Herta Mueller wins Nobel Price in Literature

[WillieW]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=ay0YNs.bWOP8

German Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize in Literature (Update2)

By Patrick Donahue

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born writer who escaped Nicolae Ceausescu’s police state two years before the Berlin Wall fell and has become one of reunified Germany’s best known novelists, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose,” 56-year-old Mueller “depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” the Swedish Academy said today on its Web site.

Born into a German-speaking community in Romania, Mueller began opposing Ceausescu’s regime while studying German and Romanian literature at the University of Timisoara in the 1970s. She was fired from her post as a translator of machine manuals for declining to work as a spy for the Securitate secret police.

Her first work, “Lowlands” (Niederungen), which was published in censored form in Romania in 1982, details the brutally conformist life of rural Swabian Germans in Romania’s Banat region, where Mueller grew up. Complete versions had to be smuggled out of the country.

“Herta Mueller is a writer who helps us understand what it is to be human in the 20th and 21st centuries,” Pete Ayrton, publisher at Serpent’s Tail, said by e-mail. The U.K. company was the first to publish her books in English.

“Once again, the Nobel Prize committee has done its job -- to bring to the attention of a wider public an essential writer whose lyrical prose captures the oppression of totalitarian regimes, the reality of life for too many people today,” Ayrton said.

Ceausescu’s Ban

During the Cold War, Mueller’s work was lauded in the west, while in Romania she was pilloried by the national press. The Ceausescu government banned her from publishing.

She left Romania for West Germany in 1987 with her husband, Richard Wagner, two years before Ceausescu’s regime was overthrown. In the last two decades Mueller has had lectureships at German universities and has continued writing.

This year she published “Atemschaukel,” which has the English working title “Everything I Own I Carry With Me,” a novel about a German-speaking Romanian youth at a deportation center at the end of World War II. The book, one of six short- listed for the German Book Prize to be awarded Oct. 12, exposes Stalin’s persecution of German-speaking Romanians.

Mueller’s mother was deported to the Soviet Union after the war and spent five years in a Ukrainian work camp. Her father had served during the war with the Nazis’ Waffen SS.

Sympathy for Victims

“Atemschaukel” is “a testament to literary empathy unparalleled in German literary history,” critic Michael Naumann wrote in a review for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit last month. “Behind Herta Mueller’s anger toward the consequences of political violence -- behind powerful prose that eschews all charm -- lies hidden an incredible ability to articulate her sympathy with the victims of tyranny in microscopic detail, with a kind of poetry of minutiae.”

Mueller has sought access to her own secret Securitate files in Romania, and has been turned down each time, according to an article she wrote in Die Zeit this year in July.

“Instead, each time, there were signs that I was once again -- that is to say still -- under observation,” she wrote. “Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, has not disbanded, it has just been given another name.”

Other works of Mueller’s that explore life in dying dictatorships include “Land of the Green Plums” (Herztier) from 1994 and “The Appointment” (Heute waer ich mir lieber nicht begegnet) from 2001.

Mueller, who lives in Berlin, didn’t expect the award.

“I am surprised and still can’t believe it -- I can’t say any more at the moment,” her publisher, Carl Hanser Verlag quoted her as saying in a statement on its Web site.

‘Engaged’ Literature

As a writer, Mueller is “determined to keep alive memories of the inhumane aspects of state communism, even 20 years after the East-West conflict,” Michael Krueger at Carl Hanser Verlag said on the Web site. “Her highly literary, elegiac work is an impressive example of engaged European literature that makes our history topical with sharp analysis and poetical exactness.”

Mueller was a top-placed 3-to-1 favorite to win the Nobel in literature, tied with Israeli novelist Amos Oz, according to Harrow, England-based bookmaker Ladbroke’s Plc. American writers Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth were tied for second place, as 5-to-1 favorites.

A controversy erupted last year when the Academy’s then permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said that authors from the U.S. were impeded because their country is “too isolated” and weighed down by a restraining “ignorance.”

The new permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said on Oct. 6 that he disagreed with Engdahl’s comments. He said the judges must be wary of becoming “too Eurocentric,” according to the Associated Press.

Boell, Hesse

Mueller is the first German to win the prize since 1999, when it was awarded to Guenter Grass, and the ninth ever. Other Germans to have received the Nobel were Heinrich Boell in 1972, Hermann Hesse in 1946 and Thomas Mann in 1929.

She is also the 12th woman to have won the prize, joining the likes of Doris Lessing, who won two years ago, Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and Toni Morrison, the last American to have won the Nobel in 1993.

Last year’s literature prize went to French novelist Jean Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who wrote about exotic and endangered cultures in some of the world’s most outlying regions. Winners in the last decade have included British writer Harold Pinter in 2005 and J.M. Coetzee of South Africa in 2003.

The 10 million-krona ($1.44 million) Nobel literature prize was created in the will of Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901. Nobel, a Swede who invented dynamite, also set up awards for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry and peace.

[NV Whino]

1. Now there's an interesting statement

A controversy erupted last year when the Academy’s then permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said that authors from the U.S. were impeded because their country is “too isolated” and weighed down by a restraining “ignorance.”