Herta Müller - Literatur-Nobelpreis 2009

Herta Müller’s oeuvre – and the high-faluting word is meanwhile very fitting – is a literary reminder in the history of political terror that cannot be overlooked. This writer’s art is to literally put into language what is unspeakable about everyday fear in a dictatorial society, arrest, torture and murder, and to do so in her own unmistakable way. She looks at the political masters of fear through the victims’ eyes and names their names. She is one of the leading witnesses of our unholy era to write poetry.
The uncounted victims of the totalitarian century were not only the victims of National Socialism, but also those who were given blanket accountability for the Nazis’ crimes by the victors of World War II, for example all 17 to 45-year-old Romanian Germans, who were transported to Soviet labour camps in January 1945 because Romania under dictatorial rule had joined Hitler’s military campaigns. Among the deportees was the young 17-year-old Oskar Pastior, who was only released in 1949 (and later, in 1968, fled to Germany), but also the mother of Romanian-born poet Herta Müller. (...)
After Pastior’s death, Herta Müller laid her notes to one side for a year – but then after all did write down the story of the five years he spent suffering forced labour in a coking plant and brickworks in the Russian steppe. The result is a chronicle of constant, constant hunger. Someone who has been sentenced for nothing needs nothing to eat. Herta Müller’s book about harassment under the rule of collaborating overseers and the feeling that becomes blunter from year to year of even being a human being at all transcends the remembrance literature genre, transforming itself from one page to the next into a desperate accusation against totalitarian inhumanity. (…)
Anyone reading this writer’s books will discover something old-fashioned in contemporary German literature: there still is poetry, or to be more precise, a form of poetic outrage, that addresses such big issues as law and justice, threats to human dignity and freedom. Herta Müller is a master of this form. She comes from dictatorial Romania, a country that trod such virtues underfoot, and she arrived in a country that had much more to do with this disaster than we think we know. Atemschaukel has taken this critic’s breath away.

Michael Naumann: „Kitsch oder Weltliteratur?“
© Die ZEIT, 20 August, 2009