Romanian-born author Herta Mueller on October 8 won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature. In 1999, Mueller, whose parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania, spoke to Mircea Iorgulescu from RFE/RL’s Romania-Moldova Service about growing up under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, her encounters with the secret police, and how her background has shaped her work.RFE/RL: Your novels all have something in common. They’re all set in Romania. This is a paradox or a detail that has been noticed also by the German press. Do you have an explanation for this split between two worlds?
Herta Mueller: No, this looks very natural to me. I was born in Romania, I grew up there, and I lived there until I was 32. I left Romania in a rather complicated state of mind. I wrote my first books in Romania. My first book was “Niederungen” [“Lowlands”], which is about a child’s view of the German Banat [a region in Western Romania]. In that book and in others the central topic is the dictatorship. I knew nothing else. I’d seen nothing else. And I continued with that topic. And I believe there is a kind of literature across the world, the literature of certain biographies, that runs in parallel with extreme events, in parallel with the times of the authors’ lives. For example in the 1950s, the gulag was present in Eastern Europe in certain forms. [Or] for instance, the labor camps. And then we have the national-socialist era, Hitler’s time, the destruction of the Jews, a topic which many authors have described in parallel with their own biographies…. I believe this type of literature exists everywhere, from Cuba to China.”
RFE/RL: So it’s not the geographical matter that’s the most important to the reader?
Mueller: No. I don’t think the geographic landscape is important. That landscape or environment is necessary — and I have no other landscape other than the one I know, the one I came from. [My] literary characters reflect what happens to the human being in a totalitarian society or system. And I believe this is not a topic that I chose, but rather one that my life has chosen for me. I don’t have that freedom of choice. I cannot say: ‘I want to write about that thing, or about that other thing.’ I am bound to write about what concerns me and about the things that won’t leave me in peace.
RFE/RL: You were born in the early 1950s in the region of Banat in southwestern Romania.
Mueller: In 1953, the year Stalin died…. Or rather when his body died and was put to rest, because his ideas lived a little bit longer, didn’t they?
RFE/RL: Are they still alive today?
Mueller: Well, yes, I think they’re still alive. In many people. Or at least remains of those ideas. Maybe not his whole theory in such a visible form as it was back then, but parts of it…. A lot of stones from that mosaic are still around, I’m sure.
