Unpacking the Suitcases: Autofiction and Metaphor in Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel

Packing his improvised suitcase – made out of a gramophone case – seventeen-year-old Leo, the protagonist of Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel, takes several books with him to a Soviet labour camp in the Ukrainian steppe. Among these, there are “[k]eine Romane, denn die liest man nur einmal und nie wieder” (13). Contrary to the narrator’s conviction, by analysing the genre, Müller’s writing technique, and the work’s inherent controversy, which stems from its ambiguous relation vis-à-vis fiction and reality, I have found Atemschaukel to be certainly worth reading more than once. Each new reading can be seen as a metaphorical unpacking of Leo’s suitcase that may reveal an entirely different vision of the work. It is not just the newly discovered relationship of the work to the real and fictional worlds, but also a new state of things, that can be perceived through careful analysis of the novel’s language.

Given the potential heterogeneity of meaning, in my analysis of the text, I set out to problematize the claims of some reviewers about the documentary precision of Müller’s novel, while simultaneously presenting a coherent vision of the work’s poetics through interpretation of its key conceptual metaphors. The thesis of this essay is that precision and unambiguousness are essential – yet foreign and parasitic – elements in the otherwise highly poetic autofictional work. The autofictional text serves the purpose of self-preservation for the protagonist and develops a key trope for creative writing (breathswing) as a form of resistance to oppression. However, the novel does not comply with the classical notion of autofiction as requiring that the author’s personal life be fictionalized: this has led some critics to claim that the problem with the narration in Atemschaukel lies in its inauthenticity (e.g. Radisch).

Herta Müller was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Atemschaukel, published several months before, was immediately proclaimed one of Müller’s major works (Gauss). It was lauded for its meticulousness and precision on the one hand and for its rich metaphorical imagery on the other. Some critics went so far as to claim that Müller’s first-person narrative novel told the true story of the Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, here reimagined as the fictional Leo Auberg (Jung). It is true that, beginning in 2001, Pastior shared his experience of living in the labour camp in the Soviet Ukraine with Müller. They even planned to write a book together and agreed on the title. But in 2006 Pastior died, and after a long period of reflection, Müller decided to write Atemschaukel.

The novel’s background and the larger context of critical analysis on Müller’s oeuvre greatly influenced the work’s immediate interpretation and appreciation. Upon its publication in 2009, it was not uncommon to speak about the novel’s Genauigkeit and Präzision. Atemschaukel was said to demonstrate “sachgebannte Genauigkeit” (Naumann) and “wortgenaue Sprache” (Braun), because what the novel was considered to tell its reader was allegedly “alles wahr, ist alles so gewesen, ob nun das Wort Roman auf dem Buch steht oder nicht” (Jung).

Having employed Pastior as a main witness and her mother’s silence as an inspiration (Müller, “Es war”), Müller achieves a semblance of testimony. To highlight its strong claims to reality, the novel was often identified as a report (Borchert), as a document, and even as “protokollarische Poesie” (Naumann). This view can be supported by the fact that a lot of the details and important images in the novel do come from Pastior, and both Pastior and Müller visited the former labour camp in Ukraine. In her notes for the novel, Müller made a meticulous outline of the situation in the camps, and Pastior provided her with a detailed schematic of the Stalinist labour camp (“Herta Müller”). In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Müller speaks of “die fast monströse Genauigkeit der Lagerbilder” (“Akte”) in Pastior’s memories, of which she has carefully taken note. As one of the critics...