Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

13. Accumulating Histories

13 Accumulating Histories Temporality in Herta Müller’s “Einmal anfassen—zweimal loslassen” Katrina Nousek On May 11–13, 2000, eight authors came together at the University of Tübingen to speak on the topic “Zukunft! Zukunft?” [Future! Future?]. The lectures addressed the possibility of and limitations to thinking a notion of time that includes the idea of a future. Many sought to articulate a future-oriented indebtedness to past and present moments that could adequately represent subjective experience. Among these efforts was Herta Müller’s contribution, later published under the title “Einmal anfassen—zweimal loslassen” [Catch hold once—let go twice].1 Though the essay underscores the inextricability of past and present, it also implies an important potential for change dependent on individuals’ ability to locate their subjective experience historically and socially. The narrating subject of Müller’s essay reflects on her association of her past experiences in Communist Romania with her contemporary experiences in Germany . She is unable to shed these associations despite the time that has passed, her spatial relocation, and the end of the Communist dictatorship in Romania. Representing the narrator’s subjective experience therefore requires articulating a post-socialist future that recognizes the influences Accumulating Histories 253 of past experience under a Communist dictatorship. In what follows I wish to shed light on the complex literary strategies Müller develops to demonstrate the inadequacy of representing subjective experience within a temporal structure divided into past, present, and future. Her interrogation of temporal conceptions may be read as the potential for articulating a post-socialist future that does not collapse into a mere repetition of the past despite recognizing a fundamental connection with experiences in a Communist dictatorship. By actively appropriating her history, the narrating subject opens the potential for future change that requires a confrontation with history, a future in which history must be acknowledged but not necessarily relived. Müller’s essay opens with an allusion to the narrating subject’s project of demonstrating the inadequacy of existing temporal categories for representing subjective experience: “Die Splitter aus der Vergangenheit könnten mir selber nicht so unerhört grell und neu durch die Gegenwart gehen, wenn ich sie seinerzeit, als sie gelebter Augenblick waren, durchschaut hätte” [The shards from the past could not get to me so shockingly garish and new through the present if I had seen through them at the time when they were experienced moments] (29). This sounds at first like a confirmation that hindsight is always perfect, but as the text unfolds, it becomes clear that the relationship between past and present time is not simply one of knowledge gained too late. Rather the present moment in the text is one of recycled pasts or new events that reveal themselves as returning variations of old ones. The early experiences of the autobiographical narrator in German communities in the Romanian Banat and later during the dictatorship of Ceauşescu provide a vocabulary through which she interprets the rest of her life. Her past imprints not only her memories but also her experiences to come. The relationship between past and present that constitutes her experience requires a complex mode of narration for its representation. Convoluted syntax and word plays in expressions such as “Ich treff meine Vegangenwart in der Gegenheit seit meiner Zukunft” [I meet my past-present in the present-past since my future] reveal the narrator’s dissatisfaction with the existing categories of temporality that distinguish three main stages and often suggest a linear progression from past through present toward future (Müller 29).2 Though 254 Nousek the narrator foregrounds this difficulty explicitly, I hope to show how the text builds an implicit network of temporal associations based on a common vocabulary of images not foregrounded for the reader’s attention. The text thus presents a stylistic solution that works in tandem with the author’s theoretical articulation of temporal relations to bring the present moment and its temporal implications to light. Andreas Huyssen’s discussion of conceptions of temporality at the turn of the twenty-first century provides a useful point of orientation for thinking about Müller’s essay and the aims of the Tübingen conference in general . In Twilight Memories, Huyssen argues that the growing concerns with memory, monuments, and commemoration in the German context can be read as a crisis of conceptions of temporality. Whereas the turn of the twentieth...