The Toy of Tyrants
Jane Yager
The Toy of Tyrants
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceauşescu’s Romania
By Herta Müller (Translated from German by Kate McNaughton)
Granta Books 256pp £16.99
In her acceptance speech for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller said of her life: ‘The arc that stretches from a child herding cows in the valley to the Stockholm City Hall is a strange one.’ The autobiographical work The Village on the Edge of the World traces this arc from Müller’s childhood in a German-speaking village in Romania, through her persecution as a young writer under the Ceauşescu regime, to her ultimate emigration to Germany. The book, first published in German in 2014 as Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern and now appearing in Kate McNaughton’s English translation, is based on a series of interviews between Müller and her editor, Angelika Klammer. The interviewer has a light hand, steering Müller towards topics but letting her digress. The book feels nothing like an interview transcript; rather, it is more like an episodic yet full-bodied memoir, rich in resonances and recurrent motifs.
Early in the book, Müller remarks: ‘The political has all sorts of psychological effects; it plays a fatal part in everything and everyone. Every family history is also the private imprint of contemporary history.’ Her own family illustrates this point keenly: while her father served in Hitler’s SS, it was her mother – in what Müller describes as an unjust distribution of guilt and punishment between the two – who spent five years in a Soviet labour camp after the war as part of a policy of punishing Romania’s German minority for their collaboration with the Nazis. The starvation her mother endured in the camp haunted Müller’s childhood. Hunger and strange ways of eating emerge as an obsessive theme in The Village on the Edge of the World: as a child, Müller furtively tastes inedible plants (‘Clearly, I never happened on anything poisonous’) and devours other taboo items – bitter green apricots, berries from a graveyard, bits of paper. When she begins writing as an adult, the experience induces ‘a kind of word hunger’. Later, Müller incorporates into her creative process a habit of slicing words out from newspapers and cutting them apart to create new words. This tactile practice, she says, is a way of sating her hunger.
Müller has a penchant for coining new terms, from Atemschaukel (breath-swing), the original title of The Hunger Angel (2009), her acclaimed novel set in a Soviet forced labour camp, to Herztier (heart-beast), which she mentions repeatedly in The Village on the Edge of the World. Her experiments with language demand an astute translator and she has one in McNaughton, who elegantly chooses the right moments to retain Müller’s German wordplay.
The author’s account of her early life displays a fierce integrity. After leaving her village for the city, she initially worked as a technical translator in a machine factory; there the Securitate, the regime’s secret police, tried to recruit her as an informer. Her refusal led to harassment by the state, and she started writing to cope with the psychological effects of persecution. Fear, she found, ‘could be tamed by writing’, and ‘precise observation’ became a survival tactic in the face of despotism. ‘The regime’s use of words and its use of harassment … blended into each other,’ Müller recalls. She writes in German, but ‘the Romanian language writes with me’ – not the ‘concrete-covered, grey State language’ but the ‘spoken language that belonged to the people’.
After the publication abroad of Müller’s first book, Nadirs (1982), the secret police stepped up their harassment of her. Müller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction. At one of the many surreal interrogations to which she was summoned, she ‘had to eat eight hard-boiled eggs with onions and coarse salt from the long table they were sitting at. A woman’s voice was screaming through a closed door at the back of the room.’ The Securitate also left deliberate signs they had invaded her flat in her absence: ‘a picture that hung on your wall would be left lying on your bed, a shoe would be on top of the fridge, or a kitchen stool would be in your bedroom, but the door to your flat would be intact’. In a final Kafkaesque touch, when she departed for Germany, the exit stamp in her passport bore the date 29 February 1987 – a non-existent day, as 1987 was not a leap year.
In one of the book’s most painful passages, Müller describes being betrayed by a close friend who started collaborating with the Securitate at a time when they were planning to murder her. The episode shows how the state seeped into all private relationships: ‘it’s easy to destroy relationships from within. But ours were destroyed from without, too. They were always within reach of the regime.’ What is most striking about this story, however, is that in Müller’s unnerving telling the betrayal heightens rather than reduces the intimacy of her relationship with her friend. Trauma is ‘something that buries itself so deep inside your body that it destroys and enchants you’ and ‘damage is an intimate connection’.
Müller unremittingly refuses to tidy up paradoxes or find resolution where there is none. ‘Literature does not heal anything,’ she declares bluntly, and her poetic ethic insists that we must never pretend to understand more of ourselves or the world than we do. ‘We are so opaque to ourselves. We know the facts, but how they take effect and shape us remains a mystery.’ In leaving space for this mystery, The Village on the Edge of the World is an autobiographical work of rare and unsettling honesty, an extraordinary and uncompromising telling of an extraordinary and uncompromising life.
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