Herta Müller is the author of ‘Everything I Possess I Carry With Me’ (German: ‘Atemschaukel’). Last year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is born in Romania (1953) and she has lived under the repressive regime of Ceauşescu. Her father had been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, in Communist Romania he earned a living as a truck driver. Müller has written many novels about the cruelty and terror, from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania.
‘Everything I Possess I Carry With Me’ (2009) portrays the deportation of German speaking Romanians to Russia during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as forced labor. Müller describes the journey of the seventeen years old boy Leo to a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1945. He is forced to stay in this labour camp until 1950.
This story is inspired by the memories of a poet (Oskar Pastior) but also by what happened to Müller’s own mother who was sent to such a camp when she was seventeen.
It is a grim story, about hunger and violence and indifference. When there’s hardly anything to eat, except some bread of a bad quality and soup with cabbage shreds, while you are doing hard physical labour, like digging coal and pitch, gradually men become ‘egotistical’. They can’t afford any sentimental feelings if they want to survive.
So we could ask ourselves, if people have survived such horrors, what have they been doing for trying to survive? Are they, in one way or another, guilty? Or, is this an inappropriate question…
