Shock for Nobel literature winner: Mueller's hero was enemy spy

Sep 17, 2010, 12:06 GMT

Berlin - Herta Mueller, current holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was in shock after the revelation that the real-life hero of her latest anti-totalitarian novel - and a close friend of hers - had been a communist spy, she said Friday.

Romanian-born Mueller, who lives in Berlin, received the prize last December for her chilling books about the cruelty of communism and her own persecution by Romania's Securitate secret police.

Last year, she published a novel, entitled Atemschaukel (rocking of breath) in German, about a homosexual Romanian who is locked up by the Soviets in a Ukrainian gulag where many people starve to death.

Her close friend, Oskar Pastior, helped her till his sudden death in 2006 to write it. It was based on his true story.

On Thursday, a literary scholar revealed that Pastior, an ethnic German like Mueller, had been a traitor.

Using the code name 'Otto Stein,' he worked as an informer from 1961 to 1968 for the Securitate, documents in Bucharest show.

Stefan Sienerth, the scholar, disclosed Pastior's involvement in the literary quarterly Spiegelungen, publishing the June 8, 1961 document signed by Pastior in which he agrees to pass on information about his friends and associates to the secret police.

The document offered rehabilitation to Pastior, who had married and become a radio reporter after release from the gulag. The spying ended when he was allowed through the Iron Curtain to live in the West.

The German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine quoted Mueller on Friday saying that she had learned of the document's discovery several weeks ago, and 'felt both horror and rage.'

'It was like being slapped in the face,' she said.

Mueller said she had since progressed to a state of mourning.

Over the years the writer has clashed with Romania's post-communist intellectuals with her remorseless campaign against former Securitate informers, demanding that writers and theatre people who were on the police payroll be unmasked and punished.