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Ten years following the Nobel Prize for Literature for Günter Grass, the award once again goes to Germany: The committee’s choice of Herta Müller is being well received – also by Klaus-Dieter Lehmann: “She was my secret favourite,” admits the president of the Goethe-Institut, with which Müller has long been associated.

Stockholm, Thursday, 1 p.m.: Peter Englund, the new secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, steps to the microphone and announces the decision: Herta Müller is the 2009laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The reactions are almost unanimous: German president Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, Berlin’s governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit; all of them are full of praise for the author and the jurors who honoured her. Only star critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki remains silent.

Lehmann, too, makes no secret of his pleasure: “This impressively underscores the international standing to which contemporary German literature can lay claim,” says the president of the Goethe-Institut. “Herta Müller was my secret favourite. She has a moving way in her composed narration of labelling barbarism as what it is.” With Herta Müller “a singular voice in German literature is honoured, which deals like no other with the consequences of state-sanctioned terror on the individual and, in particular, with the situation of the German minority in Romania.” Müller originally comes from German-speaking Romania.

Admittedly, Lehmann has a second reason to be especially pleased about the jury’s opinion: Ever since the early 1980s when her first book Niederungen was published (English title: Nadirs), Herta Müller has been closely associated with the Goethe-Institut. She collaborated in a number of events held by Germany’s cultural institute, according to Lehmann. With support from the Goethe-Institut, her prose has been translated into dozens of languages.

Translated into more than 20 languages

On the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, Müller attended writer’s meetings, symposia, conferences, book presentations, readings and trade fairs – from Amsterdam to Sydney and from Guadalajara to Sofia. The breadth of subject matter of these events ranged from The inherited burden of Stasi and Securitate – What should be done with the files of the Communist secret police? (Bucharest 2001) and Old homeland – new homeland. Emigration and literature (Budapest 2006) to countless readings from her works and the presentation of translations, to participation in literature festivals – such as that in Mantua in 2009. She and other outstanding German authors have been invited to Copenhagen for the programme Internationale Författerscene for 2010.

The Goethe-Institut’s translation promotion programme also contributed to the distribution of Herta Müller’s books overseas, where her prose, in particular, received a good deal of interest. Many of her books have been translated into, for example, Danish, Swedish, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Croatian, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian – and even Romanian.

Müller’s works are most striking in their stirring description of everyday life under a totalitarian system. The author knows what she is writing about: born in Niţchidorf, Romania in 1953, after house searches, countless interrogations and the censorship of Nadirs she emigrated from Romania, which was still suffering under the Ceausescu regime, in 1987 and settled in Germany.

Her novels, essays and short stories tell of alienation and of home, of political persecution and of insurgency against totalitarian regimes. Müller’s life in Romania was characterized by restrictions and surveillance by the apparatus of Securitate, who still pursued her after her emigration to Germany. Since the early 1990s and the translation of her works into more than 20 languages, Herta Müller, with books such as Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, is among the important authors of international literature. The Nobel Prize is the culmination of many awards that Müller has already received for her books. She is the twelfth woman to receive the sought-after prize. The prize money equals approximately one million euros.