Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

Introduction

Introduction Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar Literature speaks with everyone individually—it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book which expects nothing in return, other than that we think and feel. Herta Müller, speech held at the Nobel banquet in the Stockholm City Hall, December 10, 2009 Two languages inform the writings of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller: German as well as Romanian bear on Müller’s novels, essays, and collage poetry. Born in 1953 in German-speaking Nitzkydorf—a Banat-Swabian village in southwestern Romania—Müller grew up as part of a linguistic and ethnic minority in a Communist state. Her writing career began with a fictionalized portrayal of the village of her childhood, an isolated backward community deeply influenced by National Socialism and characterized by narrow-minded ethnocentrism. Romanian literary censorship, which had dramatically increased in the 1980s, delayed the publication of Müller’s first collection of short stories for several years. When Niederungen was finally published in 1982, the censor’s fingerprints marked the text.1 An uncensored Niederungen was published by Rotbuch in the Fed- 2 Brandt and Glajar eral Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1984. An English translation, Nadirs (published by the University of Nebraska Press), came out in 1999. In many ways Niederungen is a typical Dorfgeschichte [village tale], though the defining characteristics of this genre have all been distorted. The idyllic harmony of village life and unspoiled nature turn into a world of alienated relationships due to alcoholism, abuse, cruelty, and hate. The Banat-Swabian environment penetrates Müller’s autobiographically inspired writings, but the writer deviates poetically from the facts of her own experiences through a style she calls “sich erfindende Wahrnehmung ” [an invented and reinventing perception] that mediates between perception and its refracted form, the invented perception. Müller’s fictionalized stories brutally exposed life in the rural village; hence they offended the Banat-Swabians in Romania as well as the very vocal Banater Schwaben Landsmannschaft (Organization of Banat Swabians ) in Germany and led to scathing critiques in the Banat-Swabian press. A few of these reviews had actually been penned by informants of the Securitate (Romanian secret police). In particular the source “Voicu” was instrumental in discrediting her texts. In his review of Müller’s Niederungen , “Voicu” concludes: “Critică şi iar critică. O critică atît de destructivă, încît te intrebi, ce rost au aceste texte?!” [Criticism and more criticism. This criticism is so destructive that one has to wonder what the purpose of these texts is] (ACNSAS 10). After an unsuccessful and officially undocumented attempt to recruit Müller for the Securitate, a file on Herta Müller (I233477, “Cristina”) was opened in March 1983, a dossier that eventually would grow to an astonishing 914 pages. Müller simply told her recruiting officer: “N-am caracterul ” [I don’t have the character for this (kind of work)]. This statement apparently infuriated the secret service officer to such a degree that he shredded the recruitment letter that Müller had refused to sign and threw the snippets on the floor, only to gather them all up again when he remembered that the failed recruitment attempt would have to be explained to his superior. This incident, of course, also highlights the moral quality of Müller’s writings. The Communist discourse of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was imposed in all the languages spoken in Romania—Romanian as well Introduction 3 as German and Hungarian, the language of another ethnic and linguistic minority. Müller has a complex relationship not just to (Ceaușescu’s) Romanian, which she learned as a teenager as a second language, but also to German, especially the German of her Banat-Swabian village, in which the undefeated discourse of National Socialism seemed to ceaselessly carry on. The result is Müller’s characteristic writing style, often associated with the fremde Blick, or the “strange gaze.” Faced with increased surveillance, a defamation campaign, and ongoing threats on her life, Müller finally decided to leave Romania. As the result of a bilateral agreement signed in 1978 between the Romanian dictator and the FRG’s then chancellor, Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, Müller was one of the up to twelve thousand ethnic Germans who were granted an exit visa every year for the price of around 8,000...