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Herta Müller has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature – she is the 12th woman to win the prize. The Romanian born author is renowned for her books based on life under the harsh regime of the dictator Ceausescu. Müller was born in 1953 in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf in Romania. Her parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania. Jeb Sharp profiles the German author.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.
JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.
BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.
SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.
HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.
SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.
HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.
SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.
HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.
SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.
LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.
SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.
MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.
SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.
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Okay, here’s an admission: Yet another recent Nobel laureate whom I’ve never even heard of, and this confession coming from one who has considered himself very well-read and pretty well versed in literature. This is not to diminish Ms. Muller’s achievement, and I congratulate her. I just wonder if, as an American and English-speaker only, I’m somehow missing out on a lot of erstwhile magnificent literature because it isn’t translated into my mother tongue, and if this is so, why? Are we so overwhelmed by the Dan Browns and Stephanie Meyers and Oprah’s choices that a world of great literature is being eclipsed here by the shadow of towering blockbusters?
This stories mentions that she makes collages. Is it possible to see them anywhere online? My own search turned up no images and no other mention of them. I’d like to know if she makes these collages for herself or to show. Thank you.
During your report on the Nobel announcement, (congratulations to Ms.Muller), why was it necessary to criticize “brick and mortar” bookstores for not having the book in stock?
Any good bookstore is happy to take special orders, and they will, no doubt, have copies of the award-winning book in stock soon.
Do your listeners need to be encouraged to order books online while many beloved bookstores are struggling to stay in business?