 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Herta Müller (b. 1953) |
|
Romanian-born German novelist, essayist, and poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Much of Herta Müller's fiction, written in poetic, metaphorical style, draws on her experience of growing up and living in the bleak atmosphere of a totalitarian state, in this case, in Ceausescu's Romania. "And then I have the feeling that whenever someone dies he leaves behind a sack of words. And barbers, and nail-clippers—I always think of them, too, since the dead no longer need them. And they don't ever lose buttons either." (from The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller, translated by Michael Hofmann, 1994, p. 1) Herta Müller was born to a German family, in Nitzkydorf, a
village
in the Banat, where as it was said – with exaggeration – that the only
ethnic Romanian in the village was the policeman. (In 1941, only a
third of the 3000 villagers spoke Romanian.) During World War II, when
the country was occupied by Germany, Müller's father served in the
Waffen SS. After the war he worked as a truck driver. Müller's mother,
Catarina, was deported to a work-camp in the Soviet Union for five
years. Her marriage was a result of a necessity. "Ohne den Krieg hätte
ich deinen Vater nie geheiratet," she later confessed to her daughter. (The German Legacy in East
Central Europe: As Recorded in Recent German-Language Literature
by Valentina Glajar, 2004, p. 156) She never broke her silence on her experiences at the camp. Müller studied German and Romanian in the university in
Timosoara.
She has said that "the Romanian language related to me like a change in
my pockets. When I saw something I liked in a window, I suddenly
realised I didn't have money for it." ('Uncomfortable
spaces: language and identity in Herta Müller’s work' by Doris
Mironescu, in Wold Literature
Studies 7, no. 2, 2015, p. 62) While at the university,
Müller became acquainted with the
Aktionsgruppe Banat, made up of young writers of German language, among
them Richard Wagner, who was also a member of the Communist party. The
group was accused of plotting against the regime and one of its
members, William Totok, was sent to prison. Officially the group was
banned after 1975, but it had an important role in the development of
opposition against the totalitarian nationalist-communist system. Romanians had the lowest standard of living in Europe. Müller began writing after her father died. She has said that she had to turn back and reflect back upon her childhood, her parents, and her village. From 1977 to 1979, Müller was employed as a translator at the tractor factory Tehnometal, translating manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. Due to her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police, and serve as an informant, Müller was dismissed. A file was opened on her, and eventually it consisted of three volumes and 914 pages. To support herself, Müller worked as a teacher in a kindergarten and gave private German lessons. Labelled as a "parasitic element" (like Joseph
Brodsky in the 1960s
in Leningrad), Müller became the target of repeated threats. She
recalled in an article, published in Die Zeit (July 2009)
about her long-lasting harassment by
the secret police. Once her interrogator accused her of having sex with
Arab students in exchange for
Western tights and cosmetics. "When I said I didn't know a single Arab
student, he replied: 'If we want to, then you know twenty. You'll see,
it will be an interesting trial.' He stressed the fact that they were
Arabs because in his opinion that was the filthiest thing for a woman.
Romanians would have sufficed to make an arrest." ('Freedom
I Something Some People Fear and Other's Don't' by Herta Müller, in European Angst: A Conference on Populism,
Extremism and Euroscepticism in Contemporary European Societies,
2018, p. 56) Müller finished in 1979 the manuscript for Nadirs (Niederungen), consisting of fourteen prose miniatures and the long title story, but it took three years before the work appeared, in mutilated form. When the uncensored version was smuggled to Germany and published there by Rotbuch-Verlag in 1984 with critical acclaim, Müller was not allowed to travel. After the permission was granted, the secret service created a smear campaign against her, spreading a rumor that she was, in fact, an agent for the Securitate. Müller was also forbidden to publish in Romania. In 1987 Müller succeeded in emigrating to Germany with Richard Wagner, who was her husband at the time. Ceausescu's regime was overthrown in 1989 and the dictator himself was hastily tried and executed with his wife. Müller has, however, argued, that she was still under observation when she visited Romania twenty years later. The community of Banat, with its traditional gender roles and
old-fashioned values, has fuctioned as a microcosmos of the whole
repressive society in Müller's early fiction. Noteworthy, Müller has
refused to be classed as a feminist writer, stating in an interview:
"Ich bin keine Feministin. Ich bin vielleicht eine Individualistin und
ich bin eine Frau." (Herta
Müller-Handbuch, edited by Norbert Otto Eke, 2017, p. 206)
The dark and coldly intense Niederungen portrayed a dying
Banat-Swabian village from the point of view of a child. In this work
Müller used the image of the croaking frog as a metaphor for the German
minority: "Everybody brought a frog along when they immigrated." The
Land of Green Plums (1994), written after the
death of Müller's two
friends in suspicious circumstances, was about a group of young people,
whose friendship is destroyd by the deleterious effects of a
totalitarian society. "The words in our mouths do as much damage as our
feet on the grass. But so do out silences," says one of the characters.
(Ibid., translated by Michael Hofmann, New York: Picador, 2010, p. 1) Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger
(1992) depicted life in provincial Romania during the late 1980s. As in her other stories, Müller is concerned in The Appointment (1997) more with the private world of an isolated individual than the collective experience in Ceausescu's reign of terror. During a tram ride the thoughts of the narrator, a young factory worker summoned to interrogation, turn and twist as unexpectedly as the sudden twists and turns of the tram. Like Müller, she has lost her job and is threatened. To get out of the country, she has sewn desperate messages into the linings of jackets bound for Italy, saying "Marry me", with her name and address. Traveling on One Leg (1989) presented the problems of adjustment of Irene, a 30-year old Romanian-German immigrant, who is drawn into intimate relationships with three men. "The action in this volume may be slight, but Irene's innermost consciousness -- where the political has indeed become the personal -- is magnificently portrayed." (William Ferguson, The New York Times, February 21, 1999) In his own works Richard Wagner has also written about his departure from Romania and arrival in the West in the stories Ausreiseantrag (1988) and Begrüßungsgeld (1989). Both feature the same characters, the disillusioned journalist called Stirner, and his German-teacher-wife. Müller has published lectures on writing, entitled Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (1991), journalistic pieces (Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett, 1992), essays (Hunger und Seide, 1995), the experimental Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm: Vom Weggehen und Ausscheren (1993), which played with the juxtaposition of text and illustration, and the collage poem, Este sau nu este Ion (2005). Atemschaukel (2009, The Hunger Angel) was based on the experiences of Müller's friend, the late Romanian-German poet Oskar Pastior, who died in 2006. They went together to Ukraine in 2004, to conduct research for the book. The camp was in Donbas. Narrated in the first person, the novel tells about the experiences of a young homosexual man, Leopold Auberg, who is deported to a labour camp in Ukraine. The novel was translated into Ukrainian in 2011. Besides the Nobel Prize, Müller has won numerous other
literary awards, including The Kleist Prize (1994), the European
Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature (1995), the International IMPAC
Dublin Litetary Award (1998), the Franz Kafka Prize (1999) and the
literature prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2004). In Germany,
where Müller has settled in Berlin, she has given lectures in several
universities. In 1995 she was appointed member of the German Academy
for Language and Poetry, in Darmstadt, and in 2005 she held the
Heiner-Müller Guest Professorship at the Free University. Müller was suspended in 2018 from the Writers' Union of
Romania for failing to pay her membership dues. "I was unaware I was a
member of the Writers' Union of Romania," she told DW. ('Romania
Writers' Union boots Herta Müller, who says: Huh?' by Robert Schwartz, dw.com, 22.04.2018) Müller's
favorite Romanian writers are Gellu Naum (1915-2001) and Max Blecher
(1909-1938). Müller said in 2022 in an interview: "What do I have in
Romania? I can go to the apartment complex where I once lived. Or to
the graves of my friends. If such things are supposed to part of home
..." (Nobel
Laureates Müller and Alexievich: "German Politicians Are Disgracing Us
Before the Entire World," interview conducted by Susanne Beyer, Der Spiegel, 09.02.2022) For further reading: 'In allem ist der Riss': Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Body in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages, in The Modern Language Review by Lyn Marven (April 4, 2006); Body and Narrative in German Literature by Lyn Marven (2005); Herta Müller, ed. by Thomas Daum (2003); Herta Müller, ed. by Brigid Haines (1998); Eine Poesie der Sinne: Herta Müllers Diskurs des Alleinseins und seine Wurzeln by Herta Haupt-Cucuiu (1996); Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literature in German by Lyn Marven (2006); Herta Müller, edited by Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven (2013); Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics, edited by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar (2013); Schreiben als Widerstand: Elfriede Jelinek & Herta Müller, edited by Pia Janke & Teresa Kovacs (2017); Herta Müller-Handbuch, edited by Norbert Otto Eke (2017) Post-multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators by Sneja Gunew (2020); Poetics of Breathing: Modern Literature's Syncope by Stephanie Heine (2021); Border Politics in Novels by European Women: In Translation by Pam Morris (2024) Selected bibliography:
|
