Abstract
This chapter reads Herta Müller’s literature as an auto-ethnographical gaze on various types of oppressive communities. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature and revising the theoretical approaches to community, the chapter presents how Müller’s characters try to negotiate their lives with the various cultural practices these communities foster. Her characters understand community living as an individual choice in selecting the features and practices. Thus, they face different coercive actions that the community takes against their acts of dissidence. As a result, the impossibility to accept the entire set of communitarian living practices results in a constant feeling of dwelling in an allogenous vernacular, leading to a perceived sense of estranged homeliness. All three communities that Müller’s characters inhabit—the Swabian minority from Banat, communist Romania, and Germany after emigration—prove to be challenging living conditions, making all the characters from her autofictions feel uprooted. As a direct result, they perceive a permanent minority status.
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Notes
- 1.
Publishing in German, being censored, and eventually banned from publishing, Herta Müller was little known. After the fall of communism in 1989, however, the Romanian director Stere Gulea made Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was Ever the Hunter) into a movie, entitled Fox Hunter, in 1993. Yet, at that time, the author was virtually unknown mainly because of the language barrier. Translations of Müller’s works started to emerge in the mid-1990s.
- 2.
Dragoste implies that the German-language writers from Banat deliberately stood apart from the idyllic local literary tradition since they found that this type of writing failed to provide a general outlook on the community.
- 3.
Müller uses this term to define her work both in the interviews and in her essays.
- 4.
The concept of “travelling-back-home writers” took shape within the framework of the research project “Migration and Reshaping Identities in Romanian Travel Writings (1960–2010) – MARIS,” from the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Liviu Papadima, and financed by UEFISCDI Romania. Here, “back-home” refers to the group of German-origin Romanian writers that left Romania to join Germany (the former GDR) in their attempt to escape the totalitarian regime.
- 5.
Although not representing an ethnography of the home village, Müller’s gaze may consist of ethnographic stances. She studied German language and literature as her first major and Romanian language as a second major. Looking at the curricula from the academic year 1973–1974, Müller studied Folk literature and the history of the Romanian literature, among other subjects. The study of folklore at those times, although most probably centered upon the text and less, if any, of its contexts, may have yet opened the path to understand the existence of a folk culture and reading it with ethnographic tools.
- 6.
It is obvious that the author’s intention is not to produce an ethnography of traumatic life experiences. Her literature, read in conjunction with the contexts that determined it, however, resembles a form of autobiographical ethnography in which the native witnesses and is subject to “cases of violence and repression” (Maréchal 2009, p. 45). In fact, there are numerous accounts of the connection between fiction and fact in Müller’s work, including by the author herself (Bozzi 2013, Eddy 2000, Haines 2002, Kohl 2013, Marven 2011, Spiridon 2013).
- 7.
I envisage here a multiplicity of minority languages consisting even of smaller dialects. I am not suggesting a linguistical definition of dialects but rather as variants of a language spoken by those who form a cultural minority within the same language. The opposition between major and minor is clearly stated as the opposition between Romanian and German languages, which covers the narration of the totalitarian reality. Her Germanness, however, is hardly unitary. It develops at least two distinct forms of minorities within the same language, which I term dialects. This means that the authorial language becomes a minor one every time it discloses the reality of rejecting the group’s native culture or, as is the case with the post-emigration literature, when the authorial language fails to be absorbed because of the persistent traumatic legacies.
- 8.
See Dragoste (2007, pp. 76–90) for a list of opinions stemming from the reviews on Nadirs.
- 9.
Georg, one of the four friends from the novel, immigrates to Germany and commits suicide by jumping from the window of the building housing asylum seekers. Rolf Bossert, a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, dies, aged 33, a few months after reaching Germany.
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Stoicescu, A. (2020). In Search of a Suitable Home or the Perpetual Minority Status: Herta Müller’s Case. In: Fagerlid, C., Tisdel, M. (eds) A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_3
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