Herta Müller, we honor you today for your distinguished body
of writings and for your courage in speaking out on behalf of the dispossessed.
Born in the Banat in Rumania as part of the ethnic German
minority there, you studied both German and Rumanian literature in your native
country. During the Second World War, your father was a member of the Waffen
SS. After the war, your mother spent five years in a labor camp in the Soviet
Union. Both of these experiences figure prominently in your work. You yourself
became a translator at a factory, but were shunned and ultimately fired when
you refused to become an informant of the dreaded Rumanian secret police, the
Securitate.
In 1982, you published your first book, Niederungen (Nadirs)
both in a censored version in Rumania and an uncensored one in West Germany, a
work that focuses on the stifling atmosphere found among the German ethnic
minority living in the Banat. While this remains a major theme in your work,
your later works have also portrayed the terror caused by the Rumanian
government’s harsh persecution of dissident voices. Thus all your works address
larger issues of human rights and dignity. As a critic of the dictatorial
regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, you were
subject to harassment by his secret police. In 1987, you were granted
permission to emigrate to West Germany, where you continued speaking out and
writing about the repression of the Ceaușescu
government.
Over the next two decades, you published novels such as The Passport, The Land of Green Plums, and The
Appointment. You also published four volumes of literary collages, created
from images and word parts cut out from popular magazines. As your acclaim as a
writer grew, you were awarded many prestigious prizes such as the Kleist Prize the
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Franz Werfel Human Rights
Award. In 2009, the Swedish Academy recognized your life’s work by awarding you
the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoring you as someone, “who, with the
concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of
the dispossessed.” Your 2009 novel Atemschaukel
has just been translated into English as The Hunger Angel and has received glowing reviews from such sources
as The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Chicago Tribune.
Just two days ago, many of us here had the opportunity to hear you read from
this incandescent work, which the reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement declared to be, “A work of rare force, a
feat of sustained and overpowering poetry…Müller has the ability to distil
concrete objects into language of the greatest intensity and to sear these
objects on to the reader’s mind.”
Herta Müller, you have had a long and deep relationship with
Dickinson College. In the spring of
1996, you spent a semester here as writer-in-residence. The next year, 1997,
Dickinson made you an honorary fellow of the college. You returned to Dickinson
in 1998 to help dedicate the college’s new Max Kade Center for the Study of
Contemporary German Culture, and you came back once more, in 2000, to introduce
the campus to your newest volume of collage poems.
Mr. President, for her commitment to literature and to
giving voice to those whom dictatorships render voiceless, it is my honor to
present to you Herta Müller for the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.
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Herta Müller, upon the recommendation of the Faculty to the
Board of Trustees, and by its mandamus, I confer upon you the Degree of Doctor
of Letters, honoris causa, with all the rights, privileges, and distinction
thereunto appertaining, in token of which I present you with this diploma and
cause you to be invested with the hood of Dickinson College appropriate to the
degree.