those who have fled – and Istvan and his Roma, a fight with great severity and brutality takes place, which will lead as a result to many victims on both sides. But violence is not the last word in this novel. In 1855, the political leader of the country, Alexander Ghika finally abolishes slavery in all of Romania (Moldova and Wallachia). And the story of Istvan comes to a resolution during a later court case that ties all the loose ends of the story together, giving it a last surprising twist. I don’t want to reveal more here in order not to spoil this very exciting story unnecessarily for readers.

I liked the book. It introduces the reader to the life of the Roma in the 19th century and I find it very embarrassing that although the slavery of the African Americans in the south of the USA is well known and explored, while at the same time, the fact that the Roma in Moldova and Wallachia were living in very similar conditions during the same period, is largely unknown in Europe and elsewhere. The book is shedding light on the plight of the Roma, and the reader has to be grateful to the author for this. The story itself is told with a lot of tempo and a feeling for dialogue, and even if not all characters are drawn without clichés, this story is definitely worth reading. It is also interesting that the author at least in passing mentions the fall in prices on the market for slaves; this is another parallel to slavery in the American South. Slavery disappeared in the end because it couldn’t survive in the changing economic and technical conditions.

The author, Matéo Maximoff, was born in Spain to a Kalderash Rom father from Russia – hence the Slavic family name – and a Manouche Sinto mother from France (she was a cousin of Django Reinhardt). At the age of eighteen or nineteen – his exact birthday is unknown – he moved to France with his family during the Spanish Civil War. Maximoff was the first one of his clan who had learned to read and write early on. While he was in prison – three people were killed in an argument within his clan, whereupon the police arrested indiscriminately everyone from his family – he began to write his first novel, which was later to be followed by ten more. After the end of World War II, Maximoff, who survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp himself but had lost many family members, began his successful career as the first Roma writer ever. Over several decades he was also an activist and fighter for the equality of his ethnic group in France. He also translated big parts of the Bible into the Kalderash Romanes language.

I read the book in the German translation that was published in 1955. It seems that none of his books are in print at this moment, neither in the French original, nor in English or German translation.

There is a very interesting award-winning Romanian film that also deals with Roma slavery: Aferim!. I can highly recommend the film; you can watch a trailer here.

Matéo Maximoff: Le prix de la liberté. Wallada, 1996; Der Preis der Freiheit. Morgarten Verlag Conzett & Huber, Zurich 1955 (tr. Bernhard Jolles)

© Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki, 2014-21. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Transylvanian Speaking Exercise

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Poetry is a genre that is rather neglected by the book blogging community. And I think that’s a real pity. Therefore I didn’t want to let this year’s edition of German Literature Month pass without including one or two posts about German-language poets.

One of the best German poetry books I picked up in the last years is the collection Transylvanian Speaking Exercise (Siebenbürgische Sprechübung) by Franz Hodjak. The book collects the best poems of several previous poetry books by him and includes also a few that were published in journals only. An instructive afterword by the poet and editor of the volume Werner Söllner gives additional valuable information on the author and his background.

Hodjak was born 1944 in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) in Romania and lived later for many years in Cluj (Klausenburg). Transylvania and the Banat are home to a German-speaking minority since hundreds of years; also a Hungarian minority lives there. The number of native German speakers is dwindling, migration to Germany has reduced the minority considerably in the last decades. Especially in the villages very few Germans have remained until today and it is not clear if this minority will survive as such the next generation, despite the fact that the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, is a prominent member of this ethnicity.

Romania has had a thriving German-language literary scene until recently; Herta Müller is the most prominent author among these, but there are plenty of other important writers. In Communist Romania there was a period from the mid 1960s to approximately the mid 1970s when Romanian literature written by ethnic Hungarians and Germans was promoted, and the censorship was for a few years relaxed to a certain extent. During this period, Franz Hodjak published his first poems and worked as an editor in a publishing house that would publish also Romanian-German literature. Hodjak, who publishes also prose, is additionally a congenial translator of Romanian literature. In 1992 he emigrated to Germany. He lives in Usingen near Frankfurt am Main.

Below you can read two of his poems in the original German and in my translation. Hodjak is an author whose work I like a lot and I am publishing this post in the hope to make a few more people aware of this poet who deserves to be read and also published in other languages. I would love to see a collection by him in English translation or any other language one day.

small elegy 

ignorant were even then 
those who went along. snow dug them in  
or a blooming torrent of words.  

the socks are hanging on the balcony, it 
is march. 

up in the cemetery,  
the blackbirds are conferring. 

is there a death that grants death   
a meaning? 

posterity beckons from the train. 


kleine elegie 

unwissend waren schon damals 
die, die mitgingen. schnee grub sie ein 
oder blühender wortschwall. 

die socken hängen auf dem balkon, es 
ist märz. 

oben, im friedhof, konferieren 
die amseln. 

gibt es einen tod, der dem tod  
sinn verleiht? 

die nachwelt winkt aus dem zug. 




Kelling 3

about ten die per year,
eleven wander off to the city,
twelve drive off to the brother.

the acacias, small and crippled, bloom
with the courage of despair.


Kelling 3 

zehn etwa sterben im jahr, 
elf wandern weg in die stadt, 
zwölf fahren zum bruder. 

die akazien, klein und verkrüppelt, blühn 
mit dem mut der verzweiflung.

(Kelling/Câlnic is a village near Alba Iulia.)

Franz Hodjak: Siebenbürgische Sprechübung, Suhrkamp 1990

© Franz Hodjak
© Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999
© Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki, 2014-9. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A menetekel

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One of the key messages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Two Hundred Years Together” is that the October Revolution, Bolshevism, and communist ideology in general are essentially Jewish “projects.” The intelligence apparatus, the systematic murder of regime opponents, the creation of the Gulag system in which millions of people were enslaved and murdered: it is mainly the Jews who are to blame. (He does not say it so flatly, but in the end this is what really matters to him). So whoever today is an anti-Semite, one could conclude by implication, only proves his anti-communism convincingly. And if there were acts of violence against Jews in Eastern Europe apart from the Nazi crimes, it was self-defense or revenge for communist injustice suffered, and in fact they meant only the Jewish political commissars … – this is how for example Paul Goma justifies today the murder of the Jews, committed by Romanians during WWII. And in Bulgaria, too, this form of anti-Semitism is a daily affair among staunch anti-communists. The more so today, where openly anti-Semitic political parties are in the government.

Therefore, when the Bulgarian writer Theodora Dimova publishes a strangely conspiratorial text in the otherwise respectable portal “Kultura”, a text that ostensibly commemorates the anniversary of the bombing of Sofia’s Sv. Nedelja Church in 1925, while emphasizing at the same time the struggle of the Bolsheviks against the Christian religion (which in the context of this terrorist act represents a falsification of history, since its motivation was quite different), this may at first sight seem a little outlandish. But the author, who often refers to “Christian values” in her public statements and laments the lack of a “spiritual elite” in Bulgaria, may be having in mind the approaching Orthodox Easter celebrations that coincide with the Jewish Passover feast this year?

What follows is a long-winded series of biblical quotations and hermeneutical remarks, all of which point to the continuity of the hatred of the enemies of Christ and Christianity – then as now: the Jews, as many readers who understand Dimova’s wink will surely say. They murdered Christ and they are behind Bolshevism, the ideology of the Anti-Christ. Dimova is too clever, she does not mention the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But the Jewish Passover feast and the invention of Jews abducting and slaughtering Christian children to drink their blood are well known to most Bulgarians, and the timing of the publication is obviously no coincidence. The Blood Libel, a ritual murder legend is believed by many people in Eastern Europe until today or at least found to be “interesting”. And there are also openly violent-pornographic anti-Semitic works, from Adolf Hitler to Henry Ford and Fred Leuchter, prominently placed and advertised in almost every bookstore in Bulgaria and sold by the tens of thousands. In such an environment, it is no longer necessary to be more explicit. Almost anyone who wants to understand the subtext understands it. One mentions the religious hostility of the (Jewish) Bolsheviks against Christianity, one speaks long and widely about the (Jewish) Christ murderers, quotes from biblical sources (thus unsuspiciously), and publishes everything a few days before Passover, the period when Jews are according to the Blood Libel looking for Christian children to sacrifice . The context is unambiguous: “We understand”.

Of course, all this is not conclusive proof of an intention. But the subtext is there. And the author is not naïve. However, anyone who babbles about “Christian values” and “spiritual elite” and then uses anti-Semitic clichés, only shows that he / she stands neither for these values, nor belongs to a spiritual elite, but to a dull mass of eternal-yesterday people.

The dilemma of the democratic right wing and conservatism in Bulgaria is that apart from militant verbal anti-communism, they have nothing to offer. There are no real values that they stand for and the ideology that they are shouting about and whose monuments they want to dispose of, is already dead (its enterprising heirs though are alive and kicking). There is a lack of a unifying, positive thought, a social vision. Moreover, there is no delimitation from the enemies of a democratic and pluralistic community from the extreme right. The tsarist and fascist dictatorship before the Communist takeover are being glorified, the main responsible for the murder of more than 11,000 Jews is counter-factually declared the “savior of the Bulgarian Jews”, General Lukov, a particularly close friend of the Gestapo and head of the Bulgarian legions is whitewashed into a hero and brave anticommunist, surviving members of these organizations who participated in crimes against humanity, are portrayed as great democrats and true patriots and given every podium (including the European Parliament) to spread their fake version of history to the applause of many Bulgarian intellectuals. The terrorist and anti-Semitic VMRO is today, only slightly revamped, a ruling party in Bulgaria. And so it goes on – the media and history books are now being “adapted” accordingly.

Today, Bulgaria is even further away than ever from making progress on the way to an open society. On the contrary, we are experiencing today the almost complete collapse of any intellectual honesty and decency. Bulgaria’s misery is not primarily due to the existence of corruption and organized crime, but to the indolence, cynicism and moral failure of a large part of the Bulgarian intelligentsia. The intellectually completely irrelevant article by T. Dimova is a menetekel.

28008677

Alexander Solschenizyn: Two Hundred Years Together, Herbig 2015

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-8. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Moldauisches Heft (1): Bücher und Menschen

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Bücher und Menschen

K. und ich sitzen dicht neben dem kleinen altertümlichen Ofen, der auf Hochtouren läuft, aber gerade nur so viel Wärme abgibt, dass man es eben noch so aushalten kann im winterlich kalten Studio des Malers und Dichters D. P. in Chisinau. Uns gegenüber sitzt D., der gerade in einen Katalog eines bulgarischen Malers vertieft ist, den er zu dessen Lebzeiten gekannt hat; zwischen uns ein Tisch auf dem sich Malutensilien, diverse Brillen, Medikamentenschachteln, ein Teller mit Früchten und drei noch halbvolle Gläser mit moldauischem Cognac ein Stelldichein geben. D. strahlt. Der Besuch und das Interesse an seinen Gemälden tun ihm gut und er blüht förmlich auf. Besonders gegenüber der jungen Frau zeigt er sich aufmerksam und charmant und ich wundere mich nicht, dass sehr viele seiner im Studio befindlichen Werke Porträts meist junger Frauen und Mädchen sind. Trotz seiner 74 Jahre flirtet er ein wenig mit K., die es mit gutem Humor aufnimmt. Zur aufgekratzten Stimmung trägt auch bei, dass ich ein Bild gekauft habe, ein stimmungsvolles, schön komponiertes Stillleben mit Früchten und einer Karaffe, welches mir sofort auffiel. D. hat große Probleme mit den Augen und der ausgemachte Kaufpreis hilft, die notwendige Operation zu bezahlen.

– ‚Ich komme aus einer Familie, in der es Bücher gab und in der gelesen wurde‘, sagt D. nachdem er den Katalog zur Seite gelegt hat. – ‚Das war ganz und gar nicht alltäglich in unserem Dorf im Budzhak, dem heute zur Ukraine gehörenden Teil Bessarabiens. Die Liebe zur bulgarischen Sprache habe ich von meiner Mutter, das Verständnis für den Reichtum der Muttersprache und dafür, dass Sprache mehr sein kann als nur ein bloßes Verständigungsmittel; das Wissen, dass man wirklich in der Sprache wohnen und zuhause sein kann habe ich von ihr. Die Liebe zu und der Respekt vor Büchern kommt dagegen vom Vater und Großvater. Zu Anfang des letzten Jahrhunderts hat Großvater angefangen, eine private Bibliothek zusammenzutragen. Darin gab es Bücher in verschiedenen Sprachen, Bulgarisch, Russisch, Rumänisch…viele davon müssen teuer gewesen sein; es waren aufwendig gedruckte und gebundene Bände darunter, viele mit Illustrationen. Er liebte besonders Werke zu religiösen Themen. Auch mein Vater kaufte später Bücher für diese private Bibliothek. Als dann die Rumänen kamen, füllte er eine große hölzerne Truhe mit Büchern in russischer Sprache, die er dann irgendwo vergrub. Wer russische Bücher im Haus hatte, galt den Rumänen als gefährlich, als Verräter, und hatte mit schweren Konsequenzen zu rechnen; mancher verlor sein Leben wegen ein paar russischer Erbauungsbücher im Haus. Später kamen dann die Russen zurück, und wieder wurde eine große hölzerne Truhe gefüllt, diesmal mit Büchern in rumänischer Sprache. Nun wurde nämlich jeder mit rumänischen Büchern im Haus als Verräter angesehen und schwer bestraft, in die Verbannung geschickt oder erschossen. Niemand weiß heute mehr, wo die Truhen vergraben sind; vielleicht hat jemand sein Haus dort gebaut, wo sie liegen, nicht ahnend, was für ein Schatz und was für eine Geschichte dort verborgen ist.‘

Über das Buchenland, die Bukowina, und seine Hauptstadt Czernowitz sagte Paul Celan, dass dort einst Bücher und Menschen lebten; doch dasselbe gilt wohl auch für das benachbarte, am gleichen Meridian gelegene Bessarabien.

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Roumanian Journey

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It always amazes me how little we “Westerners” usually know about the culture and the history of South-Eastern Europe. And I am saying this even after sixteen years of Balkan experience.

It is therefore always a pleasure to read well-written travel accounts by authors that have the necessary curiosity, education and ability to transfer their knowledge to us readers. A good example is Roumanian Journey by Sacheverell Sitwell (the younger brother of Edith Sitwell, and an early member in Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party before Mosley turned it into a fascist movement.).

The court ceremonial that Sitwell is describing is truly strange:

„As late as 1818, there is an account by an English traveller of an audience with the reigning prince, at Bucharest, in which he is described as being carried into the room, in the old traditional manner, supported by the arm of a servant under each of his shoulders, as though he were too important a personage to walk. These were the manners and customs of the old Turkish court, or even of the Court of Pekin. It was remarked, too, that the Phanariot princes had no standing army. This was not allowed them. Their state consisted in a multiplicity of servants, and in a few heyducks or Albanians gorgeously arrayed. I am even told, by Prince Matila Ghyka, that a Phanariot Prince, of the Mavrojeni family, made his official entry into Bucharest riding in a sledge drawn by a pair of stags with gilded antlers.”

A classical book – the first edition appeared in 1938 – that belongs in each library of anyone with an interest in South-East European history and culture; and for readers of travel books as well. The edition I read has a foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor, another expert on Romania. Travel literature at its best, until about ten pages to the end when the author is revealing his anti-Semitism.

If it was not for the more than doubtful remarks about the “Jewish problem” that made me cringe, this book would be one of the very best in this genre. As it is, it is still a great read – with the mentioned restriction.

Sacheverell Sitwell: Roumanian Journey, with an introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Oxford University Press, Oxford New York 1992

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Passport

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This review is part of the German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzie (Lizzies Literary Life) and Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat)

When in 2009 the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Prize for Literature to Herta Müller, whose opus magnum The Hunger Angel had just appeared in print, I thought that at least this one time the jurors in Stockholm had shown not only that they are able of a decent choice, but that sometimes they have even a sense of timing. Because The Hunger Angel marked the point when Herta Müller got also outside the German-speaking world the attention she deserves. Her first translated work available in English, The Passport, got some favorable reviews but was commercially not a big success.

Müller’s works – and The Passport is no exception – are almost exclusively set in Romania, the country in which she was born and grew up in a small German village (Nitzschkydorf) during the time of the more and more paranoid dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Although Romania didn’t adopt a policy of ethnic cleansing after WWII against the ethnic Germans living there since centuries like most other Eastern European countries did, the situation for the Banat Swabians (Donauschwaben) and the Saxons in Transsylvania (Siebenbürger Sachsen) was far from comfortable.

Most of them had embraced the Nazi ideology during the war, many enrolled in the SS, and the whole community had to pay a high price after the war for this act of treason as it was seen: a big part of the men and women from the German community were sent as slave workers to Siberia for five years and more. Many of them died there and those who survived came back considerably aged and without any hope or illusion for the future. In Siberia they had seen what they before refused to see: that people are able to do any act of cruelty or moral sordidness for a piece of bread.

This is the historical backdrop of The Passport, a very short book of only 100 pages, with chapters that are short or even very short. But this book is anything but a fast and easy read.

Windisch, the village miller, has decided to apply for a passport for himself and his family. The passport is necessary if you want to travel abroad or emigrate to (Western) Germany, as the Windischs plan. Windisch is already waiting more than two years and a half, but doesn’t seem to make any progress with his application, despite the fact that he is bribing the mayor with sacks full of flour. But the flour is not enough, the priest (he has to issue the birth certificates) and the militiaman (his support is crucial for receiving the passports) also need to be bribed.

When Windisch finally understands what these two men want, he is sending his daughter to them…After she sleeps with them, the passport will be finally arranged. In the last chapter we see the Windisch family coming for a visit to their home village after their emigration. While many other Germans emigrated too, a few, like Konrad the night watchman have not. Konrad has even married and intends to stay in Romania, despite all the problems.

Müller arranges her material in a very interesting way. The short chapters have sometimes the character of stand-alone short stories, sometimes they are like vignettes that allow the reader for a moment to catch a glimpse of something that he usually would not see.

One of the most remarkable things in Müller’s book is the language. Very simple and short compact sentences full of poetic, sometimes surrealistic metaphors. The German title would be literally translated “A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world”, obviously a local saying that is quoted in an early conversation between Windisch and Konrad by the latter. Windisch retorts that a man is strong, stronger as the beasts, but later after his daughter Amalie has slept with the village officials, he is repeating Konrad’s sentence as if to remind the reader that he was wrong and too optimistic about the strength of man.

The story of Windisch and his family is intervowen with other stories: the story of Rudi the glass maker who is not right in his head, and his parents; the story of Dieter, Amalie’s friend, who is shot dead while obviously attempting to cross the Danube to Yugoslavia; the story of Konrad, the night watchman; the story of the skinner and his wife; the story of the carpenter; and also stories that are told like anecdotes from the past: the story when the king passed by with his train before the war and the village couldn’t sing the welcome song because the king was asleep and his entourage insisted on not waking him up for some villagers; and there are even stories about the owl that was seen in the village and that the villagers consider as a sign for something to happen; and most disturbingly the story of the apple tree that was eating his own apples before the war and that had to be burned therefore to drive away all the evil.

There are signs of alienation everywhere. When Windisch passes the church, he wants to go inside to pray. But:

“The church door is locked. Saint Anthony is on the other side of the wall. He is carrying a white lily and a brown book. He is locked in.”

There is no hope to be expected in this world from the church, St. Anthony, or even God. Later in the book, when we learn about the disgusting priest, who uses his power position – without birth certificate no emigration – to extort sex from the women he fancies, we understand why.

There is alienation of course between the Romanians and the Germans; the Romanians are contemptuosly called “Wallachians” by the Germans and vice versa the Romanians wonder how, after Hitler, it is possible that there are still Germans in Romania. But it is not only for the Romanians that the Swabians feel contempt, the same goes for their feelings for the Germans in Western Germany, especially the women. “The worst Swabian woman is still better than the best over there.”

Children cannot escape this paranoid world of the village where the Securitate, the mighty intelligence network of the secret police is watching over everything. Amalie, who works as a schoolteacher, is instructing the kids:

“Amalie points on the map. “This land is our Fatherland”, she says. With her fingertip she searches for the black dots on the map. “These are the towns of the Fatherland,” says Amalie. “The towns are the rooms of the big house, our country. Our fathers and mothers live in houses. They are our parents. Every child has its parents. Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausecu is the father of all children. And Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of all children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.” ”

(It is rather embarrassing that The Times Literary Supplement (!) claims in its review: “Every such incidence of misdirection is the whole book in miniature, for although Ceausescu is never mentioned, he is central to the story, and cannot be forgotten.” – This happens when reviewers don’t read the book they are supposed to write about.)

Even worse is the alienation between men and women. Men use their position to get what they want from the women: sex. In Siberia, Amalie’s mother was a whore. She was selling her body for food and warm clothes in order to survive, and now Amalie is stepping in her mother’s shoes, spreading her legs for the priest and the militaman to get herself and her family out of this place where all the children love the parents of the country so much.

It is revealing that when she was a child and was almost raped by Rudi, her father was blaming her, not Rudi: “Amalie will bring disgrace down on us.” The conversation that the drunk Windisch, his wife and his daughter have over lunch after Amalie’s visit to the priest and the militiaman, is rather depressing, but it shows exactly how things are between men and women in this village, in this society:

“Windisch’s wife sucks the small, white bones. She swallows the short pieces of meat on the chicken’s neck. “Keep your eyes open, when you get married,” she says. “Drinking is a bad illness.” Amalie licks her red fingertips. “And unhealthy,” she says. Windisch looks at the dark spider. “Whoring is healthier,” he says. Windisch’s wife strikes the table with her hand.”

The Passport is a difficult, sometimes even depressing read. A paranoid system like Romania under Ceausescu is doing the things to people that Herta Müller is describing in this book. It is poisoning even the most private feelings, activities, relationships. It is easy to understand that the author’s honest, unvarnished description of German village life in the Banat didn’t bring her many friends in her own community. Until recently she was still the target of smear campaigns of former Securitate agents and Danube Swabians who want to paint a nicer picture of their own past – for whatever reasons.

If you look for an easy, fast, superficially enjoyable book – this one is not for you. But if you like to read a beautifully crafted, multi-layered book about the human condition in times like ours, I can heartily recommend The Passport to you. It is also a reminder that there is absolutely nothing to feel nostalgic about for any dictatorship like Ceausescu’s Romania was.

Herta Müller: The Passport, transl. by Martin Chalmers, Serpent’s Tail, London 1989

Other Reviews:
Winstonsdad’s Blog
Book Around The Corner
The Reading Life


© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.