Books

World Books: Herta Müller, Memory, and the Nobel

Now that the predictable “who is she?” brouhaha over this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has ended, it is time to explore the artistry of Herta Müller, whose books consistently denounce the corruption of language and memory, often by reworking her own past experiences in innovative, lyrical, and evocative prose.

By Tess Lewis

Herta Müller: Her books are beautifully written, but they do not make for pleasant reading.

Suffering under totalitarianism’s perverted ideals is the central experience of the 20th century. This year’s Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a writer who has devoted her life to resisting totalitarianisms of several stripes, both directly, by exposing the degradation and persecution of Romanians under Ceausescu’s political terror and indirectly, by resisting the taboo against discussing Romanian cooperation with the Nazis and then the Soviets. More fundamentally, Herta Müller consistently denounced the corruption of language and memory, reworking her own memories and experiences in innovative, lyrical, and evocative prose.

This, of course, does not make for easy or pleasant reading. Many of the incidents and plots in her fiction are based on events in her own life. After the narrator in “The Land of Green Plums,” emigrates to Germany, she still receives the death threats that had begun when she refused to work with the Securitate. When her close friend Tereza comes to visit, the narrator discovers in her friend’s suitcase a copy of her own apartment key and the address of the Romanian embassy in Berlin. She realizes that Tereza has come to spy on her and must ask her to leave immediately. Adina in the novel, “Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter,” has a fox pelt in her room. The secret police enter her apartment regularly while she is teaching, and cut off a part of the fox pelt every time they visit. First it’s the tail, then each back paw, then a front paw. Her anxiety and fear increase with each dismemberment. When only the head is left to be severed, she realizes the noose has tightened and she escapes into hiding.

Both of these incidents happened to Müller as did the many less drastic, but pervasive experiences of intimidation and betrayal that run throughout her novels and stories. Yet she describes these events in such poetic, concentrated prose, rife with metaphors and neologisms, that they attain a haunting beauty and a significance that elevates them above the personal.

In an essay on the success of her books, Müller wrote, “Books about bad times are often read as testimonies. And my books are, by necessity, about bad times, about lives amputated by the dictatorship, about the outwardly cowering and inwardly self-glorifying daily life of a German minority, and about their disappearance through emigration to Germany. For many, therefore, my books are testimonials. Yet, in writing, I don’t feel like I’m bearing witness. I learned to write from silence and secrecy. That was the beginning.”

Before she won the Nobel earlier this month, Müller was hardly as obscure as the complacent “Herta Who?” reaction in the American press would indicate. She has published more than 20 books of fiction, essays, and poetry in Germany. Four of her novels and one collection of short stories have been translated into English. She has won major prizes and has been an important figure in German literary circles. Her insistence on addressing the legacy of National Socialism won her as many critics there as admirers. She wrote of her father’s brutality, tracing it directly to his service in the SS and was unsparing about his legacy. “He was in the SS. After the War, he returned to his village and spawned me. . . My father’s death was the death of a disease.”

Although German is her mother tongue—she did not learn Romanian until she was fifteen—she has remained a bit apart from her adopted city of Berlin. Her outspokenness has maintained that distance. Yet, Müller has always been an outsider. She was born in 1953 in the village Nitzkydorf in the German speaking Banat region of Romania. The Austro-Hungarian empire had encouraged such settlements of German speakers in what was then Hungary. During the Second World War, this minority allied themselves with the Reich and suffered relatively little until the Russians arrived. In retaliation for the alliance with Germany, the Soviets sent most of the community’s healthy adults between the ages of 17 and 45 to forced labor camps in the Ukraine between 1944 and 1949. Müller’s mother spent those years in a camp, but, deeply traumatized and ashamed, never spoke of her time there. Müller’s father, as a prisoner of war, avoided the labor camps and found work as truck driver on his return. Müller’s childhood was tainted by her father’s violence and the narrow-minded provincialism of her village.

Müller left Nitzkydorf to study in Timisoara and in 1982 published her first book, Nadirs, a heavily censored collection of stories about village life. Her countrymen, the Banat Schwabians were incensed and launched a smear campaign disguised as literary criticism, accusing her of writing “fecal language” and “urine prose”, calling her traitor, a party whore, and even a spy for the secret police. The Securitate had, in fact, tried to recruit her, but she refused and lost her job as a translator in a tractor factory as a result. Unable to find work and under increasing danger from the regime, she emigrated to Germany in 1987. The death threats and slander continued well after Ceausescu’s fall in December, 1989, but she refused to let that silence her.

Müller’s most recent novel, “Everything I Own I Carry With Me,” was shortlisted for the German Book Prize this year. It is a harrowing account of a young poet’s years in a Ukrainian camp. The narrator is modeled on her friend, the German-Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, who had intended to write a book with her about the camps, but he died in 2006, before it was completed. She continued on alone, using his accounts of the camp and material he had collected in interviews with survivors. The resulting novel is a gripping story and a study of language as a means not simply of survival amidst horror, but of salvation. That salvation is tenuous and elusive, but it is the protagonist, Leopold Auberg’s only safeguard against moral and physical destruction.

It is a powerful, heart-rending book and the remove at which Müller writes of the camps does not diminish its authenticity. More important, however, is the immediacy, persuasiveness, and horrible fascination of Müller’s writing.

The tone and structure of “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” resemble Tadeusz Borowski’s and Varlam Shalamov’s camp narratives, though without their depths of cynicism. It is closer to Fred Wander’s “The Seventh Well” and Norman Manea’s stories in “October Eight O’Clock.” Each of these books is constructed upon specific narrative mechanisms and strategies that enable the authors to come close to expressing the inexpressible. Borowski used black, caustic humor, Shalamov estrangement through an extreme objectivity and matter-of-factness, Wander turned to the act of storytelling itself as a means of reclaiming the memory and dignity of the concentration camp victims he saw perish, and Manea employed a childlike magical thinking and fetishization of objects. Müller uses most of these strategies as well, but through her manipulations of language, her creation of new compound words, such as the German title “Atemschaukel” which means breath-swing or breath-seesaw, she paints the inner life of a poet in extremity and portrays how language is all that is left once his spirit and body are broken.

The strongest weapons of any totalitarian systems are lies, deceit, and fear. Müller refused to acquiesce or look away, but held the mirror of her fiction steadily up against the distortions of the regime. While the truths reflected are repulsive, they are the first, small steps towards undermining the reign of mendacity.

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Books by Herta Müller available in English translation:

Nadirs – stories, 1982 translated by Sieglinde Lug (1999); University of Nebraska

The Passport – novel, 1986 translated by Martin Chalmers (1989) Serpent’s Tail

Traveling on One Leg – novel, 1989 translated by Valentina Glajar and Andre Lefevere (1998); Northwestern University Press

The Land of Green Plums – novel, 1994 translated by Michael Hofmann (1996) Metropolitan Books

The Appointment – novel, 1997 translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm (2001) Metropolitan Books

Atemschaukel - novel, 2009 (translation forthcoming as “Everything I Own, I Carry With Me”)

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TESS LEWIS is an essayist and translator who writes frequently on European literature. She was recently awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant and an NEA grant for her translation of the Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig’s short stories.