COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

Friedrich Müller (also known as Friedrich Müller-Langenthal) was bishop of the Evangelical Church of Augustan Confession of Romania during the period 1945–1969. He was known as an uncomfortable ecclesiastical personality for the communist regime; this is why the Securitate attempted, unsuccessfully, to eliminate him in the 1950s. Bishop Müller was one of the bishops who opposed the limitations imposed by the communist regime on the practice of catechisation of children and young people for their religious confirmation. He is the author of many documents in the High Consistory Collection which illustrate this opposition.
Friedrich Müller was born on 28 October 1884 in Valea Albă/Lagenthal (now in Alba county, Romania) in a peasant family and, because his parents died when he was very young, he was brought up by richer relatives. After finishing high school in Sibiu, he studied physics, geography, and theology, and then history, geography, and theology at the universities of Leipzig, Cluj, Vienna, and Berlin (1903–1909). Given his complex intellectual background, the High Consistory made him counsellor for denominational schools in the interval 1922–1928. In 1932, he failed to occupy the position of bishop. However, the same year he became episcopal vicar. Between 1940 and 1944, the Evangelical Church A.C. of Romania came under the control of the local Nazi movement. In this context, in November 1940, Müller opposed the taking-over of denominational schools by the German Ethnic Group in Romania, an organisation controlled by the local Nazis, which managed every aspect in the life of Germans living in Romania (Traşcă 2011, 324). Prior to this moment, however, Müller had displayed no anti-Nazi attitudes in the community. On the contrary, he made a few pro-Nazi public statements in the  late 1930s. After 23 August 1944, when Romania joined the Allies in World War II, the pro-Nazi bishop Wilhelm Staedel was demoted. The episcopacy became a source of conflict between the former Bishop Viktor Glondys, forcefully removed by the Nazis, and Friedrich Müller, who argued in support of new choices. Müller was elected bishop in April 1945 following the church elections. At this moment the situation of the Evangelical Church A.C., and indeed that of Transylvanian Saxons in general, was very difficult. According to a report of the High Consistory, there were 229 active ministers in 1943, but the number had dropped to 122 ministers by 1945 (Müller 1995, 21). The deportation of ministers to the USSR and the arrests carried out by the Securitate were the main causes for this decline. The deportation of the adult Saxon population from Transylvania to the USSR and the confiscation of their property led to the massive poverty of church parishes. Despite this difficult situation, the church’s authority increased as it was the only institution of importance for the Transylvanian Saxons which had not been suppressed in the period 1944–1945.
Friedrich Müller proved to be an uneasy bishop for the new political regime due to his opposition to the interferences of the state authorities in the domestic affairs of the church. For example, in the period 1949–1951 he tried to prevent the election of pro-communist members to the High Consitory or to local presbyteries. As Leslie László has observed in the case of Hungary, the Presbyterian system of the Protestant churches, allowing a “greater lay representation” in their elected assemblies, represented a favorable institutional context for the infiltration of these synods by the secret police (László 1989, 144). This is why in 1952 the Securitate planned his removal from the episcopal chair in order to promote a more servile minister. Although the plan was prepared in detail and sent for approval to the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Securitate did not receive a positive answer to its request. A plausible explanation for this decision is the good personal relations that Friedrich Müller had with Petru Groza, the prime minister of the communist-dominated government. In spite of these attempts by the Securitate, Bishop Müller managed to maintain a dominant position within the High Consistory until the 1960s. Although he tried to stop the interference of state institutions in the internal affairs of the church, Bishop Müller proved concessive in other issues and supported some policies of the communist regime such as the collectivisation of agriculture. The most intense conflict between the Evanghelical Church A.C. and the communist authorities was caused by the opposition of the church leadership to the banning of the confirmation classes by which ministers prepared children and young people for religious confirmation. Taking into account that the communist state and the Evangelical Church A.C. tried to find a modus vivendi during the episcopacy of Friedrich Müller (1945–1969), this relationship could be labelled as “accommodative” in Sabrina P. Ramet`s classification, in which, the “accommodative mode” of state-church relations in the Soviet Bloc “involves compromise on both sides – sometimes mostly on the Church’s side” (Ramet 1991, 83).

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet, and essayist and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born on 17 August 1953 in Nițchidorf, Timiș County in Romania in a traditional Swabian family. Her father joined the Waffen SS during World War II and her mother was among the German ethnics who were deported from Romania to the Soviet Union in 1945 and released five years later. Herta Müller graduated in German studies and Romanian literature from the Western University of Timișoara and was hired as a translator in 1976 in an engineering factory in Timișoara. Because she refused to become its informer in 1979, the Romanian secret police began harassing her and soon after this she was unemployed and with slim chances of finding work as the Securitate warned prospective employers about her “hostile” activities against the communist regime. Moreover, this harassment by the Securitate and the subsequent social marginalisation coincided with the death of her father. As Herta Müller has mentioned on several occasions, she began to write as way to escape the problems in her life and to find a support that she could hold on to. She joined the former members of the suppressed nonconformist literary circle Aktionsgruppe Banat, and their support and friendship helped her to resist the harassment of the Securitate and continue writing. In 1982 her first book, Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania at the Kriterion publishing house. Apart from outlining the moral and cultural decay of the German communities, her book also painted an unflattering image of the communist system and of life in the countryside that contrasted greatly with the official view, which insisted on the beneficial changes brought by socialism in rural areas. One year after the publication of Müller’s book, the communist authorities ordered that she be put under informative surveillance. The surveillance intensified as she managed to have Niederungen (Nadirs) published by a Western publishing house. Consequently, the Securitate began to see Herta Müller as a person conducting “hostile” actions “against socialist order,” as it feared that her criticism of the regime could cause a deterioration of the image of Romania in the Western world. Despite the enthusiastic reception of her first book abroad, Müller continued to be harassed by the Securitate and lost her position. Moreover, her officially approved journeys to West Germany to receive a literary award and participate in book fairs became part of the Securitate’s plans to “annihilate her influence inside and outside the country” as it launched the rumour that she was its agent and that it was for this reason that she was allowed to travel to the West. To the dismay of her acquaintances and of the Securitate, Müller chose to return to Romania after each of her trips abroad and continued to publish her short stories in the Romanian German-language press, bringing out another book, Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango), at the same Kriterion publishing house in 1984. In September 1985 Herta Müller, together with other German writers, signed a collective memorandum addressed to the local Party secretary in which they denounced the lack of artistic liberty and the involvement of the Securitate in curtailing their freedom of speech and hindering their artistic initiatives. This episode only managed to anger the Securitate and as a result she again lost her position. Moreover, Müller ran out of money as the revenues from the German edition of Niederungen (Nadirs) went to the official body of Romanian writers. After a year and half during which the Securitate continued to harass her, Herta Müller and her husband Richard Wagner were allowed to emigrate in 1987. They settled in West Berlin, where she continued to write about her experience and life in communist Romania. Her novel Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was Ever the Hunter) published in 1986 captures the distress, angst and humiliation experience by the main character, whose private life is the object of constant intrusion by the secret police, whose officials cut a piece from a fox fur every time they search the house. In the novel Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment), she describes the anxiety and the struggle to maintain mental balance of a young girl who is periodically summoned to the secret police. In October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced its decision to award that year's Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed. ”

Ladislav Mňačko was a Slovak writer, poet, playwright and journalist. He was born in Moravia but soon moved with his parents to Slovakia. He was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during the Second World War but managed to escape and later participated in partisan raids against Germans in Moravia. After the war, he became an editor for the Communist newspaper Rudé právo and later for the Slovak Pravda. Mňačko was left-wing oriented and became a convinced Communist after the Second World War, but he was not afraid to express his concerns about politics in Czechoslovakia. Therefore, he became known as a prominent critic of the regime after 1956 and his books, which were popular with Communist functionaries and the public alike, had print runs in their hundreds of thousands. Mňačko’s unique position was described by Frank Osvald, a Danish Czech studies scholar, who saw Mňačko as being “a devoted, loyal Communist and a stubborn searcher for truth and passionate (more than deep) moralist at the same time”. Mňačko emigrated to Israel in 1967 – his emigration was in protest against the antisemitic policies of the Czechoslovak government. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968, but following the occupation by the armies of the Warsaw Pact in August he left Czechoslovakia for Austria. After 1990, Mňačko lived in Slovakia and later also in Prague. Ladislav Mňačko is now seen as one of the most important Slovak journalists and political writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Among his most well-known books are his partisan and autobiographical novel Smrt si říká Engelchen (Death is Called Engelchen, 1959), a collection of short proses exposing the political terror of the 1950s Opožděné reportáže (Delayed Reportages, 1963) and in particular the book Jak chutná moc (The Taste of Power, 1967) describing the practices of Communist functionaries. He was also the author of many short stories, plays and reports. His books have been translated into several languages.