Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

8. From Fact to Fiction

8From Fact to Fiction Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel Olivia Spiridon The novel Atemschaukel [The Hunger Angel] marks an important turning point in the career of Herta Müller—an author who fought her way from writing literary texts with the regional touch of a small minority into the center of German mainstream literature. In 2009, the year of its publication , Atemschaukel became the focus of attention for the most prestigious German-language newspapers: Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, and taz. Its reception intensified further when Müller received the Nobel Prize for literature in the same year. In this chapter I will discuss the novel’s success in connection with Müller’s treatment of the deportation of ethnic Germans from Southeastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and examine to what extent the particularity of the process of transformation of a historical fact, the res gestae, into fictional/narrative text, a historia rerum gestarum, has facilitated the novel’s extraordinary reception. By discussing the genesis of this novel, its poetic achievement, and the debates it has generated, I will investigate the particular function of Atemschaukel to “enlarge experience” (Wild) in relation to the historical deportation to Russia.1 “The deportation to Russia” is a historical term to describe the trans- From Fact to Fiction 131 portation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from Central and Southeastern Europe to forced labor camps in the USSR during the last months of World War II. Affected by these measures were civilians of German nationality from the regions east of the rivers Oder and Neisse, the Baltic states, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria . It is difficult to offer exact figures. Because of the paucity of historical sources, the estimates oscillate between 270,000 and well over 360,000, with an average mortality rate of 20 percent (Beer 465). It is estimated that 70,000–80,000 were from Romania (Gündisch and Beer 221). The road to the collective denunciation of the Germans had already been paved years before. On the one hand, Nazi Germany found fertile ground for ideological penetration in the Banat and Transylvania as only very few German-Romanian politicians and intellectuals resisted the Nazi ideology .2 On the other hand, the German minority in Romania got caught in the millstones of international agreements. The treaties between the Third Reich and Romania, a consequence of their political alliance during the 1930s, serve as an illustrative example. Through the economic conventions of March 23, 1939, and May 29, 1940, and finally through Romania’s accession to the Axis pact (Germany, Italy, and Japan) on November 23, 1940, the country became an integral part of Germany’s economic and war plans. On May 12, 1943, Germany and Romania signed a fatal treaty for GermanRomanians ; it stipulated the legal possibility for the recruitment of ethnic Germans from Romania into the infamous Waffen-SS (Gündisch and Beer 205–10).3 On August 23, 1944, Romania switched sides and became Russia ’s ally. About sixty thousand Germans from Romania were still serving in the Waffen-SS and the German Wehrmacht at that time.4 January 1945 saw the sudden deportation of Romania’s German minority to the USSR for the purpose of reconstruction “on the basis of the Soviet demands, based on the truce of September 12, 1944, and the Soviet-Romanian economic convention of January 1945” (Gündisch and Beer 214, 219).5 Women between the ages of nineteen and thirty, as well as men between seventeen and forty-five years of age, were abruptly recruited on the basis of so-called national registers, which had been updated in the autumn of 1944 (Gündisch and Beer 219). Inquiries in the Soviet archives make it clear that the Soviet plans for the postwar period, in which reparations 132 Spiridon were to play a significant role, date back to the defeat of the German troops in the battle of Stalingrad, the turning point on the eastern front (Beer 465). Because of their ethnic affiliation, German-Romanians, regardless of their political affiliation or individual responsibility, were collectively held responsible for the destruction inflicted by the German troops during their war of aggression against the USSR. The Romanian authorities actively took part in the implementation of the Soviet order of deportation . The theory of collective guilt, the official political...