[the English-language edition, The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A “File Story” of Cold War Surveillance, was awarded the 2025 George Blazyca Prizeof the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies]
This book is an in-depth investigation of Müller’s file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Müller’s surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.
(From Boydell and Brewer’s webpage)
What people say about it:
“The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller shows in fine detail how the Securitate infiltrated the lives of so many people. SECU included SECU officers, SECU informers, SECU translators, and SECU targets, or ‘privileged targets,’ who were able to travel abroad, bring back books published in the West, meet with foreigners, publish their books in the West, earn royalties in foreign currency – in part because of their willingness to cooperate with SECU. Were they just another version of the “sources” who informed on them? The ambiguity of the relationships of those caught up in the SECU network is striking. It was a slippery slope on which even Müller and her husband, the writer Richard Wagner found themselves for a while.” (Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh)
“The book illuminates the Romanian surveillance apparatus, revealing how targets, informers, and bystanders came to be (voluntarily or not) entangled with the Securitate, and also throws light on the complex lives of the German ethnic minority in communist Romania. The richness and interdisciplinary character of Glajar’s work make it equally appealing to surveillance studies scholars, Cold War historians, and Romanian and German studies specialists. Moreover, Glajar’s monograph stands out through its engaging tone, clear prose, and well-devised narrative arc. The reader often feels they are following a gripping story in which incisive, well-balanced analyses are combined with exciting details about twists and turns in the Securitate’s moves and Müller’s and the informers’ lives and decisions. To sum up, Glajar’s solid academic endeavor is an exciting read for both scholarly audiences and the general public.” (Ioana Luca, National Taiwan Normal University, in Journal of Romanian Studies)
“A Securitate file is a strange document, part fact, part malevolent ideological fiction, and as full of holes as a sieve. It reveals as much, if not more, about its creators and the system they served as it does about the man or woman unlucky enough to be its subject. Contextualizing and making sense of it is no easy task. Glajar embeds her research within the wider context of postcommunism while also bringing out the country-specific features of Müller’s file story.“ (Brigid Haines, Swansea University, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies)
“Readers of this engaging, clear, and precise scholarly monograph will be left with several insights that open unique and previously unconsidered perspectives on Müller’s work and in the Müller scholarship. […] the book represents a paradigm shift in the scholarship on Herta Müller in that, rather than reading the secret police files as a lens through which to analyze Müller’s texts, it reads the surveillance files as “file stories.” Scholars of Müller’s work, students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and general audiences interested in memory studies, reading and uncoding archived Cold War surveillance files, and Cold War surveillance tactics in the communist Romanian context, will find a treasure trove in this monograph.” (Maria S. Greve, City University of New York, in Gegenwartsliteratur)
„This book has all the earmarks of a police procedural or whodunit. Reading it, one feels that one is in the midst of a film about the secret police on the order of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 Das Leben der Anderen. Whereas von Donnersmarck’s film is entirely fictional, however, Glajar’s book is based on all-too-bitter reality: the actual secret police dossier put together in the 1980s by the Romanian Securitate on Herta Müller, the most celebrated of her generation of Romanian-German writers.“ (Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, in Monatshefte)
„Overall, this is both a gripping account of surveillance and a model for how to build accessible and insightful analysis out of secret police archives. Glajar makes a sprawling and obscure written record graspable and interesting to her reader without accepting it at face value, and has therefore produced a study that will have an appeal far beyond the academic community interested in Müller.
However, it is the implicit evaluation of Müller’s honesty that forms the red thread in this book, and that is likely to attract the most attention.“ (Jenny Watson, University of Edinburgh, in Oxford German Studies)
You can listen to interviews with the author here (in English) and here (in Romanian).
You can read a preview of the book here.
You can buy the book here.
About the author:
Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University.
You can find more information about Valentina Glajar here.