Review: Herta Müller’s Herztier

This is the first work I've read by Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.  The novel is available in English as The Land of Green Plums, translated by the poet MIchael Hofmann. And it does take a poet to translate Herztier, for it is more of a prose-poem than what we normally would consider a traditional novel.  The novel is written as a series of short fragments that constantly shift back and forth from the past tense to the present – the present being Romania in the 1980s during the Ceausescu dictatorship.

And the language! I have never encountered German language such as this. Herztier is full of strange nouns and even the familiar nouns are often infused with  strange, private meanings that only reveal themselves slowly in the course of the narrative. Part of this strangeness has to do with Herta Müller's situation as a member of the Banat-Swabian minority in Romania.  This is German that is spoken in a vacuum, cut off from the air-supply of German speakers in Europe.  But it also relects Herta Müller's effort to create a private language of resistance, a language that negates the totalitarian repression of the narrator's world.  For Herztier is a novel about language and the challenge of finding the words to offer personal testimony.  The book begins and ends with these words spoken by the narrator's friend Edgar:

Wenn wir schweigen, werden wir unangenehm', sagte Edgar, 'wenn wir reden, werden wir lächerlich' (When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become
unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.)

German language provides a kind of refuge for the narrator and her friends, but even this is precarious because of Germany's legacy: the fathers of the narrator and of her three friends were SS officers. Herta Müller draws a direct line from Hitler to Ceausescu. Still, Germany provides the only possible escape for the narrator; those who remain behind die from illness, suicide or else simply go mad.

At the center of Herztier is the enigma of Lola, a roommate of the narrator at the provincial university. Lola has apparently hung herself with the narrator's belt – the same belt the narrator's mother used to strap her to a chair in order to cut her toenails as a little girl. Lola's death and the narrator's (unwilling) complicity shock the narrator into consciousness.  She begins to question both the present and her own past, and realizes the horror of the present is connected to the oppression of the past, She forms a friendship with three other German-Romanians – Edgar, Georg and Kurt.  Much of Herztier is involved with the four friends wrestling with the riddle of Lola's death and their relentless persecution by Hauptmann Pjele, who hounds them into suicide and emigration (even in Germany, the long-arm of Ceausescu reaches them, with tragic consequences.).

But more than the story of the four friends, what stays with the reader is Herta Mueller's dark poetry, where the world is depicted as a horror-fairy tale.  The narrator's friend Kurt has been assigned work as an engineer in a state slaughterhouse, where fear has gradually transformed the workers into bloodthirsty beasts. The workers in the
state-operated slaughterhouses secretly gorge themselves on animal blood.
Their children are their accomplices:

Die Kinder sind schon Komplizen.  Die riechen, wenn sie abends geküsst werden, dass ihre Väter im Schlachthaus Blut saufen und wollen dorthin. (When their fathers kiss them goodnight,
they smell that they've been drinking blood in the slaughterhouse, and they
want to go there too.)

Herta Müller's nouns gradually acquire layer after layer of meaning until they crush the Herz-Tier (literally "Heart-Beast") – that remnant of the human spirit that resists tyranny. Once the Heart-Beast has left, all that remains are the words – the poet's testimony -  which. in the end, is enough.

Herta Müller is often compared to Franz Kafka, since both create a vision of totalitarianism.  But Kafka is the hyper-rationalist, whose vision disturbs because we are absolutely convinced of its logic.  Herztier is a cris de coeur by a gifted poet whose words speak to our subconscious emotions so that we "know" at the deepest level what inhumanity feels like.

See my review of Atemschaukel.