Herta Müller

Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania. Her much acclaimed 2009 novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel) portrays the deportation of Romania's German minority to Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labour. Müller has received more than twenty awards to date, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the Aristeion Prize (1995), the International Dublin Literary Award (1998) and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009). On 8 October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as a woman "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

Herta Müller studied at West University of Timișoara. The recorded working language is German and Romanian. The field of work recorded is poetry and essay. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are essay. Places of work recorded in the authority are Berlin. Employment is recorded with Freie Universität Berlin and Nikolaus Lenau High School. Works named in the authority record are Nadirs, The Passport, The Land of Green Plums and The Hunger Angel. Work by Herta Müller is recorded in the collections of Herta Müller Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS. Distinctions recorded are Nobel Prize in Literature, Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn-Förderpreis, Premiul UTC la secțiunea „lucrări în limbile naționalităților conlocuitoare" and Aspekte-Literaturpreis.

• Name — Herta Müller • Born — 17 August 1953 • Birthplace — Nițchidorf, Timiș County, SR Romania • Occupation — Novelist, poet • Period — 1982–present • Education — West University of Timișoara • Notable Works — * Nadirs • The Passport • The Land of Green Plums • The Appointment • The Hunger Angel • Awards — * Kleist Prize (1994) • International Dublin Literary Award (1998) • Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009) • Nobel Prize in Literature (2009)

Müller was born to Banat Swabian Catholic farmers in Nițchidorf (German: Nitzkydorf; Hungarian: Niczkyfalva), up to the 1980s a German-speaking village in the Romanian Banat in southwestern Romania. Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant, but his property was confiscated by the Communist regime. Her father was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, and earned a living as a truck driver in Communist Romania. In 1945, her mother, born 1928 as Katarina Gion, then aged 17, was among 100,000 of the German minority deported to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union, from which she was released in 1950. Müller's native language is German; she learned Romanian only in grammar school. She graduated from Nikolaus Lenau High School before becoming a student of German studies and Romanian literature at West University of Timișoara. In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. After her dismissal, she initially earned a living by teaching in kindergarten and giving private German lessons.

Müller's first book, Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania in German in 1982, receiving a prize from the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth. The book was about a child's view of the German-cultural Banat. Some members of the Banat Swabian community criticized Müller for "fouling her own nest" by her unsympathetic portrayal of village life. Müller was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German-speaking writers in Romania who supported freedom of speech over the censorship they faced under Nicolae Ceaușescu's government, and her works, including The Land of Green Plums, deal with these issues. Radu Tinu, the Securitate officer in charge of her case, denies that she ever suffered any persecutions, a claim that is opposed by Müller's own version of her (ongoing) persecution in an article in the German weekly Die Zeit in July 2009. • Illustration — Müller in Hanover, 1992 After being refused permission to emigrate to West Germany in 1985, Müller was finally allowed to leave along with her then-husband, novelist Richard Wagner, in 1987, and they settled in West Berlin, where both still live. In the following years, she accepted lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad. Müller was elected to membership in the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in 1995, and other honorary positions followed. In 1997, she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. In July 2008, Müller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the moral and financial support given by the institute to two former informants of the Securitate participating at the Romanian-German Summer School. The critic Denis Scheck described visiting Müller at her home in Berlin and seeing that her desk contained a drawer full of single letters cut from a newspaper she had entirely destroyed in the process. Realising that she used the letters to write texts, he felt he had "entered the workshop of a true poet". • Illustration — Reading The Hunger Angel, Potsdam, July 2010 The Passport, first published in Germany as Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt in 1986, is, according to The Times Literary Supplement, "couched in the strange code engendered by repression: indecipherable because there is nothing specific to decipher, it is candid, but somehow beside the point, redolent of things unsaid. From odd observations the villagers sometimes make ("Man is nothing but a pheasant in the world"), to chapters titled after unimportant props ("The Pot Hole", "The Needle"), everything points to a strategy of displaced meaning... Every such incidence of misdirection is the whole book in miniature," for although Ceausescu is only mentioned in one paragraph (in the chapter "A Big House"), he is central to the story, and cannot be forgotten. "The resulting sense that anything, indeed everything – whether spoken by the characters or described by the author – is potentially dense with tacit significance means this short novel expands in the mind to occupy an emotional space far beyond its size or the seeming simplicity of its story."

• Illustration — Müller's nail scissors, which she used to cut words from printed materials, hanging in the Nobel Prize Museum. In 2009, Müller enjoyed the greatest international success of her career. Her novel Atemschaukel (published in English as The Hunger Angel) was nominated for the German Book Prize and won the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award. In this book, Müller describes the journey of a young man to a gulag in the Soviet Union, the fate of many Germans in Transylvania after World War II. It was inspired by the experience of the poet Oskar Pastior, whose memories she had made notes of, and also by what happened to her own mother. In October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced its decision to award that year's Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." The academy compared Müller's style and her use of German as a minority language with Franz Kafka and pointed out the influence of Kafka on Müller. The award coincided with the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism. Michael Krüger, head of Müller's publishing house, said: "By giving the award to Herta Müller, who grew up in a German-speaking minority in Romania, the committee has recognized an author who refuses to let the inhumane side of life under communism be forgotten". In 2012, Müller commented on the Nobel Prize for Mo Yan by saying that the Swedish Academy had apparently chosen an author who 'celebrates censorship'. On 6 July 2020 a no longer existing Twitter account published the fake news of Herta Müller's death, which was immediately disclaimed by her publisher.

Herta Müller wrote the foreword for the first publication of the poetry of Liu Xia, wife of the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, in 2015. Müller also translated and read a few of Liu Xia’s poems in 2014. On 4 December 2017, a photo of a letter from Liu Xia to Herta Müller in the form of a poem, in which Liu Xia wrote that she was going mad in her solitary life, was posted on Facebook by Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu.

At the 7 October Forum held in Stockholm on 25 and 26 May 2024, Müller commented on the "unimaginable massacre" committed by Hamas in its "limitless contempt for humanity" in the 7 October attacks and described it comparable to German extermination pogroms. Müller also criticized two progressive groups: Berlin club-goers and Ivy League students. "Hatred of Jews has infiltrated Berlin's nightlife," she said. Furthermore, she stated: "After October 7, the Berlin club scene literally ducked away. Although 364 young people, ravers like them, were massacred at a techno festival, the club association did not comment on it until days later. And even that was just a dull exercise in compulsory action, because antisemitism and Hamas were not even mentioned." In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she cast doubt on the veracity of images coming out of Gaza. "Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our emotions," she wrote. "Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel’.

• Illustration — Müller signing one of her books in September 2009 • Illustration — Cover of Drückender Tango, Bukarest 1984 • Niederungen, stories, censored version published in Bucharest, 1982; uncensored version published in Germany, 1984. Translated as Nadirs by Sieglinde Lug (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) • Drückender Tango ("Oppressive Tango"), stories, Bucharest, 1984 • Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt, Berlin, 1986. Translated as The Passport by Martin Chalmers (Serpent's Tail, 1989) • Barfüßiger Februar ("Barefoot February"), Berlin, 1987 • Reisende auf einem Bein, Berlin, 1989. Translated as Traveling on One Leg by Valentina Glajar and Andre Lefevere (Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, 1998) • Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel ("The Devil is Sitting in the Mirror"), Berlin, 1991 • Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1992. Translated as The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Philip Boehm (2016) • Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett ("A Warm Potato Is a Warm Bed"), Hamburg, 1992 • Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm ("The Guard Takes His Comb"), Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993 • Angekommen wie nicht da ("Arrived As If Not There"), Lichtenfels, 1994 • Herztier, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994. Translated as The Land of Green Plums by Michael Hofmann (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 1996). Reviewed in The New York Times • Hunger und Seide ("Hunger and Silk"), essays, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1995 • In der Falle ("In a Trap"), Göttingen 1996 • Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1997. Translated as The Appointment by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books/Picador, 2001) • Der fremde Blick oder Das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne ("The Foreign View, or Life Is a Fart in a Lantern"), Göttingen, 1999 • Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird ("Home Is What Is Spoken There"), Blieskastel, 2001 • A Good Person Is Worth as Much as a Piece of Bread, foreword to Kent Klich's Children of Ceausescu, published by Journal, 2001 and Umbrage Editions, 2001. • Der König verneigt sich und tötet ("The King Bows and Kills"), essays, Munich (and elsewhere), 2003 • Atemschaukel, Munich, 2009. Translated as The Hunger Angel by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books, 2012) • Immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel, 2011

• Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame ("A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot"), Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2000 • Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen ("The Pale Gentlemen with their Espresso Cups"), Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2005 • Este sau nu este Ion ("Is He or Isn't He Ion"), collage-poetry written and published in Romanian, Iași, Polirom, 2005 • Vater telefoniert mit den Fliegen ("Father is calling the Flies"), Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2012 • Father's on the Phone with the Flies: A Selection, Seagull Books, Munich, 2018 (73 collage poems with reproductions of originals)

• Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern, with Angelika Klammer (2014). The Village on the Edge of the World, trans. Kate McNaughton (2026)

• Cristina and Her Double: Selected Essays, trans. Geoffrey Mulligan (Portobello, 2013)

• Theodor Kramer: Die Wahrheit ist, man hat mir nichts getan ("The Truth Is No One Did Anything to Me"), Vienna 1999 • Die Handtasche ("The Purse"), Künzelsau 2001 • Wenn die Katze ein Pferd wäre, könnte man durch die Bäume reiten ("If the Cat Were a Horse, You Could Ride Through the Trees"), Künzelsau 2001

• 1993: Vulpe – vânător (Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger), directed by Stere Gulea, starring Oana Pellea, Dorel Vișan, George Alexandru etc.

Herta Müller worked in poetry and essay. She was employed by Freie Universität Berlin and Nikolaus Lenau High School. She worked at Berlin.

Herta Müller is recorded with the occupation translator. Classed in the genre essay. Recorded as having received Nobel Prize in Literature, Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn-Förderpreis and Premiul UTC la secțiunea „lucrări în limbile naționalităților conlocuitoare".