Abstract
My paper elaborates Herta Müller’s Gulag novel, Atemschaukel (2009; published in English under the title of The Hunger Angel in 2012), in the historical, political and ethical contexts of twentieth-century forced migrations by placing the novel among those exodus narratives that have unfolded the parallel history of Romanian-German and Jewish communities during and after the Second World War. Given the fact that the memory of forced migrations and of the Gulag is a “soft memory” (Etkind 2004), there are no consensual remembrance policies in any concerned East or East-Central European country regarding their history. In the absence of official ownership, the legacies of these colletive and individual traumas became predominantly text-based (rather than image- or monument-based). One must therefore study those aesthetical forms by which literature is able to encode the physical, psychological, moral, social-political conditions of any totalitarian rule—and thus, attempt to establish the perceptional and sensational frames on which the universe of the Gulag can be re-constructed. Accordingly, my paper gives an amplifying view of the tendencies by which Müller’s Atemschaukel both preserves and subtly re-orchestrates the conventions of the genre of the Gulag novel. One of the main achievements of her (politics of) aesthetics consists in re-creating the image of the labor camp through an ethically grounded conception of literary testimony, which, at the same time, gains and fulfills a mediative (mimetic) function.
Highlights
My paper elaborates Herta Müller’s Gulag novel, Atemschaukel (2009; published in English under the title of The Hunger Angel in 2012), in the historical, political and ethical contexts of twentieth-century forced migrations by placing the novel among those exodus narratives that have unfolded the parallel history of RomanianGerman and Jewish communities during and after the Second World War
Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel, a novel that was written in cooperation with Oskar Pastior, a RomanianGerman poet, and published in 2009 without any indication of their co-authorship, recounts the preparations of its seventeen-years-old protagonist, Leo Auberg, (Pastior’s alter ego) for his deportation and journey in a converted cattle truck together with hundreds of other ethnic Germans from Romania to the Ukraine
This occurred in January 1945 when, on orders from Moscow, some 80,000 adult Romanian-Germans were rounded up by the Red Army in an act of revenge and recompence for Nazi crimes and deported to the Soviet Union to work on reconstruction projects, where some 10,000 subsequently died (Wichner 2005: 135)
Summary
My paper elaborates Herta Müller’s Gulag novel, Atemschaukel (2009; published in English under the title of The Hunger Angel in 2012), in the historical, political and ethical contexts of twentieth-century forced migrations by placing the novel among those exodus narratives that have unfolded the parallel history of RomanianGerman and Jewish communities during and after the Second World War. Several spatial and temporal parameters of the events that take place in Herta Müller’s novels can be linked to and associated with the history of the Romanian-German minority in the twentieth century, such as their deportation into Soviet labor camps in 1945, or their immigration to Western Europe (mainly to Germany) in the 1970–80’s.
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