Herta Mueller, Nobel Prize in Literature

The profile of the Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in a family of ethnic Germans, she was both critical against the Ceausescu regime and other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, including the former East German writers who collaborated with the secret police. While she was not extensively published and discussed as an author in her home country- mostly through her positions against members of the cultural and political establishment - in Germany she is well known and appreciated and her works are translated in at least 20 languages. Probably now she will benefit of extensive laudatio and impressive articles.

Camus on the writer's mission

In 1957, Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his banquet speech he outlined the difficult mission of the writer, as a balance between a self-imposed exile, a necessary solitude for creation, and an emergency to get involved, by the power of his words, on the part of those suffering of misery or of lack of freedom.
The larger context of his speech is the definitive deterioration of his friendship with J.P.Sartre. It started first with Camus’ resistance to all forms of totalitarianism – he fought Nazism and flatly opposed Marxism. Sartre’s choice, after the public denunciations of Soviet camps was silence. A war of words between the two, started by a book of essays of Camus, attacked in Sartre’s review “Les Temps Modernes” ended with a long letter of Sartre whose beginning was: ''My dear Camus, our friendship was not easy, but I shall miss it.''
The public dispute between the two continued during the war in Algeria, whose independence never been accepted by Camus. He rejected the violence of the FLN , even supporting the Muslim rights. At the end, he preferred the public silence.