Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper reads Herta Müller's life and works in the light of those of Hannah Arendt in order to explore Müller's place within broad currents of European history, literature, and thought. Arendt and Müller are ethical, phenomenological, and instinctively iconoclastic thinkers who insist on the value of experience and are unafraid to think and speak, to use Arendt's term, ‘without a banister’. Both mount a modernist challenge to totalising discourses and seek out the possibilities of humanity in dark times, locating these in ideology's opposites: singularity, newness, and infinite possibility, in short, in the ‘natality’ (Arendt) which characterises the human condition. Müller's protagonists experience the loneliness and atomisation that Arendt identified as central to totalitarian rule, but they are also survivors and witnesses whose stories illuminate across time. Müller's disorienting collage technique, reminiscent of Benjamin's montages of quotations, promotes in the consumer a process of judgement and thought, a ‘vigilant partiality’ (Arendt on G. E. Lessing) which spurs engagement with the issues of their own era.
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