Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

11. Osmoses

11 Osmoses Müller’s Things, Bodies, and Spaces Anja Johannsen After her Nobel Prize was announced, commentators never tired of emphasizing that Herta Müller lent her literary and political voice to the victims of Stalinism and the Ceauşescu dictatorship. Müller is without question a political author whose writing describes and indicts the mechanisms of surveillance and oppression and their effects on people. Harassment and surveillance by the authorities and secret police of the Romanian dictatorship frequently mark the day-to-day life of her protagonists. The living conditions of her characters have severely damaged them and considerably affected their perception of themselves and the world. What is interesting above all, in my opinion, is that beginning from the processes of changing perception to the consequences of political and social repression , Müller raises questions of perceptual structures in general that go far beyond the specific themes of the politically oppressed. These perceptual structures are strikingly often debated by means of the description of spaces in Müller’s texts. Such debate is especially remarkable against the background of the recent spatial turn in the field of cultural studies: literary studies have been increasingly preoccupied with the question of how theories of space can be applied to the analysis 208 Johannsen of literary texts, especially in terms of the relation between space and text. What does the description of a room or a landscape within a literary text tell us about the text itself or about the author’s poetics? I argue that Müller ’s texts are particularly appropriate for tackling this question. In her literary texts space is dependent on the observer’s frame of reference— that is, it is the product of sensuous perception and bodily practices. Space is always conceptualized relationally. In my analysis I will focus on the components of these spatial constructs—things and bodies—and their complex relation within the literary text as I argue that Müller’s attention to questions of perception is instrumental in her creation of spaces. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky writes that our everyday perception tends toward automatization and does not conceive an object in its particularity but rather identifies and categorizes it—that is, reduces it to the characteristics necessary for instrumental rationality to deal with that particular object. Shklovsky refers to this automated seeing as the algebraic method of thinking (Shklovsky 13). The central function of the arts, in contrast, is to disturb and rupture this automated perception that dominates our everyday life. The literary text, in estranging the world we believe ourselves to know, sensitizes us. This sensitizing also has an eminently political and moral function for Shklovsky since it makes us once more receptive to that which automated perception has withheld and thus ultimately teaches us empathy. Following in the footsteps of the formalists , who focused primarily on the question of how a text is made, I discuss which processes and literary techniques Müller uses to break up and sensitize our automated perception—and how her literary and political voice maintains its distinctive and unmistakable sound. Things The presence of material objects is conspicuous and plays a decisive role in Müller’s texts—whether in her fiction, her essays, or her collages. Her characters often find themselves confused by the things of everyday life. In her essay “Einmal anfassen—zweimal loslassen” [Catch hold once— let go twice; König 106–29], Müller explains the peculiar significance that things hold in her writing and thought and reflects on what constitutes her prose. She begins the text (a good twenty pages that were conceived Osmoses 209 for a lecture at the Tübingen Poetik-Dozentur in 2000) by recalling a train trip she took shortly after settling in West Germany at the end of the 1980s. Back then the German rail network was advertising its sleeper cabin in a poster featuring a relaxed young woman in a white nightgown with lace straps and the words “Inge Wenzel auf dem Weg nach Rimini” [Inge Wenzel on the way to Rimini; König 107].1 This nightgown prompted three sorts of memory in Müller: first, the image of this item of clothing recalled her adolescent years, when her grandmother had sewn her a similar nightgown before she left her village for a boarding school in the city. Second, it reminded her of a terrifying journey in which she...