by Bogdan Munteanu
Describing her simply as “the
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009” is a phrase that doesn’t
quite fit Herta Müller’s biography. Her life was rather a chain of bitter
losses: she lost the right to a job befitting her studies; the chance to live
normally, without the fear of being followed and even killed; the possibility
to publish her (uncensored) books in the country of birth; and, like all
emigrants, she lost her country, although she found a new home in Germany.
Harassed by the Romanian secret
police (Securitate), she would refuse herself the thought of giving birth to a
child in a realm of future-less insanity as Communist Romania had become in
the 1980s. As a child, she struggled to understand why the German community she
was born into was stigmatized. In her youth – she lived in constant fear. Later
on, as a grown-up, she had to adapt to living in a new country. She has never
had an easy, comfortable life.
Nor has she ever lived longing
for material delights, so that the Nobel’s prize financial dimension (€ 950,000
in 2009) would make her life easier. In our hypermaterialistic times, many
people envy ‘winners’. But who would trade their lives for the unenviable first
half of Herta’s existence which was full of incertitude, fright, humility?
A life story
Born on August 17, 1953, in the
village of Nițchidorf (Nitzkydorf ) Herta Müller is the daughter of Swabian
parents, part of a German speaking ethnic group who had been living in Banat
(Western Romania) since the early 1700s. By the mid 20th century, this
community underwent dramatic changes that would shape Herta’s destiny.
During World War Two, Germans in
Romania were either lured by the Nazi offer “to join the Motherland’s armed
forces” or compelled to do so, only to be punished indiscriminately by the new
Communist regime and the Soviet occupants. When Herta was born, the Communist
grip over the country was getting stronger and stronger. Times were hard for
everyone, but especially for ethnic Germans accused of collaborating with the
Nazi regime. Herta’s grandfather, a hard working farmer and merchant would see
his wealth confiscated. Starting with 1945, her mother spent five years in a
work camp in present-day Ukraine before she could return to Romania.
As a teenager, Herta questioned
her father about his blindness in joining the Waffen-SS and about not seeing
the criminal nature of Hitler’s regime. Not long after expressing her inability
to understand her father’s attitude, she realized that she was in a similar
situation. Would she give in to the same sin as her parent, would she go with
the flow, denying that there is anything wrong with the absurdity of Nicolae
Ceauşescu’s dictatorship?
No, she decided she couldn’t do
it. She would speak up anytime she could, irrespective of consequences. The
opportunity to test her resolution appeared soon, sometime between 1973 and
1976, when she studied German and Romanian literature at the University of
Timişoara. She befriended members of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a literary
society of young German writers who fought for freedom of speech. The group was
dissolved by the Communist authorities in 1975, but Herta couldn’t avoid
another encounter with the Securitate four years later.
Because she had rejected the
State’s ‘repartition’ to work in a country school over 500 km away from Banat,
she took a nerve-wracking job of translating technical specifications in an engineering
factory. In 1979, she was approached by a secret police officer requesting her
to become an informat. She repeatedly refused the offers to collaborate, so she
lost her job.
From then onwards, she had to endure constant harassment from the Securitate, which took the form of permanent surveillance, searches of her apartment and death threats. In 1987, she would be ‘sold’ (that is allowed to emigrate) in exchange of 8,000 Deutsche Marks paid by the German State, as tens of thousands of other ethnic Germans were ‘exported’ by a dictatorship hungry for foreign currency.
Witness bearer of inconvenient truths
What Herta Müller writes about
are not likeable topics, but they draw the interest of people who have
experienced life in repressive regimes anywhere in the world, from Eastern
Europe to South America. “With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of
prose, [she] depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” – this is how the
Swedish Academy justified their choice of Müller as Nobel Prize winner in 2009.
In the collection of short
stories Niederungen (1982), which was censored in Romania, and the novel
Drückender Tango (1984) she paints the way of living in a small German-speaking
village, where peasants worked in a collective farm. The unflattering image of
corruption, intolerance and repression put Herta at odds with the official
literary critics of the Communist regime as peasant life in a Socialist
country was supposed to be far more idyllic. Even fellow Swabians disliked
her, as people from her village reproached her for having turned them into
‘literary characters.’
The novel The Land of Green
Plums (1996) refers to the death of two friends, in which the author
suspects the involment of the Securitate. Although fictional and only partly
autobiographical, all her literary works are full of painful truths about life
in Communist Romania. But the book that was praised most by the Swedish
Academy was her 2009 prose poem The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel in
German, translated as Leagănul respirației in Romanian) about the
deportation to the Soviet Union of some 75,000 Transylvanian Germans in 1945.
The book’s main character, Leo
Auberg, was inspired by Oskar Pastior, a German from Sibiu deported when he was
only 17. Although 26 years older than Herta, they developed a close literary
friendship and intended to write the book together. They visited the sites of
former camps in Ukraine and talked to many survivors, but Pastior died in 2006.
Since life often beats fiction,
in 2010, Herta would be shocked and grieved to find out that even Pastior had
signed an agreement with the Securitate. Earlier, she had also discovered that
one of the Securitate’s informants who spied on her in the 1980s was one of
her best friends of the time. It seems that even two decades after the fall of
Communism, Herta Müller still hasn’t paid the entire bitter price that human
beings must pay in order to set themselves free from an oppressive past…
