A Village as Small as a Thimble
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The Village on the Edge of the World, Herta Müller, trans. Kate McNaughton, Granta, 2026, 256 pages, £16.99.
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As a child, Herta Müller ate flowers. She lumbered around the valley and stuffed her face with acacia, mulberry, poplars. Under the banner of an endless sky – the German word for sky is Himmel, the same as the word for heaven – she ate so many plants that it is fortunate, she writes in The Village on the Edge of the World, that she never ate a deadly nightshade or lily of the valley. The Nobel prize-winning writer wished to become the flowers; she imagined the secret lives of flowers, picturing them ‘prowling’ at night before returning to their places in the soil for sunrise. She wished to be like the wandering acacia, free to go where she pleased. But flowers are not the only objects of consumption in Müller’s oeuvre. Words, as Müller writes in her memoir, are food; words grow ‘round the mouth’.
Herta Müller was born in 1953 in a German-speaking minority in Romania’s Banat region, where over thirty years of her life was strained and crumpled under Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In a socialist dictatorship, words are food and food poison: a person requires sustenance, yet expression is a deadly delicacy, and more often the sickening, ‘tinny’ Party slogans must be swallowed. In her memoir, as in many of her novels, Müller fixates on the mouth which becomes metonymic for the whole body, indeed the soul.
The memoir consists of a conversation between Müller and her editor, Angelika Klammer, who together discuss many of Müller’s works and the process of their creation alongside life in Ceaușescu’s Romania. What is evident from the beginning is the absurdity, for example, of Müller’s immiseration working at a clothing factory, getting fired (but never being unemployed, as unemployment cannot exist under socialism), and working in a different factory before returning once more to the clothing factory (and getting fired again). She recalls sneaking notes inside the pockets of coats bound for Italy, writing, ‘Marry me, ti aspetto’, in hope for an escape. She describes the torment and interrogations she endured after being accused of prostitution over these notes. When she finally does receive a passport to West Germany in 1987, the border agent at the train station stamps her passport with the date ‘29 February 1987’. It is not a leap-year; the regime must inflict one final blow to the writer before she leaves causing her untold distress in explaining the non-existent date to German border guards.
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Heimatliteratur – homeland literature: a word that functions like a misapprehension for Müller. She grew up in a place of splintered identities. The Banat is split like a clover between Romania, Hungary and Serbia along the Carpathian basin, and Müller’s German-speaking village rose ‘as small as a thimble’ in a sea of mixed identities. Languages formed islands, each a site of dissension; ‘To me,’ she writes, ‘the word “homeland” carried different connotations…it consisted of prowling plants, of the hereafter up in the sky, of your skin scorching and freezing and the bleak exhaustion of our village grief.’ Müller’s imagination is a form of survival in its surrealism, where flowers are beings with secret lives, where a child must endure ‘village grief’. The movement between ‘freezing’ and ‘scorching’ too echoes the binaries that collapse any possibility for selfhood or sanity under Ceaușescu: absurdity is profuse, even necessary, in the presence of an even starker violence.
As an adult, Müller and many of her friends fall under the scrutiny of the Party, often being summoned to ruthless interrogations. What many of her novels share with her memoir’s account of such interrogations is the nonsense behind every Party members’ actions. The Major, her fictionalised interrogator in The Land of Green Plums, forces the narrator to recite poetry, just as her interrogator in real life forces her to recite little rhyme schemes. ‘My fatherland is an apple core,’ she must sing in real life, ‘’twixt sickle and star we pitch and yaw.’ She is never summoned to the state, nor to the police, but rather to her Vaterland. If Müller’s oeuvre captures the absurdities of this dogmatic regime, then Heimatliteratur is the paradox of village and fatherland, the intractability of home and violence.
Müller’s relationship between her homeland and the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, is twisted and strained. Reflecting on one of her interrogations with a secret service agent, whom she dubs her secret service agent, she is forced to eat eight hard-boiled eggs. When Müller reads her real Securitate file for the first time in 2008, she is shocked at the extent of their control, at the hidden wires in her apartment and the years and years of surveillance. Her shock does not stem from ignorance; her surprise emerges as a mixture of confusion and horror. Beyond its skin-crawling implications, to expel such effort watching and listening to her makes little sense to Müller. Absurdity and violence are intimate friends in the world of the Ceauseșcu regime. In a state lacking the material resources to sustain its population, children must cut up newspapers to use as toilet paper. But when Ceaușescu’s face is printed on every newspaper, children must be careful to cut around it so that it does not end up in piles of human refuse.
The self is routinely eroded and degraded under the regime. Indeed, the original German title for her 1997 novel The Appointment is Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, or I would have rather not met myself today. In their conversation in The Village on the Edge of the World, Müller and her editor muse over the differences between the original German text and the English translations, along with the brutality of earlier editors’ deletions. Entire short stories from her debut publication Nadirs were cut under the guise of literary revisions, made for the sake of style. Yet this style, Müller explains, belonged to the Stalinist style guide, under which her first editor operated. ‘When he took something out,’ Müller recalls, ‘he said it had to be “eliminated”.’ Words, like people, must be eliminated. But Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet captures something more elusive, and perhaps more sinister: the erosion of the self. I would have rather not met myself today is denial. It is a refusal to recognise the self – or the body that has been co-opted as the self – in the mirror.
Words create paradoxes with each breath. As part of a German-speaking family, Müller is keenly aware of how meaning changes between her mother tongue and Romanian, a language she does not begin learning until she is a teenager. Learning Romanian away from her village is a source of great heartsickness for the teenage Müller, a terrible ‘insecurity’ and ‘inferiority’. So too is the feeling of being away from home, of being untethered from a village as small as a thimble. As she learns Romanian, she takes notice of small absurdities, which accumulate over a sentence: like Himmel in German, ‘Cer’ in Romanian means ‘sky’, or ‘heaven’, while an official request is ‘cerere’. So, she writes, ‘an official request in Romania is a petition to the heavens – in other words, there’s no point in making it at all.’ Perhaps the most potent of her observations about language is a ‘never-spoken word: “loneliness”. Loneliness [doesn’t] exist in our dialect,’ she writes. Although alleenig, or ‘alone’, exists in German, being alone is not the same as loneliness. ‘I didn’t see myself as a writer,’ she explains. ‘I had started to write because my father had died, and because the harassment of the secret service was growing ever more unbearable.’ Writing is a path out of loneliness and the unbearable nature of surveillance, of being stalked and tormented by the Securitate.
But longing is also present in the sentiment Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet. The desire to eat flowers, to imagine them as beings capable of wandering freely at night, without the surveillance of a harsh, omnipresent Party eye, reflects a longing for something else. To prefer to not meet or encounter oneself is to long for escape. But in many cases Müller resists linking her imagination to escape, favouring a matter-of-fact explanation for how her child’s eye viewed the world, especially life and death: ‘I thought: in your life you eat the flour from, say, thirty bags of grain, or fifty or a hundred,’ and so ‘the wheat feeds you until the earth gobbles you up.’ For Müller, ‘death has always meant that the earth devours you.’ Consumption – eating, feeding, gobbling, devouring – is an absurd, endless act, one that is part of death’s cycle. If language, and words specifically, is so intimately linked with the mouth and consumption, then words are also entrenched with death.
This link between words and death should come as no surprise. In her memoir, Müller recalls arranging a clandestine meeting with an editor from West Berlin to complete the Nadirs manuscript. They meet in the nearly deserted Poiana Brașov ski resort in the Carpathians in the summer, and their encounter is marked by a disorienting schism: Müller is ‘an Eastern child of the State and jaded by harassment’, whereas the editor is ‘an ideological ’68er from the West’. Her editor cannot comprehend the danger in which Müller places herself over their ‘conspiracy’ in the mountains. Nor does the editor recognise the oddity of meeting ‘by chance’ at a ski resort in the summer.
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Müller must write. ‘I had to make sure that I did actually exist,’ she explains. In The Land of Green Plums, first published in 1994, four friends must confront the paradox of their own existence under Ceaușescu. The novel begins when Lola, a girl at their school, is found dead. The friends refuse to believe the Party narrative that Lola has killed herself. In her memoir, Müller describes the reality underpinning the novel’s absurdity and violence. ‘When I was a student,’ she writes, ‘another student was posthumously expelled from the Party. She had hanged herself with a belt inside her closet’. The posthumous expulsion is a matter of control, a way to temper fear and mould the narrative. No one believes a suicide in a dictatorship.
Before she dies in the novel, Lola is an intractable character: she steals clothing and makeup from other girls in the dormitory, though she never comprehends her actions as theft; she is a devoted Party member and spews Party jargon ad nauseum, yet she keeps a secret diary of her private thoughts; and she sleeps with dishevelled men she encounters on the bus, on the street, indeed among the teachers at her own school. What becomes impossibly murky in the novel is Lola’s own private will. Following her death, which the Party is quick to denounce as a suicide, a vote is held among her classmates to determine whether the girl must be kicked out of the Party. What the narrator emphasises, however bitterly, is that the dead girl, herself a devoted Party member, would have voted herself out. Lola’s side of the story is guessed at, but never said. The opacity of her character is the opacity of selfhood in Romania: the Party renders us impervious to our own sense of will, our own private unsaid thoughts.
The unsaid is the lifeblood of the dictatorship. Shoving words into the mouths of men, women and children means that somewhere, perhaps hidden in an underbelly or buried like the dead, there are words not selected, words that are erased. ‘The unsaid, the approximate, was everywhere,’ Müller writes. The Party propels everything with ‘concealment, distortion, inversion, fabrication and perversion’. As a writer in Romania she is under constant surveillance and scrutiny as a threat to the state, yet whenever she is summoned for interrogation the Securitate levels sham charges at her, like prostitution or pornography. The Securitate, to sustain its very existence without topping its whole edifice, must never acknowledge its purpose of political repression. Rather than admitting to its function as an apparatus for control and repression, the Securitate identifies itself as Romania’s safekeeper. It must keep its citizens safe from criminality.
The perverted and unsaid, the concealed and distorted, feeds the backwards existence of a dictatorship at the broadest margins, extending from individual Securitate officers to the Constitution itself. Even though the Romanian Constitution proclaims a host of freedoms, among them the freedom of opinion, freedom of the press and privacy of correspondence, the Constitution is never amended by the regime. To the regime, Müller writes, the Constitution must read like the ‘most subversive text ever’. But it is impossible to read the Constitution anywhere. ‘The more the regime infringed on our human rights…the more it hid away its Constitution’. Reading the Constitution is impossible, and so too is the amending of the Constitution, even if only to fit the instruments of the regime’s repression. Such amendments, as Müller explains, require acknowledging the repression, putting the repression ‘into words’.
What Müller does not explicitly elaborate on in her memoir is the role of desire which circles her characters but remains elusive. After all, the conditions of intimacy in real life in Romania are absurd. ‘Intimacy [is] nationalised’ under the regime, she writes. Privacy and intimate relations are part and parcel of the state’s pro-natalist agenda, which, like many pro-natalist national plans from the Soviet Bloc, produce death more readily than life. Before going to the dentist women are required to receive a certificate from the gynaecologist. Under Ceaușescu, every woman must bear five children. Yet, as Müller explains, there is not enough food for even one or two-child families. Women are forced to seek abortions illegally, leading to botched procedures, infections and innumerable complications. The result of this nationalised intimacy, then, is more than the invasion of privacy; it is death. Indeed, for the characters that do talk about desire in her fiction, like Lilli in The Appointment who embraces sexuality, desire only leads to death: Lilli is mauled by a police dog while fleeing Romania with her much-older lover.
Desire can be resistance against nationalised intimacy, albeit a dangerous resistance. In The Land of Green Plums, the narrator meets with a married man in the fields for routine, clandestine encounters, where she may become like the ‘straw lying on the ground’. Everyone in the narrator’s town knows about her secret meetings with the married man. Everyone, in this case, except for the Securitate. Intimacy, then, is not about desire so much as it is about resistance. Agency over the body is a form of resistance from the state.
The physical body is the greatest source of verisimilitude in an unbelievable world. Perhaps functioning as a metonym for the meaning of pain and the body across her oeuvre, a line in her story ‘Nadirs’ stands apart:
The corn cobs seem to roll into my hands and fall into the basket by themselves. The palm of my hand hurts only when it’s empty. While the corn rubs against it I stop feeling the pain, it is so strong, it is so overpowering that it kills itself. I feel a tingle, and then my hand wrist and fingers are gone.
Fingers are motifs across Müller’s novels and stories. In her memoir, she gives a justification: fingers mean death, and they mean death for three reasons. After moving to a sublet in Timișoara as a young woman, Müller begins living with another woman who is attending nursing school. Nursing school requires this young woman to occasionally work in mortuaries. ‘One day,’ Müller writes, ‘I put my hand into my handbag in the middle of the city and pulled out a severed finger’. This finger is the first reason; it belongs to the dead, it is a ‘souvenir from the morgue’. The second finger, or second reason, belongs to Rolf Bossert, a friend of Müller, who flees to the West. Before leaving, Bossert declares that, once he is gone, he won’t do a thing for his friends stuck in Romania to help them flee. Bossert says, ‘I won’t lift a finger for you once I’m gone’. But as soon as he escapes, he begins speaking out against the regime to the Western press. For three weeks, he decries horrors of life under the dictatorship. ‘And then he threw himself out of a window,’ Müller writes. ‘Even in the West, no autopsy was performed, no one requested one’. It is yet another instance of a false suicide, of concealed, inverted, perverted death. A long time after Bossert’s death, Müller receives a postcard from the poet Roland Kirsch. In the postcard, Kirsch writes, ‘Sometime I have to bite myself on the finger to feel that I still exist’. It is the final postcard sent by Kirsch before he is found hanged. Like Bossert, Kirsch’s death is determined a suicide by the state.
Müller’s devotion to the body in its most granular forms – hair, teeth, fingers – is itself a form of resistance. She notices the fingernails of her interrogator are like pumpkin seeds, his calves like white plaster. After being summoned to an interrogation one day, Müller recalls the moment her interrogator, preparing to strike her, instead reaches forward and gingerly removes a piece of hair from her shoulder. In an inexplicable burst she cries, ‘Please put the hair back, it belongs to me’. Her interrogator puts the hair back on her shoulder, walks to the window and laughs hysterically. ‘My little display of courage was awful,’ she writes, ‘it was a plea’. In The Land of Green Plums, sending hair in envelopes serves as proof of life for four friends; in Nadirs, as in much of her fiction, cutting off hair, in particular women cutting off their braids, is a declaration of selfhood, often made in response to oppression. The narrator’s mother in the story ‘The Funeral Sermon’ in Nadirs stands before a mirror to ‘cut off her heavy grey braid with the big knife’, before carrying the braid to the dining table and setting it on a plate. Women like Müller’s real-life mother, she explains in her memoir, were forced to shave their heads in Soviet labour camps. Cutting one’s hair is both a compulsion and a resistance. The body, when divvied up into its smallest, seemingly most innocuous forms, becomes capable of a splintered agency. Perhaps in a dictatorship privacy can only exist in its smallest form, down to the hairs on your head.
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What emerges in Müller’s fiction are palimpsests drawn over real life. Displays of courage emerge in how her characters position themselves against madness. Before writing The Hunger Angel which was published in 2009, Müller spent years researching her novel. A large part of this research included a years-long process of interviewing her close friend Oskar Pastior, the Romanian-born German poet on whose life the novel’s narrator, Leo Auberg, is based. Pastior spent five years in a Soviet labour camp in Ukraine as a teenager and young man. Later in life he uses poetry to capture the violence of the dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc.
Human beings are broken into their constituent parts in the labour camps. Hunger is this force for breaking; hunger is a force for humiliation. ‘Hunger makes you brutal’ she writes. She spends countless hours poring over details of Pastior’s life in the barracks in the camp. They discuss everything from pine trees to woollen gloves to ‘bread courts’, where bread thieves are beaten to death by common consent. But in labour camps the act of stealing bread is not equated with theft – in a place where everyone is starving, made brutal by hunger, stealing bread is murder.
Müller’s own mother returned from a labour camp only a few years before giving birth to Herta in 1953. Müller is attentive to the way in which the humiliation of starvation has shaped her mother’s relationship to food, and Pastior’s. Her mother eats as if she were ‘running away from the food that she [is] eating’ whereas Pastior eats as if he were ‘disappearing entirely into the food’. While eating, both seem entirely absent. What emerges in her memoir is the complex relationship between two realities – her mother’s and Pastior’s – and the reality she gives life to in The Hunger Angel.
The hallmark of Müller’s fiction is her peculiar selection and rearrangement of words: ‘From the fields you see the village as a herd of houses grazing between the hills’. Houses are grazing animals, the village is a herd of cows or sheep. The child looking back on her village becomes the frame for Müller’s memoir: we read about a bewildered and alienated child, yet a child who finds oddly affective images amid the asphyxiation of a dictatorship. Müller’s grandmother would often tell her, ‘Don’t think where you shouldn’t.’ Thinking, Müller concludes, must then be ‘an actual place,’ perhaps an ‘overly long street’ or an ‘unfamiliar room’. But the village as small as a thimble on the edge of the world is not a place for just any thinking; it is a place where thinking must do gymnastics. We cannot escape the image of Müller looking back on her village, both as a child standing in the fields and an adult casting her eye East, in this memoir. She is thinking where she shouldn’t; she is thinking where she must.
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Gabrielle McClellan is a writer and researcher from outside Washington, DC and currently based in London. Her essays, reviews and fiction have appeared in the Harvard Review, The Stinging Fly, AGNI, and elsewhere. She is also a contributing writer for The Lancet, where she covers women’s health.
Image credit to Laurence Chaperon for Müller’s headshot.
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