Herta Muller, winner 2009 Nobel prize for literature
Herta Muller, winner 2009 Nobel prize for literature
Herta Muller, the winner of the 2009 Nobel literature prize, used her upbringing under Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive regime in Romania as her main source of inspiration.
Herta Muller has won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature
Born in August 1953 in the traditionally German-speaking Nabat region of Romania, her father was a member of the Nazi SS. Romania’s post-war communist authorities deported her mother to a labour camp.
After studying literature between 1973 and 1976, Muller was sacked from her first job as a translator in a machinery factory after refusing to work for Ceausescu’s hated Securitate secret police.
It was at this time that she decided to devote her life to literature, but she refused to publish her first book Niederungen (Nadirs) in Romania because of attempts by the authorities to censor it.
The manuscript, describing vividly the drab life under Ceausescu’s regime, was smuggled into West Germany, where it was published in 1984, with Germany’s Spiegel magazine pronouncing her a “discovery”.
After being refused permission to emigrate to West Germany in 1985, she was finally allowed to leave in 1987 after her barbed criticism of her native country’s regime earned her death threats from the secret police.
Two years later, and 20 years ago next month, the Berlin Wall fell, and Ceausescu and his wife Elena died by summary execution by firing squad on Christmas Day the same year.
Muller, 56, now lives in Berlin and her works are little known outside the German-speaking world.
The Berlin International Literature Festival described her work as being focused on the non-conformist life in the smallest unit of the dictatorial state, as well as observations from her childhood and village life and family.
The novel Reisende auf einem Bein (Travelling On One Leg) portrays the difficulties of settling anew in foreign surroundings.
Alongside other novels about the Ceausescu regime like Herztier (Land of Green Plums) and Heute waer ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment), she has also written a series of political essays.
Beside the prizes for her debut, she has received the European Literary Prize “Aristeion”, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Kleist Prize, and the Kafka Prize.
Now she has added the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize to her accolades.
In a 2007 column in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, Muller said that Romania was “afflicted by collective amnesia” about its communist past, calling Ceausescu “the most evil dictator” after Stalin “with a personality cult to rival North Korea’s”.
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Hilda Gomes 10/8/2009 |
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