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Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums. New York: Henry Holtand Company, Metropolitan Books, 1996.

When the Romanian-German author Herta Müller burst upon the Europeanliterary scene in 1984 with her collection of stories entitledNiederungen, she was hailed as a writer whose deceptively simple stylewas unique among German writers both for the purity of its language and forits stark poetic imagery. The title story of this collection portrayed withunflinching candor the author's childhood home of Nitzkydorf, a German-speakingvillage in the Banat region of Romania. In a manner reminiscent of MaximGorky's My Childhood, Müller pierced the facade of idealizedvillage life to show its harsh oppressiveness and the withering effects ithad upon her childhood.

In her later, longer works -- Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan aufder Welt, Reisende auf einem Bein, Der Fuchs war damals schonder Jäger -- Müller focussed on adult characters, but in herlatest novel The Land of Green Plums (Herztier in German),she has created what is arguably her most autobiographical novel to date,and interwoven a thick strand of childhood memories into a story line whichbegins with the narrator's student years at the University of Timisoara.The novel shows the human destruction caused by the Ceausescu dictatorship;at the same time, through linkages with the narrator's past, it demonstrateshow the oppression of the state is a continuation of the oppression the narratorexperienced in her childhood village. This layered approach underscores thefact that the Ceausescu dictatorship was not unique, for both the narrator'sSS father and the Romanian dictator "made graveyards." To distinguish betweenthe two time layers, Müller writes the childhood memories of her narratorin the third person and the present tense, while relating the novel's "present"in first-person, preterit-forms. By depersonalizing the figure of the childMüller lends these memories broad applicability, while the present tenseforms suggest that one can never escape one's memories or one's past.

Sights, sounds, and imagery link the narrator's present with past memories.A university student hangs herself with the belt of the narrator's dress,and the narrator remembers how her mother used to use her dressbelt to tieher daughter to a chair while she trimmed the child's nails. A brown fieldcheckered with snow reminds one of the father's brown-and-white checkeredhouse slippers, and how he had once crushed his daughter's hand between them.The tassels on those slippers are recalled when the adult narrator sees ahorse with tassels hanging before its eyes to remind it of the beatings ithas endured from a tasseled whip.

The child's singing grandmother tells it to "Rest your heart-beast now, you'veplayed so much today," and the "heart-beast" recurs throughout the story-- as the frosty breath of the frightened dissident students, as the departedspirits of the narrator's father and grandmother. "Heart-beast" is an imageof vulnerability, and it is the title of the German original. The Englishtitle takes another of Müller's images -- green plums -- that linksvulnerability with brutality. The father tells the child not to eat the hardgreen plums because the tender pits will kill her. Still, the young men whoflee the provinces to become members of the state police guard gorge themselveson green plums. The green plums do not kill them, but they do "make themstupid," and they work off the "poisonous fire" of the soft pits by terrorizingthe frightened populace. The plums acquire frightful connotations in thecity, where "plumsuckers" is a term of abuse for "upstarts, opportunists,sycophants, and people who stepped over dead bodies without remorse [...].The dictator was called a plumsucker, too."

All the figures of the novel carry their provincial childhoods with theminto the cities. Displaced villagers carry them, quite literally, in themulberry trees they bring to plant in city courtyards. But they also carrythe provinces "into their faces." The cities are not only an extension, buta degradation, of the provinces. Shepherds who flee the country to come andwork in state factories produce useless "tin sheep," and former farmers create"wooden melons" in the state-run wood-processing plants. The workers in thestate-operated slaughterhouses secretly gorge themselves on animal blood.Their children are their accomplices: "When their fathers kiss them goodnight,they smell that they've been drinking blood in the slaughterhouse, and theywant to go there too."  As one of the characters of the novels comments,"Everyone's a villager here. Our heads may have left home, but our feet arejust standing in a different village. No cities can grow in a dictatorship,because everything stays small when it's being watched."

At one of her readings, Herta Müller recalled that, when she moved fromNitzkydorf to Temisoara as a fifteen-year-old, she "saw that everything thevillage had given me was wrong." As a student, the narrator of the novelquickly learns that everything the state has given her is wrong as well;this becomes clear when a dorm mate named Lola commits apparent "suicide"after becoming a burden to her party-member lover. This lover then leadsthe vote to wipe the dead student's name from the party membership rolls.

The narrator meets three male students who do not accept Lola's death assuicide, and she and they form a band of frightened dissidents who are houndedby the police and subjected to frequent house searches and terrifyinginterrogations. Not even a friendship based on desperation and mutual trustcan protect them; instead, the state places unbearable strains on theirfriendship and drives two of them to their deaths.

But the narrator experiences a deeper shock in her inability to comprehendher women friends. She, like her dorm mates, had feared Lola as a possibleparty informant until Lola's death causes the narrator to reexamine herassumptions and realize that Lola was the true victim of the party. Thena deep and apparently unshakable friendship with a rebellious, privilegedfactory worker named Tereza comes to a shockingly abrupt end when the narratordiscovers that Tereza has agreed to betray her in return for being permitteda trip to the West. Like a refrain throughout the novel, a recurring dissidentsong reminds the narrator that:

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that's how it is with friends when the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that's how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

It is tempting to read the novel as a roman à clef, and to identifynot only the narrator as Herta Müller, but to associate the other characterswith specific figures: Edgar with Richard Wagner, Georg with Rolf Bossert,and Kurt with Roland Kirsch. Müller readily admits the similarities,but points out that the experiences of several members of the Banat literarycircle, or Aktionsgruppe Banat, have been compressed into these threefigures, and that many episodes and character traits in the novel are herinvention. Only the story of Tereza, she has stated, is absolutely true tofact.

Certainly this part of the novel is emotionally the most devastating.Müller recounts it by again breaking with the chronology of her narrativeand leaping into the future to portray the rupture of the friendship at thevery center of her novel. She then retraces the path to that rupture, andto Tereza's death from cancer -- a technique that increases the poignancyof her friend's death and the narrator's pain at her betrayal. The narratorrecalls that, when she was a child, her Nazi father had hacked away at themilk thistles in the garden, and she had thought, "Father knows somethingabout life. Because Father stashes his guilty conscience inside the damnstupid plants and hacks them down." At the close of the novel, the narratorwonders whether she, too, has learned something about life: "Tereza's deathhurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. Onewas full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back.It grew like grass and straw, all mixed up together, and turned into an icyaffirmation on my brow. That was my damn stupid plant." The narrator canno more exterminate the past than her father could. Furthermore, thejuxtaposition of the betrayal and death of her friend makes Tereza's deathof cancer as much a consequence of living under the Romanian dictatorshipas are the deaths of Lola, Georg, and Kurt.

Ultimately, the narrator and her friend Edgar leave Romania and relocatein Germany, but they cannot escape the damage the dictatorship inflictedon its citizens. The novel documents the way that fear erodes the strengthof the individual, by blunting one's senses and destroying one's capacityfor sustained interpersonal relationships. This is a theme with implicationsthat reach beyond the confines of Ceausescu's police state, for it is anerosion that occurs wherever one is forced to live under conditions of prolongedfear. By portraying that erosion through simple, even brutal language castupon an elaborate grid of recurring images and songs, Müller has createda psychological and artistic tour de force. The English translation capturesboth the harsh intensity and poetic beauty of the German original.

Beverley Driver Eddy
Dickinson College

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