Herta Mueller, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a tiny German community in Romania. Her village was suffocating and insular, but Mueller recently told Swedish television that she felt like an outsider in the rest of Romania, too. Even speaking made her aware of her differences:
"Of all these languages that I have borrowed, not even one belongs to me — not the one from home, not even the Romanian. None belongs to me, and that's why there is such an impulse in me to write," she said.
Mueller began writing as a young intellectual under the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She was shadowed on the street, fired for refusing to inform on co-workers, and arrested. A friend committed suicide under similar pressure.
Bridget Haines, who edited a book about the author, says the effects of living in Romania remained with Mueller, even after she fled to Germany at the age of 22.
Haines says that when Mueller's first review was published, Mueller bought 20 copies of the newspaper because she didn't realize how easy it was to make photocopies: "In Ceausescu's Romania, photocopiers were only owned by the secret service. You weren't allowed to copy anything."
Mueller writes poetically about very grim things — exile, oppression and the horrors of Nazi Germany, Soviet gulags and Eastern European dictatorships.
Her most recent book, Atemschaukel, draws from her mother's memories of a Soviet labor camp. The hero is a teenager who darkly observes that getting deported to such a camp will at least get him out of his "thimble of a town where all the stones have eyes." Five years later, he's released into a busy town where he could be stopped and interrogated at any moment:
Mueller's own experiences have led her to stand up for newer refugees fleeing to Europe from all over the world: "Why has it always been in this world that people should leave their countries and others are the ones committing the crimes?" she asks.
As for her own status as a refugee, she has returned to Romania, but only as a visitor: "One never comes back the same way," she says. "Once you leave under such circumstances, you become a different person."
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