Celebrations
Herta Mueller and the Nobel
L-R:Herta Mueller, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriela Mistral and Doris Lessing
Herta Mueller's triumph has surprised a lot of people. But that ought not to be the case, for there have been situations when others not very well known in the world of literature have come by the Nobel Prize for Literature. And not just literature. A whole lot of controversy has raged around some of the awards given out in the peace category. So it is not merely literature that has come in for controversy. And do not forget that there have been people in literature, or in its vicinity, who have either raised controversy themselves or have had controversy swirling around them when it came to the Nobel. In 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the prize and everyone went around feeling a good job had been done and the right individual had got the prize. He had, after all, given a fresh new dimension to literature with Doctor Zhivago. But then the Soviet state stepped in. Nikita Khrushchev and the Communist regime were irate, for they thought it had all been a western conspiracy to undermine and embarrass the country and communism. Pasternak was unable to accept the prize. But what do you make of France's Jean-Paul Sartre who, when he received news that the Nobel Literature Prize for 1964 had been given to him, decided he would not accept it? He issued a terse statement letting everyone know that he was not taking the prize. One almost wishes Henry Kissinger had done that when he was awarded, with Le Duc Tho, the Peace Nobel in 1973. Tho declined the prize, for peace was yet to come to Vietnam. The war was to go on for two years more after Kissinger went to Oslo. Be that as it may, the Nobel for literature this year seems to have finally gone to one who has deserved it. Herta Mueller knows what experience and political suffocation is all about. She was, after all, once a citizen of Romania. And this was at a time when Nicolae Ceausescu ran the show. In 1987, unable to withstand persecution and the threat of it any longer, she left for Germany with her husband. Mueller's life has all the tragic beauty of a literary existence about it. Her father served in Hitler's Waffen SS, the crack combat troops of the Nazi organization. Her mother spent five years in a Soviet work camp. A member of Romania's German-speaking minority, Mueller was born in the village of Nitzdykorf on 17 August 1953. At university she was vocal in defence of freedom of speech, a rather difficult act under the Ceausescu dictatorship. Once she had graduated, she became a translator at a factory. That soon caused her distress, when she refused an offer by the secret police to serve as an informant. She lost her job. That was when she veered into fiction writing. Her stories came out in a collection she called Niederungen, which in its English rendering came to be known as Nadirs. When Niederungen appeared in Romania, much of it was censored by the regime. But a smuggled copy of the work, sent by Mueller, appeared in full in Germany and received rapturous applause. Mueller moved to Germany in 1987 and has been living in Berlin with her husband since. Herta Mueller is only the twelfth woman to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among those who got it before her are Pearl S. Buck in 1938, Gabriela Mistral in 1945, Nadine Gordimer in 1991, Toni Morrison in 1993, Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and Doris Lessing in 2007. Among Mueller's notable works, in English translation, are The Passport (1989), The Land of Green Plums (1996), Travelling on One Leg (1998) and The Appointment (2001).
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