Hello Gentle Reader
In his international best seller “Danube,” Claudio Magris had mentioned Herta Müller in his chapters discussing the city of Timisoara. In this chapter Claudio Magris had the following to say:
“If in the Vojovodina the German population is now down to four or five thousand, in Rumania – or rather, in the Banat and Siebenbürgen – their culture is still very much alive. More than a hundred works of literature were published between 1944 and 4984, and poetry in dialect has taken on a new lease of life. Nikolaus Berwanger – until recently the all-too enterprising leader of the German-Rumanian culture, and now living in West-Germany – a few years ago announced the need to write in an “esperantosamizdat”. True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a profited voice of dissent, while at the same time is should speak to everyone. His position as leader inevitably drew him towards the universality of esperanto. On the other hand the stories of Herta Müller, entitled “Lowlands,” are as simple and complex as the passing of the years, and possess the existential truth of the samizdat, of the poetic word that is always non-official. Herta Müller writes about the village, like so many earlier writers of the Banat, but senselessly in sentences lacking predicates, speak of the oppressive alienation of the world and also of the individual from himself.
Owing to the new, alienating “village literature,” flourishing in Austria with Bernhard, Handke or Innerhofer, Herta Müller explores its dark, sensitive roots in an original manner. When she theorizes about it occasionally falls (like her models) into a stereotyped attitude not without a dash of arrogance. As part of the tough political repression to which Germans in Rumania have been subjected, Herta Müller has been forced into silence.”
So describes Claudio Magris about the then young author, and future Nobel Laureate in Literature of two-thousand and nine. After “Nadirs,” Herta Müller’s debut work was smuggled and published in the west, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s secret police the Securitate’s intervention, intimidation, and interrogation took on a darker dimension for Herta Müller. Of course this was taken place during the eighties when the Securitate systematically created a campaign to discourage any attempt, thought, desire, need or want to immigrate to the west leaving Romania behind. They used vicious rumours. Something Herta Müller herself experienced. Machinations were common, as were frame ups, and public humiliations. They had encouraged conflicts between two groups or segments of the population; turning people against each other. A classic communism move. They toughened the censorship of the country, took the greatest delight in crushing and repressing the smallest of gestures of independent thought or free speech. They used the word and title ‘intellectual,’ as a curse, as a brand of an equivalency to the very devil himself. Forced entries into homes, to tap telephone lines; interception of mail and all international communication as well as, routine monitoring of all domestic communications placed the country into a permanent state of fear. The belief was that the ratio of informants to the Romanian population was, for every four Romanians one of them was an informer. However in reality, there was for every forty three Romanian’s there was an informant or spy. However the number itself was still high, for the Communist Eastern Bloc. Suspicious deaths were not uncommon as well, and some have even come to light. When a coal miners’ union went on strike, some leaders had died prematurely. The reason being is some of the doctors working for the secret police, had exposed the chests of the men to x-rays in an attempt to have them develop cancer. When birth rates fell agents were placed in gynecological wards, and pregnancy tests were mandatory for any woman who were at child bearing age. Severe punishments were placed on anyone who had terminated a pregnancy or attempted to. This ubiquitous shadow, that slithered into homes. Were on every grey brick wall. Was in every window reflection. Had struck fear into the population of Romania. Herta Müller had faced this shadow head on. She learned to write from the silence. From the very absence of words. The tolerant attitude out of fear had disgusted Herta Müller. However Herta Müller also admits to knowing that there was an ominous fear in the country, and being afflicted with it as well. However she knew how to fight against it. When she traveled to Timisoara to go to school, she experienced the darkness of the dictatorship more closely and here she began to shape the person who would fight against it, and continuous to write against, and support dissident writers and intellectuals from all over the world.
“Nadirs,” the short story collection by Herta Müller which was the first experiment and foray into her signature style of poetic and prose hybrid, that requires the reader to be patient but also to give full attention to the work. The back of the book describes “Nadirs,” as follows:
“Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, ‘Nadirs,’ is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Müller’s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child’s often nightmarish impressionistic of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dreams-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state.”
To understand the dual world of Herta Müller and the language(s) that contradict each other and how her writing style has become so unique one should look at the short story “My Family,” and read the following line:
“My grandmother is blind with cataracts. In one eye she has the grey cataract, and in the other a green cataract.”
Thanks to Sieglinde Lug the translator of this collection, the explanation for what the author means via the cataracts:
“The German word for cataract is “star,” meaning “starling,”; the different cataracts are then called by the bird’s colours, gray and green.”
In these short stories, Herta Müller describes life as a series of events. There is no narrative. The child in these short stories is someone unable to theorize or understand the social world around her. That is why everything is set in a series of chain events. Father is a drunk; mother slaps child for asking stupid questions; grandpa is unwell; grandma is worried; the neighbours sleep around; a stray dog eats from the trash; a stray cat basks in the sun on the road, and then begs for milk. These are the events that are placid in the world of Herta Müller, and are simply described as such. There is nothing more to them. Though fantasy and surrealism, are commonplace through this short story collection. Further characterizing a child’s view point throughout the stories in this collection.
If you would like to know the real truth about Herta Müller and the village life she had lived through, then read the following, where she openly discusses the years her family were able to return to the Banat region. After World War II the Swabian-German’s were sent to the Baragan Plains at the Steepe of the Lower Danube. It is there that the displaced farmers lived in mud huts, reminiscent of their medieval counterparts, under Stalin’s horrible oppressive regime. However in nineteen-fifty three Stalin died (the same year the author was born) and her family soon saw liberation. They were able to move to Niţchidorf. But fear and terror were still around, as one can see in from the following:
“In my family each member lived its inner private life like on an island. These were the 1950s, during Stalinism, living in this isolated village, whose main street had no tarmac to take us to the city, Yet in spite of this isolation our village was not a sort of natural reserve could not be immune from the inroads of politics . Here three or four political activists kept under control the whole village. They arrived from the city. They just graduated and were sent to this god-forsaken village to start their career as controllers, outdoing each other’s in threats, interrogations and arrests. Our village had 405 houses and 1,500 inhabitants. All of us went about our business living in fear. Nobody dared talking about it. Although I was a small child too little to understand the meaning of fear, yet the very essence of fear, the sentiment of fear took hold of my brain. All members of my family were affected.”
II
“Traveling on One Leg,” is the homage and the documentary of what it means to move away. To become a dissident. To live in political exile. For the past two or three decades the author herself has worked and lived in exile in Germany. Which in this short novel; is not described as the greatest homecoming as one expected. The feeling of a homeland that had betrayed the main character Irene in this novel is described as a bitter place. But the new country is described as lonely world. A country in which Irene herself is out of place. That is how she comes into the orbital movements of three men. Franz who Irene met in Romania, and is emotionally distant and aloof; refusing to reciprocate the feelings Irene feels for him. Stefan is Franz’s friend; and then Thomas a bisexual or gay bookseller.
This describes the book on superficial terms. The sexual longing of the main character; symbols abound; as well as the atmosphere of isolation, displacement, identity and the concept of homeland – one that has betrayed all of Herta Müller’s characters, with its warped concept and philosophy of Communism. If one goes beyond on the superficial elements of this book, it is a deeply and intensely poetic experience. It’s a novel written not in verse but in maddening prose with poetic elements that builds up a confusing narrative of anguish and displacement. Such moments as when Irene’s photograph is taken, and she sees the “other Irene,” a shadow of her own life. The world is absurd, such as the rooms walk through her, rather than her through the rooms. Displacement is common.
I look at “Traveling on One Leg,” as a farewell to Romania, for the author. A way of coming to terms with the communist regime and the horrors that were afflicted on her. However the author is by far not some naïve young girl. She understands that even though Romania is no longer a Communist state that it has a lot of years still to go, before it backs down. It has a lot of years, before it completely abandons that part of its past, rather than still falling into some old habits.
However the main problem with Mrs. Müller comes from the fact that both try to deal with the past in different ways. Romania today tries to bury the past. They see the time of the dictator has since perished and become obsolete with the execution of the dictator himself. However Herta Müller refuses to believe this to be the case. Rather than burry the past along with its cobbler-dictator, Herta Muller, unearths it, and exorcises it. She has written about her personal experience under a dictatorship. No other author could compare to Herta Müller in this exorcism of personal demons other than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was met back to his homeland with at least shaky open arms, Herta Müller and Romania have since decided to go their own ways. Yet the coals of the two anger, continues to burn.
Remarks like “she writes in German, therefore she is not a Romanian writer . . .” are everywhere, like personal mantras that the former communist state continues to say, as if to supress their own past and the horrors of it – and in some ways to supress their part in it. Other cultural authorities have taken to other methods. Nicolae Manolescu the president of the Romanian Writers Union (who happens to be a fan of socialist realism) was surprised that the author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. To further get this point across he made sure to delete and censor the author by making sure her stories and work were removed from all his anthologies. Though he would never admit that he had a successful career, under communism. While the now successful author, herself is the one reaping the rewards of the turbulent first thirty-five years of her life.
Her former husband and fellow writer have also come to Herta Müller defense and defense of her fiction:
“As it happened before in the past we shall carry on talking about an East-West dialogue between useful idiots and secret services informers, about cultural exchanges as well as about trends and research methods. All of it as if nothing had happened, as if nothing mattered. Quite the contrary it does very much matter both in Germany and in Romania. One has barely started understanding the past that one falls victim to amnesia. Democracy remains helpless whilst being denied a template of real reference values.”
It is with those words that one can see that the author is not stuck in the past. Frozen in some far off place, or constantly brooding over it. Quite the opposite really. She is leading others forward. To recognize the past as a valid part of one’s existence. Admit the undoable, admit the crimes, and admit the horrors admit it all.
Mircea Cărtărescu a young Romanian author however took the news of Herta Müller Nobel win, with great pride and with a gentlemanly stride and congratulated the author with whole heartedly. For better or for worst, he is also showed admiration the author. Who knows what the Romanian literati may think of such an action.
I will not lie that Herta Müller is by far my favourite author; or at least one of them. She is unique in her voice and narrative. It’s confusing and absurd. You take it or leave it. You’ll be either frustrated with it or amazed that you are looking at the world through a warped fun house mirror as the author was forced to live in.
One of my personal favourite passages of this short novel (“Traveling on One Leg,”) is:
“If this happened on the first day, and if Irene stayed on for another couple of days, all the days were just a continuous farewell.”
Life in general is a continuous farewell. At one point in another we all say farewell. We will say farewell to the grocer. Farewell to the hairdresser or the barber. A farewell to the sales lady behind the perfume counter. A farewell to our parents; they say farewell to us their children. In the end we say farewell to everyone in one way or another. Someday or in a few hours we may greet them again with a salutation or hello. Other times it’s a final statement. The curtain draws and it’s the end. With such a sentence the author is able to entice and enact the very landscape of the disposed, and the isolation and solidarity of all human beings exist in.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
