Herta Muller

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Herta Müller (born 17 August 1953) is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet, essayist, and winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Ni?chidorf, Timi?

Müller has been based in Romania, where she has lived in more than 20 languages since the early 1990s, and she has been widely published.

Many of her paintings are told from the perspective of the German minority in Romania's contemporary history, as well as a depiction of the Germans in Banat and Transylvania.

During the Soviet occupation of Romania, Romania's German minority was deported to Soviet Gulags for use as German slave labour, according to her highly acclaimed 2009 book The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel). Müller has been given more than twenty prizes to date, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the International Dublin Literary Award (1995), and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009).

The Swedish Academy declared on October 8th, 2009, that she had been given the Nobel Prize in Literature, referring to her as a woman "who, with the focus of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the dispossessed's world."

Early life

Müller was born in Niţchidorf, a German-speaking village in southwestern Romania, before the 1920s, in the Kingdom of Hungary. Her family was a member of Romania's German minority. Her grandfather had been a successful farmer and merchant, but the Communist Party took away his property. Her father was a member of the Waffen SS during WWII and retired as a truck driver in Communist Romania. Her mother, Katarina Gion, who was born in 1928, was one of 100,000 of the German minority's forced labour camps in the Soviet Union, from which she was first unemployed in 1950. Müller's native language is German; she learned Romanian only in grammar school. She graduated from Nikolaus Lenau High School before becoming a West University of Timișoaran literature scholar.

Müller started working as a translator for an engineering factory in 1976, but was banned in 1979 for refusing to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's clandestine police. She began earning a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons after her dismissal.

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Career

Müller's first book, Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania in 1982, receiving a prize from the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth. The book was about a child's interpretation of the German-cultural Banat. Some members of the Banat Swabian community chastised Müller for "fouling her own nest" by her unsympathetic portrayal of village life. Müller was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German-speaking writers in Romania who fought for free expression against the censorship they suffered under Nicolae Ceauşescu's government. Her book, The Land of Green Plums, addresses these topics. In an article in the German weekly Die Zeit in July 2009, Radu Tinu, the Securitate officer in charge of her case, denies that she was ever arrested or hurt, a suspicion that is contradicted by Müller's own version of her (ongoing) persecution.

Müller was finally allowed to leave with her then-husband, novelist Richard Wagner, in 1987, where both husband and wife now live in West Berlin, where both husbands were forced to emigrate to West Germany in 1985. She received lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad over the years. Müller was elected to serve in the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in 1995, and subsequent honorary positions followed. She withdrew from Germany's PEN center in 1997 in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. Müller wrote a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute, in reaction to the institute's continued moral and financial assistance to two former Securitate students enrolled at the Romanian-German Summer School in July 2008.

Denis Scheck, a writer, described visiting Müller at her Berlin home and finding that her desk had been completely destroyed in the process. He believed he had "entered the workshop of a true poet" after realizing that the letters were used to write text.

According to The Times Literary Supplement, the Passport, first published in Germany as Der Mensch ist a big Fasan auf der Welt in 1986, is indecipherable because there is nothing specific to decipher, but it is nonetheless sad, redolent of things unsaid. Although Ceausescu is never mentioned, the villagers make odd reports ("Man is nothing but a pheasant in the world"), to chapters titled after unimportant props ("The Pot Hole"), all points to a misdirection scheme. This leads to the conclusion that everything, and even more, is potentially rich with tacit significance, extending in the mind to occupy an emotional space far beyond its length or the apparent simplicity of its tale.

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Awards and honors

• 1981 Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn Prize of the Timișoara Literature Circle
• 1984 Aspekte-Literaturpreis
• 1985 Rauris Literature Prize
• 1985 Encouragement Prize of the Literature Award of Bremen
• 1987 Ricarda-Huch Prize of Darmstadt
• 1989 Marieluise-Fleißer-Preis of Ingolstadt
• 1989 German Language Prize, together with Gerhardt Csejka, Helmuth Frauendorfer, Klaus Hensel, Johann Lippet, Werner Söllner, William Totok, Richard Wagner
• 1990 Roswitha Medal of Knowledge of Bad Gandersheim
• 1991 Kranichsteiner Literature Prize
• 1993 Critical Prize for Literature
• 1994 Kleist Prize
• 1995 Aristeion Prize
• 1995/96 Stadtschreiber von Bergen
• 1997 Literature Prize of Graz
• 1998 Ida-Dehmel Literature Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award for The Land of Green Plums
• 2001 Cicero Speaker Prize
• 2002 Carl-Zuckmayer-Medaille of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 2003 Joseph-Breitbach-Preis (together with Christoph Meckel and Harald Weinrich)
• 2004 Literature Prize of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
• 2005 Berlin Literature Prize
• 2006 Würth Prize for European Literature und Walter-Hasenclever Literature Prize
• 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
• 2009 Franz Werfel Human Rights Award, in particular for her novel The Hunger Angel
• 2010 Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize
• 2013 Best Translated Book Award, shortlist, The Hunger Angel
• 2014 Hannelore Greve Literature Prize
• 2021 Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts
• 2022: Prize for Understanding and Tolerance, Jewish Museum Berlin