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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Herta Müller

Herta Müller was born in the village of Nitzkydorf (now Niţchidorf), a German-speaking enclave in the Banat region of western Romania. She began writing as a teenager, publishing poems and short prose in state magazines and newspapers as a high school and university student. After leaving education, Müller starting being harassed by the Securitate. She had caught their attention as an associate of the literary circle known as Aktionsgruppe Banat, of which her then husband, Richard Wagner, was a founding member. As with all authors under the Ceauşescu regime, Müller’s writing was subject to intense scrutiny and her debut novel Niederungen (Nadirs, 1982) was published in a heavily edited version. Despite this, Müller was allowed to visit the West in order to publicise her work and received high acclaim from the West German literary establishment when a revised edition of Niederungen was published by Rotbuch in 1984.

Herta_Müller_Literaturfest_München_2016 Heike Huslage-Koch CC BY-SA 4.0.jpg
Herta Müller at the Munich Literature Festival in 2016 (Photo: Heike Huslage-Koch via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

However, the secret police continued to mount pressure upon Müller and her friends, most of whom eventually resolved to emigrate. Müller left Romania for West Berlin in 1987 and her experience of being an immigrant (albeit a German-speaking one) was one of alienation. Her 1989 novel Reisende auf einem Bein (Travelling on One Leg, 1989) is read by critics as a fictional product of this era. After arriving in Berlin, the thematic focus of Müller’s writing shifted from the critiques of Banat-Swabian village society and accounts of childhood loneliness (Niederungen,  Drückender Tango [Oppressive Tango, 1984] and Barfüßiger Februar [Barefoot February, 1987]) to more obvious engagements with the terrors of the Ceauşescu regime in novels such as Der Fuchs war schon damals der Jäger (Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter, 1992) and Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994). This was also the theme of several essay volumes.

In many ways these two dominant and related themes, oppression within the crypto-fascist community of her upbringing and oppression under communist dictatorship, have come to determine her reception in Germany, where she has often been called upon to act as a spokesperson of the society in which she grew up. She is viewed as a token example of an anti-communist dissident. In fact Müller is much more, and her writing betrays larger concerns which reconcile and exceed these themes, namely power, those who exercise it, and the individuals who are crushed as a result.

The unusual multiplicity of Müller’s experience, as a daughter of an SS-man and of a survivor of Soviet forced labour, a victim of communist terror yet an outsider within Romanian society, is only a partial explanation for her enduring popularity. She writes with hyper-accuracy, using vivid and precise imagery as well as minute detail to describe both mundane and life-changing experiences with great intensity. She also displays a mistrust of language as a means for communicating truth, instead regarding words as tools to spark an imaginative explosion of − sometimes unexpected, sometimes undesirable − associations.

Much of Müller’s writing has the potential to be read as autofiction, with female protagonists and settings familiar to those aware of her biography contributing to the mistaken impression that she is an author trapped in a cycle of rewriting her own history. In fact Müller addresses many of the issues of 20th-century history in microcosm, telling stories which speak to those who grew up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, it is perhaps telling that it was the appearance of her first sympathetic male protagonist, Leo Auberg, which immediately preceded her being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel, 2009), a novel about the experience of ethnic Germans deported to carry out forced labour in the Soviet Union, is the text which appears to move furthest away from her own life story and has been very well-received by critics.

Atemschaukel is also Müller’s last novel-length work to date, although she continues to produce collections of collages – which have always been an important part of her creative process. Her writing has already been translated into many languages, a process that has intensified since 2009 with her essays and lectures proving popular as well as her novels. She also continues to use her post-Nobel fame as a platform from which to speak out about contemporary injustice in regimes all over the world in various newspaper columns and interviews.

Compiled by Jenny Watson (Edinburgh)