“who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” Nobel Prize citation

There was predictable incredulity in parts of the British media when the – to them – little known writer Herta Müller was announced as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. But Müller is well known across Europe, especially in Romania, where she was born and brought up, and in Germany, her home since 1987. She is associated above all with the themes of exile, dictatorship and political oppression, and prized for her unique and extraordinary prose style.

Müller’s first work to be published in the West, Nadirs, set the tone for what was to follow. A set of bleak, sometimes grotesquely comic sketches of Swabian village life in the Banat area of Romania written from the point of view of a child, it is an anti-idyll: the traditional German values of order, cleanliness and discipline have become perverted by cruelty, corruption and hypocrisy. As she matures, the protagonist sets herself apart from the community’s ideal of ‘Heimat’ (homeland), sensing that it is based on lies and silences surrounding the period of the Third Reich. As Müller, whose own father fought in the SS, a fact which haunts her to this day, later declared, ‘The first dictatorship I knew was the Swabian village in the Banat’.

The works which followed were also mainly ‘autofictional’, a term she herself uses, that is, based on her own experiences and memories but also highly fictionalised so that they have a wide applicability. While they contain many indirect, oblique references to the terrors of life and the abuses of power in Ceaucescu’s Romania of the 1970s and 1980s, her vivid invocations of persecution and the experience of being interrogated in such works as The Passport, The Land of Green Plums, and The Appointment allow links to be made with other literatures of trauma, in particular Holocaust and Gulag literature.

Müller’s uniqueness comes from the fact that, while portraying a grim reality, her works are poetic, surreal, plot-light and made up of images and fragments. The Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu describes the relationships between Müller’s subject matter, the ‘baroque and criminal dictatorship of Romania’, and the finished prose as like that between a pearl and the grain of sand which caused it. The critic John J. White talks of her fictions being a ‘palimpsest of the political’. They treat at one remove the reality of Ceasucescu’s Romania, which she writes about directly in her essays, for example the

widespread hunger, the appalling plight of the Roma or the barbaric family policy which required women to have a minimum of five children and subjected them to gynaecological examinations if they were suspected of using birth control.

Müller’s is an insecure world. Part of this is to do with her two languages and the linguistic drift between them. Her German is pure, old fashioned – hardly surprising when you consider that she grew up in an enclave cut off from the Americanised German of the Federal Republic of Germany – yet strangely new and innovative because of her word play and because she incorporates images from her second language, Romanian, which is more sensuous and metaphorical. Take the example of the pheasant: in German it is an arrogant bird which struts around proudly, while in Romanian it is a loser which, because it cannot fly, is easily shot. Müller is fascinated by this gap between languages, the fact that identities are derived from, as well as expressed in, language, and are therefore fluid. She tends to inhabit this strange linguistic in-between space.

But the insecurity is also the result of terror. Her politics and poetics are summed up in a statement borrowed from fellow Romanian, Eugène Ionesco, ‘So let’s live. But they don’t let us live. So let’s live in the detail’. This describes a reaction to totalising systems, whether literary or political. The individual targeted by the secret service can only resist – indeed, can only remain sane and survive – by focusing on the moment, on the detail, for organised resistance is impossible. Müller despises the teleological and utopian thinking which underlies both religion and communism because utopias always turn to terror and crush the individual: ‘I have no belief, neither in a God in heaven, nor in an ideal state’. She herself was subjected to interrogations and, just as Timothy Garton Ash published his Stasi file and his reflections on it, has recently published extracts from her ‘Securitate’ file in Cristina and her Dummy, alleging that she is still an object of scrutiny by the current Romanian secret police. Müller describes vividly the feeling of powerlessness which comes from not knowing in the morning if you would still be at liberty in the evening and the fear of being plucked off the street at any moment. The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment explore the psychological terror of being subject to surveillance and interrogations. The former novel thematises the difficulty of keeping friendship alive under these circumstances, while the latter deals with betrayal in the most intimate relationships as a result of political pressure.

But detail is also the key to her style. Müller’s sentences are short, simple and laconic; she sometimes even eschews the paragraph. The world does not appear to her protagonists to be joined up; instead they observe, often without understanding or apparent feeling. Irene in Traveling on One Leg, a traumatised survivor of an unnamed eastern European regime who has fled to the West, cuts words out of newspapers and combines them in new formations to form word-collages, echoing the violence done to her, the

displacement she has undergone, and the lack of meaning in her life (Müller too creates and publishes collages). Müller’s narratives are similarly fragmented; they are a reaction to the prescriptive norms of socialist realism, the dominant literary mode of the early years of the eastern bloc states with its positive heroes and relentlessly upbeat political messages. Müller proposes instead an extreme individualism and a focus on the now.

One example will serve to show both the simplicity of Müller’s style and the depth of meaning she achieves through highlighting details. An enigmatic and supremely simple statement at the beginning of The Land of Green Plums, ‘To this day, I can’t really picture a grave. Only a belt, a window, a nut, and a rope’, gradually makes sense over the course of the novel when the reader learns of the deaths of the narrator’s four friends: the first and last from suicide by hanging as a result of political pressure, the second from ‘suicide’ by jumping (or being pushed) out of a window, and the third, the narrator’s friend who betrays her, from cancer (which first appears as a nut-shaped growth). The novel is based on Müller’s own experiences as a young adult in Timisoara, where she worked as a translator before being sacked for refusing to work for the Securitate. Müller was a member of a group of writers called the ‘Banat Action Group’, which was targeted by the authorities and several of whose members ended up dead, while only Müller and her then husband Richard Wagner managed to survive by fleeing to Germany, where a Romanian friend, who later died of cancer, still attempted to betray her. By the end of the novel, the apparently mundane and random details, the belt, the window, the nut and the rope, have achieved extraordinary poetic and pathetic resonance through the autobiographical underpinnings and the tragedy of political persecution.

Müller’s latest work, Everything I Own I Carry With Me, appeared this summer and will soon be published in English. The first of her novels not to spring from personal experience, it is based on the memories of the poet Oskar Pastior, who died before the work could be written, and of Müller’s own mother and the inhabitants of her home village. Its subject is the deportations of thousands of Romanian Germans to Soviet Gulags after 1945 by the Red Army as an act of revenge because many of them, such as Müller’s own father, had been enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich. Müller’s protagonist, however, is a seventeen-year-old boy, Leo, who at first welcomes the trip as a chance to escape the constrictions of life in the village where his burgeoning sexuality – he is gay – is becoming problematic. The novel covers the five years of his exile, during which he comes to regard the camp as a kind of home, and his difficult homecoming. The rest of his life is blighted by his experiences: he writes in old age, in Graz, where he emigrated after his marriage of eleven years failed because of his emotional deadness: ‘My wife married a coffin’. His dreams many years later are not of the camp but of failing to find it again, ‘Why do I desire the right to my misery during the night? Why can’t I be free?’

The novel does not supply a panorama of life in the Gulag; it is not an historical novel in that sense. Instead, it focuses on details – the cold, the hunger, the different types of lice, the inadequate clothing, the fight for bread, the qualities of the cement which penetrates the workers’ clothing, the degradation. It charts the gradual stripping away of individuality, of ideas of decency, and of masculinity and femininity until humans are reduced to objects. It is not relentlessly bleak, however, but full of moments of human contact, lyricism and pathos, for example when the narrator is welcomed into the home of a local Russian woman and fed because he reminds her of her absent son; when he finds a ten Rouble note, spends it all on food and is sick because his stomach cannot take the excess; when he and his workmate bathe in the lovely yellow sand gathered for building materials; when he takes pride in shovelling; when the inmates celebrate new year with a dance, while thinking of their families at home. But again, it is Müller’s clear, simple, poetic prose and estranging compound nouns which haunt the reader: Leo is accompanied at all times by the ‘hunger-angel’; he survives the ‘skin-and-bone-time’; he is full of resentment at the ‘substitute-brother’ who has been born while he is away; on his return, he is a ‘not- toucher’, unable to reintegrate into the community. One reviewer commented on the ‘tone of forced sobriety, as though again and again between two sentences, shouting had been suppressed’; another described the work as ‘an attempt to speak from inside hell’.

It is a moot point whether the award of the Nobel Prize to Müller was intended to highlight the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989 and the subsequent domino effect of the fall of the eastern bloc states. Perhaps this is true, but it does not detract from her achievement. Müller’s works will endure because they are a manifesto against forgetting. In prose which is utterly without nostalgia, she uncovers and memorialises the uncomfortable past. She writes the history of minorities, which is the history of Europe; shows Germans as victims as well as perpetrators; and, as the Nobel citation says, bears witness to the suffering of the dispossessed.