Herta Müller
Herta Müller is a highly prolific novelist and essayist whose worksportray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the rootlessnessof the political exile.
She was born in August 1953 in the German-speaking village of Nitzkydorf,in the Banat district of Romania. She left her village to study German andRomanian literature at the University of Timisoara. Here she became partof the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of idealistic Romanian-Germanwriters seeking freedom of expression under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. Aftercompleting her studies she was employed as a translator in a machine factory,until she was fired for refusing to cooperate with the secret police. Duringthis time she wrote the short stories that make up the collectionNiederungen, but she had difficulty satisfying the censors, and thiswork was not published until 1982, and then in radically modified form.Niederungen was followed two years later by DrückenderTango.
In these two works Müller depicted the hypocrisy of village life andits ruthless oppression of nonconformists. She portrayed the zealously fascistmentality of the German minority, its intolerance and corruption. Notsurprisingly, she was sharply criticized at home for destroying the idyllicimage of German rural life in Romania.
Müller was working as a teacher when her uncensored manuscript ofNiederungen was smuggled to the west and published by the RotbuchVerlag to instant critical acclaim. After a trip to the Frankfurt book fair,where she spoke out publicly against the Romanian dictatorship, she was forbiddento publish in Romania. She continued to write, however, even as her situationin Romania became more and more intolerable. In 1987 she emigrated to theWest with her husband, Richard Wagner. Since then, she has been living inBerlin.
Many of Müller's works reflect aspects of her own history. Der Menschist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986) chronicles the effortsof a Romanian-German peasant family to get passports to leave the country.Like her earlier works, this tale exposes the brutal corruption of the villageby showing how its officials, from postmaster to priest, demanded ever morematerial and sexual favors from those petitioning to leave the country. It,like the collection Barfüßiger Februar (1987), was writtenwhile Müller was waiting for permission to emigrate to the west.
Reisende auf einem Bein (1989) portrays the problems of resettlementin the west, and the feelings of alienation that plague the political exile.Many of the essays in Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (1992)are reflections on political events, written from the perspective of a womanreluctant to lay claim to words such as "homeland." A second volume of essays,Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (1991) includes a series of lectures on"Gedanken zum Schreiben" that Müller held at the University of Paderbornin 1989-1990. It is an indispensable key to understanding the tensions andconflicts that give rise to the poetic imagery in her work. The volume includesa number of collages combining image and text. Müller published a completeset of 94 collages under the title Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm.Vom Weggehen und Ausscheren in 1993; although poetic images are denselyconcentrated here onto single, unbound pages, they form an evolving networkof motifs that give unity to the whole.
The novel Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992) is a completereworking of a filmscript entitled "Der Fuchs der Jäger," that she co-wrotewith Harry Merkle. The main character is a teacher harassed by the Romaniansecret police. Through synecdoche Müller portrays the fragmentationof self that occurs in a nation governed by fear. Müller's latest novelHerztier (1994) is her richest portrayal to date of life in the Romaniandictatorship, in that she links the repressive childhood of her narratorwith the brutal oppression of the state. Her most recent work, Hungerund Seide (1995), is a collection of essays, many of them reflectionson her situation as nonconformist and dissident in Nitzkydorf andTimisoara.
Müller's works are characterized by pure, poetic language and metonymicmetaphors that recur and evolve throughout her tales. The oppressivenessof theme is alleviated by the beauty of her prose and the flashes of humorbehind some of her imagery.
Through words and actions Müller continues to demonstrate her independencefrom the dogma of church and state. She has been an outspoken critic of thoseEast German writers who collaborated with the secret police, and has recentlywithdrawn from P.E.N. as a protest against its decision to merge with itsformer DDR branch. She has won a dozen literary prizes, including theMarieluise-Fleißer Prize (1990), the Kranichsteiner Literary Prize(1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), and the European Literary Prize "Aristeion"(1995).
Beverley Driver Eddy