Herta Müller

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on August 17, 1953, in Nițchidorf, Timiș County in Romania. Although she was born there, her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Her works are very valuable because they depict, in a detailed form, the repercussions of ferocity, unkindness and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu which she has experienced herself during her youngness. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a portrayal of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania. Her considerable acclaimed 2009 novel The Hunger Angel or Atemschaukel, in German, depicts the deportation of Romania's German minority to Stalinist-Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labor. It is known that her mother was deported to a labour camp in the Soviet Union after World War II.

She began working as a translator for an engineering company in 1976, but in 1979 it is seen that she was dismissed as she refused to cooperate with the Communist regime’s secret police. After these events, she made a living by teaching at the kindergarten and giving private German lessons.

Her first book was published in 1982, but appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time, because she had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania. The Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller, ‘who, with the concentration of

poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed’. The academy likened Müller's style and her use of German, as a minority language, with Franz Kafka and pointed out the influence of Kafka on Müller. The award coincided with the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism. Michael Krüger, head of Müller's publishing house, said: ‘By giving the award to Herta Müller, who grew up in a German-speaking minority in Romania, the committee has recognized an author who refuses to let the inhumane side of life under communism be forgotten’.

As a woman, Herta Müller had the courage to write boldly, despite the threats and trouble generated by the Romanian secret police. Although her books are fictional, they are based on real people and experiences and depict scenes that can be found in the life around us.

‘I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.’ Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel