Muller

Herta Müller

The win­ner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 is .… Herta Müller. I con­fess. I do not know her work, had not heard of her prior to yes­ter­day, but so far, the reviews indi­cate she is well worth know­ing. The Swedish Academy said of her: “with the con­cen­tra­tion of poetry and the frank­ness of prose, depicts the land­scape of the dispossessed.”

Born in Romania in 1953, in the German-​​speaking town of Niţchidorf, Herta’s fam­ily was a part of the German minor­ity, and they car­ried some heavy bag­gage for her. Her father served in the Waffen SS, and her mother sur­vived five years of slave labor in the Soviet Union, from 1944 – 1949. Her fam­ily lived under the dic­ta­to­r­ial rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu, which is the sub­ject of much of her writ­ing. She and her hus­band, the writer Richard Wagner, left Romania for Germany in 1987.

She is still being forced to fight old bat­tles. In an arti­cle pub­lished in Sign and Sight, she says:

 

Romanian intel­lec­tu­als were as unin­ter­ested in see­ing the secret files opened as they were in all the crushed lives around them, or in the new arrange­ments of the party’s top brass and secret ser­vice offi­cers. If, like me, you have pub­licly demanded access to files year in year out, you start to get on the nerves even of your friends. This was another rea­son why, for years, the Securitate files were not in the hands of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (the tongue-​​twistingly named CNSAS), which was grudg­ingly set up in 1999 at the insti­ga­tion of the EU, but with the new-​​old secret ser­vice. They con­trolled all access to files. The CNSAS had to sub­mit appli­ca­tions to them; some­times they were granted, but mostly they were refused, even for the grounds: The file applied for is still being worked on. In 2004 I was in Bucharest in order to lend weight to my repeated appli­ca­tion for file access. At the entrance to the CNSAS I was puz­zled to find three young women in mini-​​dresses with plung­ing neck­lines and shiny neon tights, as if this were some erotic cen­tre. And between the women stood a sol­dier, a machine-​​gun slung over his shoul­der, as if this were a mil­i­tary bar­racks. The head of CNSAS pre­tended not to be there, even though I had an appoint­ment with him.

 

Observer, observed, actor, acted upon. Some writ­ers live what they write about, and imag­ine more — much more. Others remain out­side that expe­ri­ence, and put them­selves inside it through the mir­a­cle of imag­i­na­tion. The job of the artist is to focus a tal­ent we all share and we all use. Walking in the shoes of oth­ers. Walking with them, and walk­ing as another being entirely. The care­ful, thought­ful, col­or­ful expres­sion of what we learn along the way is among the best things we humans do.

 


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