Twenty years ago, when the world changed decisively for the first time since Churchill’s Fulton (“Iron Curtain”) speech in 1946 or Berlin’s fall to the Red Army in 1945, we were not reading Herta Mueller. Nor does she challenge the Philip Roths on our shelves now. But earlier this year, Mueller told a Romanian newspaper:

“I didn’t choose what to write. It chose me.” What chose her and innumerable other writers — some of the best of them anthologised in Roth’s seminal, pioneering Writers from the Other Europe series — was the political, personal and intellectual warp that had trapped East Europeans till 1989. Learning about the Nobel award, Mueller remarked: “My writing always had to do with how... a handful of powerful people could steal the country. Where do they get that right?”

That “right” is the product of power, authority and ideology drunk on the utopian dream of building a paradise, and building a hell instead. The sounds and images of 1989 — the Autumn of Nations — have persisted. But what did the power that Mueller mentions do to people like her? Why did the experience of writers in these police states encapsulate and magnify the spiritual, cultural and political death-in-life of their compatriots?

If they were silenced or driven underground, writers behind the Iron Curtain bore the consequences of speaking out. Paradoxically, if they were not collaborationists, they could still invest freely in writing. And they captured, created and smuggled out (the last if they could not, or did not, emigrate) pictures of the post-Nazi totalitarian state; they enlightened and politically stimulated select compatriots through samizdat editions. But if Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was a workers’ movement in Poland or East Germany’s New Forum was led by civil society, erstwhile Czechoslovakia’s first post-

... contd.