Dar Spiegel on Herta Mueller

"Authors like Herta Müller are patriots of an estranged homeland. The literature of the last 20 years suggests that hardly anyone who has stayed home can write about the rule of violence and the silencing of the victims as effectively.

With each of her books, Herta Müller fights against forgetting, against the frenzy of concealment and trivialization which has prevailed in Eastern Europe since 1989 and which seeks to pass off one of the worst periods of degradation and destruction of the individual as a regulated normality. (Unfortunately, this is an attitude that has also taken hold in the so-called "West," as could be seen in the completely uncritical reception to the recent election of communist apparatchik Irina Bokowa to the post of UNESCO director-general.)"