nestbeschmutzer
I've begun reading the work of Herta Müller, Romanian-born German author and recent Nobel Prize winner. She's known for her rather bleak stories about growing up in a small town under Ceauşescu. One short work, "Christina und ihre Attrappe" (Christina and her Dummy), recently published, describes her experiences in Romania after having refused to work for the Securitate police. It's a powerfully sparse account of how truth is manipulated. It's all the more chilling in the ways the manipulations live on -- on visits to Romania these days, she still gets surveilled; members of German-Romanian heritage associations (because of her bleak stories about her small town) paint her as the Securitate agent she never was (though many of them _were_); while she says her official file as a dissident, where she's given the name "Christina," is skimpy (nowadays), there appears to be another set of stuff created by the Securitate's Disinformation section and used to discredit her in other dissidents' eyes. Years after their creators went to ground, this identify theft and manipulation is still active; her "dummy" is still _stumbling about_ ("irrlichtern" is her word). There is only her testimony concerning what doesn't appear in "Christina's" file to fight the accusations that might be backed up by the "Dummy's" file -- personal versus official memory.
The word that got me was "Nestbeschmutzer," "spoiler of one's nest." The heritage associations described her as this. It's a word that raises my hackles, as the last time I encountered it in literature, it was in the context of the critiquing of German folklore during the 1960s. While folklore as a field of study is often traced to Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm and their collection of tales, first published in 1812, it was not founded as an academic discipline in Germany until 1933, with Nazi support. In the 1960s, younger German folklorists called on their professors to account for themselves and for the discipline's Nazi heritage. They were called "Nestbeschmutzer" by the defenders of the older order. It seems to be used whenever one's own past actions, or those of the community, are called into question by others of the community who seek clarity and honesty. "But you make us look bad; therefore you are the enemy." Not only an enemy, but a worse enemy than we might have been.
We might call them "whistle-blowers" here. I'm on their side.
Books to read:
Nadirs (Herta Müller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. SBN 978-0-8032-8254-4).
The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (James R Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-253-31821-1).
The Heritage (Siegfried Lenz. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ISBN 9783455042221)
BTW Herta Müller is on Facebook, if you want to "friend" a Nobel Prize winner.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Herta-Muller/154686566721
The word that got me was "Nestbeschmutzer," "spoiler of one's nest." The heritage associations described her as this. It's a word that raises my hackles, as the last time I encountered it in literature, it was in the context of the critiquing of German folklore during the 1960s. While folklore as a field of study is often traced to Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm and their collection of tales, first published in 1812, it was not founded as an academic discipline in Germany until 1933, with Nazi support. In the 1960s, younger German folklorists called on their professors to account for themselves and for the discipline's Nazi heritage. They were called "Nestbeschmutzer" by the defenders of the older order. It seems to be used whenever one's own past actions, or those of the community, are called into question by others of the community who seek clarity and honesty. "But you make us look bad; therefore you are the enemy." Not only an enemy, but a worse enemy than we might have been.
We might call them "whistle-blowers" here. I'm on their side.
Books to read:
Nadirs (Herta Müller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. SBN 978-0-8032-8254-4).
The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (James R Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-253-31821-1).
The Heritage (Siegfried Lenz. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ISBN 9783455042221)
BTW Herta Müller is on Facebook, if you want to "friend" a Nobel Prize winner.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Herta-Muller/154686566721