When Gabriela Adameşteanu witnessed the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania at the end of 1989, she was forty-seven years old - and a writer who had managed to publish two novels under the dictator, none of which could understand how they could get through the censorship.
In 1975 it was “The same way every day”, the story of Letitia Branea, a young woman from the provinces who was born during the Second World War from a family that was dubious under the communist regime and who has great difficulties in fulfilling her dream to come to Bucharest.
Andreas Platthaus
Editor in charge of literature and literary life.
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The autobiographical references were just as clear as the socio-political, but Letitia's fate in the novel was the result of the behavior of her relatives in the decades before Ceauşescu's accession to power in 1965, so that the protagonist's cultural career, which then opened up through protection and adaptation, was the result of the new era What could be understood: under the new party leader, so the propaganda wanted, old mistakes were revised and everyone got their chance.
Gabriela Adameşteanu turned this political myth into an oppressive private drama that was washed with all the waters of Western, especially French, literary psychology - from Gustave Flaubert to Marguerite Duras.
The will to literature
In 1983 Adameşteanu published “Lost Morning”, a large panopticon of Romanian history of the twentieth century as reflected in a bourgeois family. That was now trained in claim and style, recognizable by Proust, and in terms of content even more daring than “The same path every day”, because the roots of totalitarianism were revealed here. But this book was also able to appear, and in retrospect Gabriela Adameşteanu attributes it to the fact that she was never a heroine and therefore did not attract attention. But that is true at most for the years up to 1989. After that she was vehemently committed to the political new beginning, co-founded civil rights magazine 22 and worked there as a journalist for thirteen years. With that, however, the time of the writer Adameşteanu seemed to be over.
But when she got a look at the Securitate files in 2003, the will to literature came back - some things can only be endured and processed under the protection of fictionalization. First of all, she revisited a novel project that had been started under the communist regime: “Encounter”, the story of the short-term return of an exiled architectural historian. In return, the story of her own uncle Dinu Adameşteanu provided the foil, and in retrospect she saw working on the book as a “laboratory of censorship and self-censorship,” as Gabriela Adameşteanu called it in an interview with this newspaper. After that she knew that she could still write fiction and talk about things that were too private for her as a journalist, but still of the greatest significance for understanding a (survival) life in a dictatorship.Especially of your own. And so she came back to Letitia Branea for the next novel after forty years, her alter ego from “The same way every day”. She is now also the protagonist of the novel “Das Temporaryium der Liebe”, which has just been published in German.