2009 October Donauschwaben Nobel Prize

VISITING AUTHOR-ARTICLE

OCTOBER 2009

Herta Müller

Wins the Nobel Prize

in Literature

By Motoko Rich

New York Times

Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described Ms. Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Her award comes on the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism in Europe.

Ms. Müller, 56, emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. She is the first German writer to win the Nobel award since Günter Grass in 1999. Just four of her works have been translated into English, including the novels “The Land of Green Plums” and “The Appointment.”

“I am very surprised and still cannot believe it,” Ms. Müller said in a

statement released by her publisher in Germany. “I can’t say anything more

at the moment.”

In the press conference making the announcement in Stockholm, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Ms. Müller had been honored because of her “very, very distinct special language, on the one hand, and on the other hand she has really a story to tell about growing up in a dictatorship . . . and growing up as a stranger in your own family.”

Ms. Müller was born and raised in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf in Romania. Her father served in the SS during World War II and her mother was deported to the Soviet Union in 1945 and sent to a work camp in what is now Ukraine. As a university student studying German and Russian literature, Ms. Müller opposed the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and joined Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who sought freedom of speech.

She wrote her first work, a collection of short stories, in 1982 while working as a translator for a factory. The stories were censored by the Romanian authorities and Ms. Müller was fired from the factory after refusing to work with the Securitate secret police. While working as a kindergarten teacher, the uncensored manuscript of “Niederungen,” — or “Lowlands” — was smuggled to Germany and published there to instant critical acclaim.

“Niederungen” and other early works depicted life in a small village and the repression faced by its denizens. Her later novels, including “The Land of Green Plums” and “The Appointment,” approach allegory as they graphically portray the brutality suffered by modest people leaving under totalitarianism.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Larry Wolff described “The Land of Green Plums” as seeking “to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania.” And in reviewing “The Appointment” in The New York Times Book Review in 2001, Peter Filkins wrote that Ms. Müller used the thuggery of the government “as a backdrop to the brutality and betrayal with which people treat one another in their everyday lives, be they spouses, family members or the closest of friends.”

Ms. Müller has continued to speak out against oppression and collaboration. In Germany, she has criticized those East German writers who worked with the secret police and recently withdrew from PEN, the human rights organization, to protest its decision to merge with an East German branch.

According to Sara Bertschel, publisher of Metropolitan Books, a unit of Macmillan that released English translations of “The Land of Green Plums” and “The Appointment” in the United States, Ms. Müller has a modest readership in the United States although she has been critically well-received.

The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Ms. Muller will receive 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million.