Herta Müller

Biography

The critic Denis Scheck once described visiting Herta Müller at her home in Berlin and finding a drawer in her desk full of single letters. They had been cut from a newspaper that she had destroyed completely, and her texts were put together from these letters. Scheck wrote that he felt he had entered the workshop of a true poet.

She was born on 17 August 1953 in Nițchidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), in the Romanian Banat, into a Banat Swabian family. Her grandfather was a well-off farmer and merchant whose property the Communist regime confiscated. Her father served in the Waffen-SS during the war and afterwards worked as a lorry driver. In 1945, aged seventeen, her mother was among some 100,000 Romanian Germans deported to forced labour in the Soviet Union, to a camp in what is now Ukraine; she returned in 1950. German was Müller’s native language. She began to learn Romanian at school and mastered it in Timișoara, where she attended the Nikolaus Lenau High School, a German-language school, and lived in rented lodgings, going home only at weekends. From 1973 to 1976 she studied German and Romanian literature at the West University of Timișoara. There she became close to the writers of Aktionsgruppe Banat, who supported freedom of speech against the censorship under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Among them was Richard Wagner, whom she married.

In 1976 Müller became a translator at an engineering factory. By her own account, an officer of the Securitate, the Communist regime’s secret police, came to see her several times and demanded that she become an informer; she refused. She was deprived of her office and had to do her translations on a staircase, while her colleagues were told that she was working for the secret police. In 1979 she was dismissed. After that she taught German, worked in kindergartens and gave private lessons.

Her first book, the story collection “Nadirs” (Niederungen), appeared in Bucharest in 1982. The publisher had held the manuscript for more than four years, and it was printed in a cut version. For it Müller received a prize from the Union of Communist Youth and the debut prize of the Romanian Writers’ Union. The book is written from a child’s point of view in a German village. Some Banat Swabians resented her for what they called “fouling her own nest”. The full text was published in West Germany in 1984 and won a number of prizes. In 1985 she was refused permission to emigrate to West Germany. Permission came only in 1987, and she left for West Berlin with Wagner. In Nuremberg, at a reception camp for resettlers, she was questioned for several days by West German intelligence services, who suspected that she was a Securitate agent. Later she was invited to lecture at universities in Germany and elsewhere. She has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature since 1995, and in 1997 she left the German PEN Centre in protest at its merger with the branch of PEN in the former German Democratic Republic.

In 1986 came the novel “The Passport” (Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt, literally “Man Is a Big Pheasant in the World”), in 1989 “Traveling on One Leg”, and in 1992 “The Fox Was Ever the Hunter”. “The Land of Green Plums” (1994) was written after the deaths of two people she knew, in which she suspected the involvement of the secret police. These books are about how to live under a dictatorship in the Romanian provinces. It seems to me striking how little in them is named outright: Ceaușescu appears in “The Passport” in a single paragraph, yet he cannot be forgotten. Müller herself has said that she would never write the word “dictatorship” in a text.

In parallel she makes collages. She glues words cut from newspapers and magazines onto postcards, and short poems result: “Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame” (“A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot”, 2000), “The Pale Gentlemen with Their Espresso Cups” (2005) and “Father’s on the Phone with the Flies” (2012; 187 collages). Müller herself regards this as simply a way of writing and does not call herself a visual artist, although her collages have been exhibited, for example at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 2012 and at the Museum Langmatt in 2021.

The novel “The Hunger Angel” (Atemschaukel, 2009) tells of a young man deported to a Soviet labour camp. It draws on the memories of the poet Oskar Pastior, which she noted down in notebooks, and on the fate of her own mother. The book was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and won the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award, and on 8 October 2009 the Swedish Academy announced Müller as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation said that she “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. She has been compared with Kafka.

Among her other awards are the Kleist Prize (1994), the International Dublin Literary Award (1998) and the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (2021). In 2016 she became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

She lives in Berlin.