HERTA MÜLLER, OSKAR PASTIOR, AND ATEMSCHAUKEL AS POETIC ASSEMBLAGE

Abstract

AbstractThis study explores Herta Müller's engagement with the poet Oskar Pastior's life and work in her novel Atemschaukel (2009). The novel is largely based on Pastior's experience as one among the thousands of Romanian‐Germans deported to Gulags in 1945, and the poet worked with Müller both as a source and a literary collaborator before his death. Müller does not directly reproduce Pastior's poetics or his experience in her novel, but she engages with both using dynamic, paratactical structures reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of ‘assemblage’. Müller's interaction with Pastior benefits from an overlap between their poetic concerns: both writers’ oeuvres are marked by traumatic experiences of totalitarianism, and by a desire to undermine the master‐narratives of ideology. In Atemschaukel their poetics become entangled, evoking both resistance to totalitarian structures, and the trauma these same structures inflict. The dynamic poetic forms Müller uses to engage with Pastior also help her to negotiate a fraught memory space that not only includes Soviet crimes, but is also overshadowed by Nazi atrocity. Through the use of paratactical poetic motifs Müller acknowledges the presence of multiple painful historical currents, without shaping them into an undifferentiated whole.