Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics

9. “Wir können höchstens mit dem, waswir sehen, etwas zusammenstellen"

9“Wir können höchstens mit dem, was wir sehen, etwas zusammenstellen” Herta Müller’s Collages Beverley Driver Eddy In his critique of Herta Müller’s Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen, Anton G. Leitner has remarked that he considered the form of her collage poems, which he refers to as Schnipsellyrik, or cut-out poetry, trite and outdated ; their genius lies “in the concurrence of fortuitous and calculated word deployment by a writer who can wield not just a pair of scissors.”1 There have been many attempts to decipher Müller’s collages; many of them, like Leitner’s, concentrating on the texts and largely ignoring the artworks that accompany them.2 Some note the similarities in appearance between her collage texts and those of blackmail letters and address such questions as, Does the form demonstrate a de-personalization of the process of writing? or Is it an attempt to maintain anonymity? Others note that Müller cuts her words out from magazines and newspapers, much as repressive state censors do, and maintain that her collages therefore vis- 156 Eddy ibly reflect the restoration and triumph of free speech. Leitner is correct in his critique in seeing a bond between Müller’s work and the techniques of the Dadaists/surrealists; he oversimplifies the issue, however, when he appears to fault Müller for blindly adopting a trite methodology. In this chapter I will examine Müller’s collages as total art works of picture and text, first by tracing their origin and development as a favored literary/ artistic genre; then by showing their development through the three published collections of collages—Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm (1993), Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (2000), and Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (2005); and finally by indicating how Müller’s use of the collage form reflects her own views on literature.3 Although she created the first collages as we know them shortly after her move from Romania to Berlin, Müller had both written poetry and cut details from magazine and newspaper pictures while she was living in Romania. Her German grade-school teacher has recalled that when she was fourteen to fifteen years old, Müller possessed a thick notebook in which she wrote her poetry (Knorz); her first published poem appeared when she was sixteen.4 Although critical readers would agree with Müller that these early poems are, for the most part, “juvenile” [pueril] (Eddy 332), lines such as “Im Tische singt / der Holzwurm” [In the table the woodworm is singing],5 “mandelbittres Lächeln / habe ich gekostet” [I have tasted almond-bitter smiles],6 and “der Wind sucht . . . / auf zertretenem Gras / unsere Sonnenuhr” [The wind seeks our sundial on trampled grass]7 reveal that Müller was already developing her own poetical language. She has declared that she stopped writing poetry upon entering the university; Müller’s collage poems, then, signal a belated return to these early lyrical roots. The development of Müller’s artwork took a two-pronged route. A major impetus came from her desire to create her own art. She has commented on her frustration at being able to draw with her eyes but not with her hands.8 In compensation for that, she turned to the personal pleasure of cutting pictures out of magazines and newspapers as room adornments. One of these early pictures was of Kafka’s ear.9 Viewed in isolation, Kafka ’s rather oddly shaped ear shows sensitivity, vulnerability, and transparency ; this small body part captures Kafka’s essence as a writer. As Mül- “Wir können höchstens mit dem” 157 ler puts it, “When you look at a detail, you see only a part of a whole, but I believe you see more deeply from this part than when you view the surface of the entire object” (Eddy 330). In another example, Müller tells how a friend of hers cut Ceauşescu’s eye from a photograph, mounted it on brown wrapping paper, and wrote beneath it, “The Eye of the Dictator.” She remarks: “We laughed, laughed resoundingly, because the eye threatened us even more now. With this surveillance through the cut-out eye, [this friend] had stumbled on surveillance itself. It was palpable and no bigger than a fingernail. . . . It was a bad joke.” As a result, “We tried to hold on to...