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Nobel laureate Herta Müller has on several occasions publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime. Talking to the publisher and philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu in Bucharest in October 2010, the Romanian-German novelist and defended her often unpopular view that the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance.
"Don't you think that every book -- a clean, good, wonderful book -- born during those times was a way of saying 'no' to the world in which we lived?" asks Liiceanu. "No", replies Müller, "it was a way of evading it. [...] The fact that those people did not sully themselves was a personal matter. But it was not something that was going to bother Ceausescu and the Securitate, which was everywhere. I don't think the dictatorship would have been able to become as sinister as it did had many opposed it."
Müller, who was forced to emigrate to West Germany in 1987, is no less critical of the dishonesty of western intellectuals: "In the West, in general, there is this belief that [...] if you have talked long and profoundly enough then you can clarify everything and find harmony. This isn't true. [...] But it doesn't all depend on whether somebody has known dictatorship or not in his or her own lifetime. There are people who have not experienced dictatorship but are interested in this problem and understand it. Equally, there are people who have lived through dictatorship and don't understand a thing."
Gabriel Liiceanu, Herta Müller
When personal integrity is not enough
Herta Müller and Gabriel Liiceanu discuss language and dissidence
This article is available in English and Romanian
>> /English/
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-05-26-mullerliiceanu-en.html
