Herta Müller:
[E]verything each one of us does we do differently, because we have no other option. You can test that with writers because their job is to write things down – and this is something you can see for yourself and discuss. In the case of other people, things and ideas do not get expressed on the outside so we can't see them. That's the difference. I have met so many sensitive people in all walks of life, doing all sorts of jobs, and I have never thought that I am capable of seeing something which these people who do not write cannot.
.....
I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. I do not understand. That is why I write, because I do not understand.... Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think "I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave." I haven't a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don't even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania [during the Ceausescu regime], if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn't get my head round it. I couldn't even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn't think. I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching.... We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn't understand a thing. That's why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.
via www.eurozine.com
A very interesting interview with Herta Müller the novelist and Nobel laureate. She has publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime; she defends her stance that, as adeptly summarized by Eurozine, "the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance."
Hat-tip with a flourish to 3quarksdaily.
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