Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

6. “Die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen”

6“Die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen” Herta Müller’s Herztier Brigid Haines Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. (Arendt 475) Loneliness is an unnatural and unwanted state of isolation in which the individual cannot thrive.1 It is not to be confused with solitude, which may be sought and savored. Loneliness is often seen as a feature of modernity, associated with the breakdown of traditional communities and extended family structures. In the second half of the twentieth century it was identified more as a product of Western capitalist societies, which tend to atom- 88 Haines ize individuals, than of Eastern bloc societies. The latter attempted to unite their citizens through socialist values and central planning, while in practice often uniting them in disaffection. Many retreated from the public sphere into a Nischengesellschaft [niche society], attempting to lead “perfectly normal lives” (Fulbrook 129–50) and mocking authority in private through jokes. Indeed there is currently a wave of nostalgia for the community values lost after the fall of communism in such countries as Hungary, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, and the German Democratic Republic, whose citizens are now prey to the insecurities resulting from the introduction of market forces (Boym). The works of Herta Müller, however, repeatedly make the case that no such retreat was possible in Ceauşescu’s Romania because the penetration of the private sphere, even of the bodies and minds of its citizens by intrusive power, was so complete. This resulted in “die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen” (Müller, “Jedes Wort”). The phrase comes from Müller’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech, in which she thematizes how totalitarian power thwarts the desire for intimacy and isolates individuals. The examples she gives come from various times and places, including the Banat-Swabian village in which she was born, where her mother could only express tenderness indirectly through a gesture; the Romanian factory from whose employ Müller was sacked for refusing to collaborate with the Securitate; the Ukrainian village where, in the late 1940s, her friend, the poet Oskar Pastior, half starved from incarceration in the Gulag, found soup and a surprise gift; and the 1980s Securitate interrogation cell. In linking these scenes, a move repeated in many of her works, Müller links the experience of life in Ceauşescu’s Romania, not so much to other contemporaneous Eastern bloc regimes during the Cold War, but to Nazi-controlled Europe and to Stalin’s Soviet Union. In other words, Müller repeatedly connects the dictatorships of the twentieth century by highlighting the loneliness and the cost of survival of their victims. She is not the first to do this: in The Origins of Totalitarianism Hanna Arendt argued that while tyranny, which had always existed, isolates individuals, totalitarian rule also invades private life, producing loneliness, which is a far more desperate condition: “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity “Die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen” 89 only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation , man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time” (Arendt 477). Those familiar with Müller’s works will find this description of disorientation entirely apposite. But both Müller and Arendt also locate the limits of totalitarian power in the paradox of loneliness. Loneliness is, for Arendt, “contrary to the basic requirements of the human condition” but also, because of the fact of mortality, “one of the fundamental experiences of every human life” (Arendt 475). Mortality is, for Arendt, linked to natality, which mounts a daily challenge to the master narratives of totalitarianism: totalitarian rule claims its legitimacy from ideology based on history or nature; however , while subordinating the individual to the point of rendering...