Herta Müller: controversy swirls round her
The Appointment by Herta Mueller (Portobello, £7.99) While reading this extraordinary book, I mentioned to four different friends that I was writing a piece about Herta Mueller. All were expensively educated, well-informed people with good Oxbridge arts degrees. Yet each responded in the same way: "Herta who?" I will lay good odds that these four are not unusual. It is a measure of how insular, myopic and lazy Anglo-Saxon cultural life has become that the work of one of Europe's most important contemporary writers is so little known. So dominant is our language that vast tracts of the world assume that no novelist—with the exception of Scandinavian thriller writers—has anything to say unless it is originally said in English. Mueller won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009 having collected most of Europe's other big literary awards over the previous two decades. She may not exactly be a household name on the continent but she has been recognised as a major figure by young writers from both eastern and western Europe. Despite this, only four of her 26 books have so far been translated into English—three of those at the behest of American publishers. Mueller, 57, was born and brought up in Nitchidorf, a German-speaking community in western Romania. By the time she was in her teens, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had taken power and launched a personality cult that might have made Mao Zedong blush, while using nationalism to suppress minorities—the Hungarians in Transylvania as well as the Germans. Mueller became a teacher and wrote in her spare time, mostly in German. She joined a number of semi-legal organisations, such as Aktionsgruppe Banat, composed of fellow German-speaking intellectuals. The Securitate, Romania's communist-era secret police, came down on her and her husband, the writer Richard Wagner. By her account, the police would sometimes appear at her workplace or home three times a day to warn her against "treasonable activities" (writing letters to friends in German). They made threats on her life. She owned a fox-fur coat, which she would find in her wardrobe missing parts: its tail, a leg, eventually its head—clearly all taken by secret police goons. In the early 1980s, she lost her job, just as her work began to appear in German-language publications. In 1987 the authorities allowed her and her husband to emigrate to west Berlin, where she has lived ever since, though most of her books are about Romania. She revisits the country occasionally, but finds it can be uncomfortable. As she has remarked, in Germany she is considered Romanian and in Romania she is regarded as German. The better known she has become, the more controversy has swirled around her head. Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism. More rationally than Solzhenitsyn, more lyrically and poetically than Vaclav Havel, with the personal experience and acute observation sometimes lacking in George Orwell, Mueller visits the police interrogation rooms and queues of dictatorship. Her subject is the communist hell of Romania under the megalomaniac rule of the Ceausescus, but she could be writing of the victims of any regime where, for most people, life has been made cheap by a few who live expensively. The Appointment is the latest of Mueller's books to appear in Britain, although it was published in German in 1997 and first translated in the US in 2001. It examines the most complex of dilemmas under tyranny: who can you trust when anybody could be a spy, and what compromises can you make with the system in order to live as normal a life as possible? From its first sentence—"I've been summoned, Thursday, at ten sharp"—it is a harrowing story of betrayal and fear. A young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory is being questioned by a secret police force—never named but obviously the Securitate, which was more terrifying and brutal than East Germany's Stasi. Her crime—a serious one in Ceausescu's eyes—was to sew notes into the lining of men's suits bound for Italy bearing the words: "Marry me." A cast of sinister characters appear, from the heroine's interrogator—who begins each session with a slurpy kiss on her hand—to the neighbours in her apartment block, who log her comings and goings in children's exercise books which are then sent on to the Securitate. Mueller can be as hilarious as she is haunting. There's a wonderfully absurdist passage in which the heroine queues at a shop to buy fresh notebooks for those informing on her next door; anyone who doubts the likelihood of this can never have been to Ceausescu's Bucharest. She tries to ignore her lecherous work colleague, whom she knows betrayed her to the authorities: "But how to spend eight hours on end acting as if two moustache tips were simply floating in midair behind a desk?" With each layer of the story, Mueller shows a rotten society in which individuals are corrupted by fear. Her style is sparse, poetic, delicate and is superbly rendered into lyrical English by the book's translators, Philip Boehm and Michael Hulse. Mueller's masterpiece, The Land of Green Plums, first appeared in English in another excellent translation by Michael Hoffman in 1996, but has recently been reissued by Granta. A more directly autobiographical story than The Appointment, it follows a group of young students from the German minority in western Romania—under suspicion by the secret police for no reason other than being German. Mueller wrote it in memory of two friends who died mysteriously, soon after a trusted acquaintance admitted that for years she had informed against the writer. Mueller is sure her friends were killed by the Securitate. Recently, a former senior Securitate official claimed Mueller grossly exaggerated the number of times she was interrogated and the hardships she faced. In Romania—which has preferred collective amnesia to dealing with its ghastly past—this has caused a major sensation and Mueller is anything but universally popular. But Mueller's description of one of her final confrontations with her interrogator, when he tried to force her to sign a document naming herself as a collaborator, has the ring of absolute truth. "He called me stupid, and I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch," she explained in her Nobel lecture. "Without sitting down I wrote down what he dictated—my name, address, date of birth. Next, that I would tell no one, no matter how close a friend or relative, that I... and then came the terrible word colaborez—I am collaborating. At that point I stopped writing... [I] said 'I don't have the character for this.' The word character made the Securitate man hysterical. He tore up the sheet of paper and threw the pieces on the floor." This is the authentic voice of a moralist, and Mueller has an exceptionally rare talent—to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful. It is a gift granted to few of the very finest novelists and we are lucky one of them is still alive and creating today, in any language.
The Appointment by Herta Mueller (Portobello, £7.99) While reading this extraordinary book, I mentioned to four different friends that I was writing a piece about Herta Mueller. All were expensively educated, well-informed people with good Oxbridge arts degrees. Yet each responded in the same way: "Herta who?" I will lay good odds that these four are not unusual. It is a measure of how insular, myopic and lazy Anglo-Saxon cultural life has become that the work of one of Europe's most important contemporary writers is so little known. So dominant is our language that vast tracts of the world assume that no novelist—with the exception of Scandinavian thriller writers—has anything to say unless it is originally said in English. Mueller won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009 having collected most of Europe's other big literary awards over the previous two decades. She may not exactly be a household name on the continent but she has been recognised as a major figure by young writers from both eastern and western Europe. Despite this, only four of her 26 books have so far been translated into English—three of those at the behest of American publishers. Mueller, 57, was born and brought up in Nitchidorf, a German-speaking community in western Romania. By the time she was in her teens, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had taken power and launched a personality cult that might have made Mao Zedong blush, while using nationalism to suppress minorities—the Hungarians in Transylvania as well as the Germans. Mueller became a teacher and wrote in her spare time, mostly in German. She joined a number of semi-legal organisations, such as Aktionsgruppe Banat, composed of fellow German-speaking intellectuals. The Securitate, Romania's communist-era secret police, came down on her and her husband, the writer Richard Wagner. By her account, the police would sometimes appear at her workplace or home three times a day to warn her against "treasonable activities" (writing letters to friends in German). They made threats on her life. She owned a fox-fur coat, which she would find in her wardrobe missing parts: its tail, a leg, eventually its head—clearly all taken by secret police goons. In the early 1980s, she lost her job, just as her work began to appear in German-language publications. In 1987 the authorities allowed her and her husband to emigrate to west Berlin, where she has lived ever since, though most of her books are about Romania. She revisits the country occasionally, but finds it can be uncomfortable. As she has remarked, in Germany she is considered Romanian and in Romania she is regarded as German. The better known she has become, the more controversy has swirled around her head. Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism. More rationally than Solzhenitsyn, more lyrically and poetically than Vaclav Havel, with the personal experience and acute observation sometimes lacking in George Orwell, Mueller visits the police interrogation rooms and queues of dictatorship. Her subject is the communist hell of Romania under the megalomaniac rule of the Ceausescus, but she could be writing of the victims of any regime where, for most people, life has been made cheap by a few who live expensively. The Appointment is the latest of Mueller's books to appear in Britain, although it was published in German in 1997 and first translated in the US in 2001. It examines the most complex of dilemmas under tyranny: who can you trust when anybody could be a spy, and what compromises can you make with the system in order to live as normal a life as possible? From its first sentence—"I've been summoned, Thursday, at ten sharp"—it is a harrowing story of betrayal and fear. A young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory is being questioned by a secret police force—never named but obviously the Securitate, which was more terrifying and brutal than East Germany's Stasi. Her crime—a serious one in Ceausescu's eyes—was to sew notes into the lining of men's suits bound for Italy bearing the words: "Marry me." A cast of sinister characters appear, from the heroine's interrogator—who begins each session with a slurpy kiss on her hand—to the neighbours in her apartment block, who log her comings and goings in children's exercise books which are then sent on to the Securitate. Mueller can be as hilarious as she is haunting. There's a wonderfully absurdist passage in which the heroine queues at a shop to buy fresh notebooks for those informing on her next door; anyone who doubts the likelihood of this can never have been to Ceausescu's Bucharest. She tries to ignore her lecherous work colleague, whom she knows betrayed her to the authorities: "But how to spend eight hours on end acting as if two moustache tips were simply floating in midair behind a desk?" With each layer of the story, Mueller shows a rotten society in which individuals are corrupted by fear. Her style is sparse, poetic, delicate and is superbly rendered into lyrical English by the book's translators, Philip Boehm and Michael Hulse. Mueller's masterpiece, The Land of Green Plums, first appeared in English in another excellent translation by Michael Hoffman in 1996, but has recently been reissued by Granta. A more directly autobiographical story than The Appointment, it follows a group of young students from the German minority in western Romania—under suspicion by the secret police for no reason other than being German. Mueller wrote it in memory of two friends who died mysteriously, soon after a trusted acquaintance admitted that for years she had informed against the writer. Mueller is sure her friends were killed by the Securitate. Recently, a former senior Securitate official claimed Mueller grossly exaggerated the number of times she was interrogated and the hardships she faced. In Romania—which has preferred collective amnesia to dealing with its ghastly past—this has caused a major sensation and Mueller is anything but universally popular. But Mueller's description of one of her final confrontations with her interrogator, when he tried to force her to sign a document naming herself as a collaborator, has the ring of absolute truth. "He called me stupid, and I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch," she explained in her Nobel lecture. "Without sitting down I wrote down what he dictated—my name, address, date of birth. Next, that I would tell no one, no matter how close a friend or relative, that I... and then came the terrible word colaborez—I am collaborating. At that point I stopped writing... [I] said 'I don't have the character for this.' The word character made the Securitate man hysterical. He tore up the sheet of paper and threw the pieces on the floor." This is the authentic voice of a moralist, and Mueller has an exceptionally rare talent—to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful. It is a gift granted to few of the very finest novelists and we are lucky one of them is still alive and creating today, in any language.
