The publication of Herta Müller's Niederungen by the West Berlin publisher Rotbuch in 1984 was a literary coming-of-age of sorts. It moved the spotlight away from her writer friends—some former AGB members— and onto her as one of the most talented new German-language writers. Yet Müller's initial reaction at the prospect of her book being republished in West Germany was curiously not one of joy and elation but rather one of anxiety, as she recalled in Apfelkern in 2014. If Müller had indeed unsettling premonitions that the Romanian authorities and more generally East-West Cold War politics would interfere, she soon realized that her fears had become a reality. The Timiş Securitate would come to use its entire arsenal to surveil Müller: Unit S (correspondence interception), T.O., Service I (internal affairs), Service III (counterespionage), and its loyal source network. Informers diligently recorded every stage of Müller's surveillance, while officers filed the incriminatory documents along with their own comments and analysis reports in her dossier.

This chapter tells the recorded story of Niederungen—a manuscript that traveled from Timişoara, Romania, to West Berlin in the summer of 1983, was edited and proofread at a clandestine meeting with a Rotbuch editor at the Romanian ski resort Poiana Braşov in January 1984, and attracted the attention of a West German television crew who tried but failed to reach Müller in Timişoara in August 1984. Most of the short stories included in the Rotbuch edition of Niederungen had first been published in the Romanian Germanlanguage literary journal Neue Literatur (NL) between 1979 and 1981, and then in a volume at Kriterion in Bucharest in 1982. The version that eventually appeared with Rotbuch in 1984 omitted some of the stories from the Kriterion edition, and included others from Müller's second book, published in Romania, Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango, 1984). A section in this chapter offers a close examination of the changes that occurred from the original NL version to the West German edition of the Niederungen short stories and puts to rest persistent allegations of extensive political censorship. The last part of the chapter examines the Western reviews filed as original or translated copies in Müller's Securitate dossier. As this part illustrates, the Securitate officers treated both the positive and negative reviews as pieces of intelligence with operational potential, and analyzed them for their hostile content, which could damage the image of communist Romania abroad.