Herta Muller vistited Bucharest

Herta Muller, Romanian-born German writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, paid a visit to Bucharest to promote her novels “Everything I Possess I Carry With Me” and “Traveling on One Leg”, published by Humanitas.

“Traveling on One Leg” is Herta Muller’s first novel after she left Romania following a publishing ban in 1987. The other novel, “Everything I Possess I Carry With Me”, published in 45 countries, brings back a long ignored historical drama.

The story takes place in Romania, 1945, at the end of World War II, when a large part of the German minority was deported to the Soviet Union. Following lengthy talks with poet Oskar Pastior and other soviet camp survivors, Herta Muller gathered sufficient material for this novel, which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in the summer of 2009.

During her meeting with the public in Bucharest, Muller spoke of her friend Oskar Pastior as a source of inspiration and contributor to her novel. As reported in the German Press, Pastior, having served five years in a Soviet camp, was an informer for the Securitate between 1961 and 1968. In ’68, he requested political asylum in the Federal Republic of Germany.

“Oskar Pastior had no way out, he was crushed. He wasn’t himself when he wrote that declaration. Had he not accepted, he would have been locked up. He would have only been left with two options – to hang himself or to be committed to a mental asylum. To ask that is inhumane” said Herta Muller

Talking about her relationship with literature, the Nobel prize winner said that she feels connected to books that teach her something, and not the ones that help her get away.




“I didn’t see books as a way of escaping. I haver most cherished books that wouldn’t allow me to get away. I read them in order to learn something, and some of them provided me with support. This is what changed me as a person” , said Herta Muller.

The author also said that after receiving the Nobel prize, she went on to write what she calls “collages”, and that she always tries to take two to three year brakes between two novels.

“I don’t write all the time. I enjoy not writing” Muller added ironically. Referring to the political situation in Romania, Herta Muller believes that former Securitate operatives in Romania prospered after the 1989 Revolution and that she is still under surveillance when she comes home to her country. Even if she lives in Germany, and has done so for the last 20 years, Herta Muller continues to write about her Romanian experience. Why? “In my case”, says the writer, “the most overwhelming experience was in Romania, under dictatorship. And the fact that I now live hundreds of miles away does not make me forget what I lived here.”

(Radio România Internaţional, Serviciul în limba engleză).