Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

4. Interview with Ernest Wichner

4 Interview with Ernest Wichner Valentina Glajar and Bettina Brandt Ernest Wichner (b. 1952, Guttenbrunn, Romania) is a founding member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. Wichner left Romania in 1975 and has been living in Berlin ever since. He is a writer, translator, and editor, and he has served as the director of the Literaturhaus (Literary Institute, Berlin) since 2003. In 2004, Wichner accompanied Herta Müller and the poet Oskar Pastior on a research trip to the Ukraine, where they visited the remainders of a campsite to which Pastior had been deported in 1945 and where he worked as a forced laborer until 1949. The interview was conducted in German via e-mail in March 2011 and then later translated into English. Valentina Glajar: Mr. Wichner, Bettina and I would like to thank you for agreeing to participate in this interview and for sharing your experiences with our readers. As German writers from Banat, Romania, you and Herta Müller seem to have had a similar trajectory. You come from the same region, grew up in traditional ethnic German households, left your birthplaces to get an education, and studied German language and literature at the University of Timişoara. Do you recall when your paths first crossed? What was your impression of Herta Müller at the time? Interview with Ernest Wichner 37 Ernest Wichner: In September 1968, I went for a weekend to a parish festival in Nitzkydorf with a friend from high school; we were both attending the (German-language) Lenau Lyzeum in Timişoara, and on Sunday night at the ball this friend introduced me to Herta Müller. We danced together and talked about how we liked literature and both were writing poems. I remember clearly how Herta Müller complained that her girlfriends were teasing her because she wrote poetry. At the time, that came as a surprise to me because until then I had thought that only boys were picked on and ridiculed when they wrote poetry, that it was not considered very masculine. That girls or young women (Herta was fifteen and I was sixteen years old at the time) could be mocked for the same reason was news to me. VG: You are one of the founding members of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German-Romanian writers that also included Richard Wagner, William Totok, Johann Lippet, Gerhard Ortinau, and Rolf Bossert. In 1992 you compiled and published texts by these authors from the early years in Romania in Ein Pronomen wurde verhaftet. Müller was not a member of your group but was closely associated with it. In what ways did Müller interact with the Aktionsgruppe? In what kind of group activities did Müller not participate—that is, what made her not a “member”? Please tell us about your first impressions regarding her very early poetic writings. EW: Indeed, Herta Müller was not a member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. That might have had to do with the fact that we were a group of young men who were regularly discussing politics, talking about the relationship between literature and society, about Marxism and Neomarxism. That is why we called ourselves the “Aktionsgruppe”: we did indeed think that literature should have an activist impulse on society, should be willing to intervene. We wanted to change society’s structures through literature ’s ability to change the structure of consciousness. These kinds of thoughts were not on Herta Müller’s mind at the time. She came to our meetings and listened but never said anything. We also thought that her early poems, from the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies , were a little naive—were not what we called and considered “engaged.” Besides, she probably thought that we were male chauvinists, know-it-alls. What we were saying was very interesting to her, but our 38 Glajar and Brandt attitude must have alienated her. A few years later—the Aktionsgruppe had been broken apart in the fall of 1975—they arrested Richard Wagner, Gerhard Ortinau, William Totok, and Gerhard Csejka, the literary critic from Bucharest who had been our editor at the Neue Literatur journal, and the Securitate in Timişoara interrogated them for several days. After they were released, they rearrested William Totok and detained him for eight months. These arrests were a clear signal that we could not carry on with the Aktionsgruppe...