Photo: Tilmann Eberhardt
Herta Müller Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the German novelist Herta Müller. The Swedish Academy announced this onThursday, October 8th 2009 in Stockholm. In explaining their selection, the Academy stated that the 56-year-old author “[…] with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Herta Müller wrote her novel Atemschaukel (Everything I Possess I Carry With Me) with the help of a “border crosser” research grant of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
Border Crosser Novel by Herta Müller: Atemschaukel
Subject
Romania at the end of WWII. The German population is living in fear. “It was 3 in the morning on January 15, 1945, when the patrol came to fetch me. It was getting colder, –15º Celsius.” This is how the young man begins his story. Five years lie ahead of him, five years which he does not yet know anything about. Five years, after which he returns as a different person. Müller tells of an experience which shaped the rest of the survivor’s life. She collected facts and material through numerous conversations, forming them into one powerful novel.
Border Crosser Research
In 2004 the Romanian-German authors Ernest Wichner, Herta Müller, and Oskar Pastior went on a research trip to the Ukraine. They were looking for the former soviet gulag, to which Oskar Pastior had been deported as member of the German minority in Rumania for “rebuilding purposes”. Herta Müller and Oskar Pastior originally planned on writing a novel together, as the author writes, but “when Oskar Pastior abruptly passed away in 2006, I had four notebooks full of handwritten notes as well as rough drafts for a few chapters. [...] It took me over a year to bring myself to say goodbye to the ‘we’ and write the novel on my own. Without Oskar Pastior’s details from daily life in the gulag, however, I never would have been able to do it.”
The Author
Herta Müller was born in the Banat, Romania, in 1953. After she had been banned from publishing her works and numerous repressions by the Romanian secret service Securitate she managed to leave Romania in 1987 and has lived in Germany since then. She has written numerous narrative accounts and novels about the emotional effects of suffering under a dictatorship, and has received a number of awards for her works such as the Kleist Prize in 1994, the Berlin Literature Prize in 2005, and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize, given by the city of Aachen, in 2006.
Border Crosser Novel by Herta Müller: Atemschaukel
Subject
Romania at the end of WWII. The German population is living in fear. “It was 3 in the morning on January 15, 1945, when the patrol came to fetch me. It was getting colder, –15º Celsius.” This is how the young man begins his story. Five years lie ahead of him, five years which he does not yet know anything about. Five years, after which he returns as a different person. Müller tells of an experience which shaped the rest of the survivor’s life. She collected facts and material through numerous conversations, forming them into one powerful novel.
Border Crosser Research
In 2004 the Romanian-German authors Ernest Wichner, Herta Müller, and Oskar Pastior went on a research trip to the Ukraine. They were looking for the former soviet gulag, to which Oskar Pastior had been deported as member of the German minority in Rumania for “rebuilding purposes”. Herta Müller and Oskar Pastior originally planned on writing a novel together, as the author writes, but “when Oskar Pastior abruptly passed away in 2006, I had four notebooks full of handwritten notes as well as rough drafts for a few chapters. [...] It took me over a year to bring myself to say goodbye to the ‘we’ and write the novel on my own. Without Oskar Pastior’s details from daily life in the gulag, however, I never would have been able to do it.”
The Author
Herta Müller was born in the Banat, Romania, in 1953. After she had been banned from publishing her works and numerous repressions by the Romanian secret service Securitate she managed to leave Romania in 1987 and has lived in Germany since then. She has written numerous narrative accounts and novels about the emotional effects of suffering under a dictatorship, and has received a number of awards for her works such as the Kleist Prize in 1994, the Berlin Literature Prize in 2005, and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize, given by the city of Aachen, in 2006.
More Information
Herta Müller was our guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair.