Melville House Books

Herta Müller

“A former member of the Romanian secret police has launched a blistering attack on the Nobel prize winning writer Herta Müller,” says a Guardian report by Kate Connolly. According to the report, in the latest round of attacks in her homeland on Müller’s reputation since she won the Nobel Prize, “Radu Tinu, who has admitted to spying on Müller as head of the secret police (or Securitate) in the Romanian city of Timisoara, where the Romanian-born German-speaking writer lived until 1987,” says Müller “has a psychosis, and has no contact with external reality. She wasn’t interrogated nearly as often as she has claimed.” He also admitted installing a “bugging system” in her home.

Müller has written extensively about the “psychological terror” she was subjected to by the Securitate, and the Guardian report notes that “Much of her maltreatment is documented in her Securitate file, which runs to 914 pages.”