The Land of Green Plums
Posted on: October 9, 2009

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.…
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