Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

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"I believe there is a kind of literature throughout the world, the literature of biography that runs in parallel with extreme events, in parallel with the authors' lives. For example in the 1950s, the gulag was present in Eastern Europe in certain forms. [Or] for instance, the labor camps. And then we have the national-socialist era, Hitler's time, the destruction of the Jews, a topic which many authors have described in parallel with their own biographies I believe this type of literature exists everywhere, from Cuba to China." Herta Mueller, from the Radio Free Europe, 1999.

Herta Mueller, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, was born in 1953 in the German-speaking town Nitzkydorf in Romania.

Her father served in the Waffen SS during World War II. After the war ended, her mother was deported to a work camp in the Soviet Union for five years.

Mueller studied German and Romanian literature at the university and joined the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German speaking writers who opposed Ceausescu's dictatorship and required freedom of speech.

After studying, she worked as a translator but lost her job since she did not cooperate with the secret police, the Securitate.

Her first work, a collection of short stories Niederungen (Nadir) in 1982, was censored in Romania but smuggled and published in Germany two years later. In 1984, she published her first novel, Druckender Tango (Oppressive Tango).

Since she openly criticized Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the harsh treatment of Romanian Germans, her work was banned from being published in Romanian.

In 1987 she escaped Ceausescu’s Romania to Germany and became known to a wider literary world. She moved to Berlin with her husband, author Richard Wagner.

Mueller has written nineteen books, and in 1996, her novel The Land of the Green Plums won the German Kleist and the Irish IMPAC awards. The novel tells about the lives of a group of university students from provincial villages, who come to the city only to realize that life there is in many ways as somber and terrifying as it was in the country. Those searching freedom of expression and thought are branded enemies of the state and must perish. The only options are to either give in to the will of the state or emigrate, a privilege only a few have.

Mueller’s terse and protocol-like prose exposes the bleakness of the outer and inner landscapes that seem to merge, like in Traveling on One Leg:

"This loose summer Irene felt for the first time that the water's flowing away, far out, was closer than the sand under her feet. Irene saw the notice--"Danger Landslide"--at the foot of the stairs to the steep shore, where the earth crumbled. It stood there as it had all the other summers. For the first time this loose summer the warning had more to do with Irene and less with the shore. The steep shore was as if built of crumbled earth and sand, built by soldiers so suction couldn't come into the country, into the heart of the country from anywhere."

The novel focuses on Irene, who has emigrated from Romania to Germany, where she struggles to maintain her sanity while entangled in a doubtfully romantic quadrangle with three men. Her uprootedness and anxiety vis a vis the refugee's intimidating bureaucracy of her new homeland, her impressions of Berlin and her restrained homesickness are rendered with exact and unsentimental observations.

Oppression, displacement and exile have been not only Muller’s fate, but also that of million of others who have suffered under the dictatorship of Ceausescu in particular, and Communism in general. Symbolically, the announcement of the prize coincided with the Wall’s fall twenty years ago.

Muller’s work is not only a crucial testimony against current upsurges of Ost-algia (a survey published this September in Stern magazine found that 15 percent of the Germans long for the Wall) it is a warning not to take democracy and the privileges that come with it for granted.