Herta Müller: 'I like small things'

Nobel laureate Herta Müller's autobiography was published this week, My homeland, an apple pit. A few years ago, A Quattro Mani had an exclusive interview with the Romanian writer when her first collection of poetry collages was published, The womaniser and his witty aunt. We spoke to her at her home in Berlin, she showed us how her poetry collages are created, and taking a photo brought goosebumps to her arms - as well as to ours. It was one of the most poignant encounters with a writer we ever experienced. On the occasion of the publication of the autobiography of one of Europe's greatest writers, a republication of this interview.

Torment

Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 must have been both a blessing and a torment for Herta Müller. The many trips and readings, the attention paid to her person and the countless interviews and photo sessions that followed exhausted her. Again and again, the endless interrogations to which she was subjected for years by the secret service during Ceausescu's dictatorship are recalled. The tension - fear even - can be read from her face, especially when taking a photograph - the flash causes outright panic. It is not only her eyes that betray the damage done inside her. Her elegant stature, small and petite and as always dressed in black, looks powerful and fragile at the same time. Afterwards, as we stand outside, tears run down our cheeks.

Tension

But that's later - now we have yet to begin. On the occasion of the publication of The womaniser and his witty aunt, the first collection of poetry collages to be released in Dutch, she gives just this one interview. 'It hopefully doesn't have to be that long, does it?' she asks nervously.

That tension disappears when, a little later, she talks about her collages, standing at the desk on which she fabricates them. The seriousness has disappeared for a moment, exchanged for an almost childlike enthusiasm. Although mainly known as a prose writer, Herta Müller has been making collages of images and poems for half a lifetime. She has published three collections in Germany and she also made one in Romanian. Her collages are also available as posters and wallpaper.

What began as a form of expression out of necessity - using a typewriter was dangerous during the dictatorship, as it was traceable - has become a necessary form of expression. She has now made about a thousand of them, and also sent them as cards to friends.

Snipped glossies

Müller uses a wide variety of magazines for it, from opinion magazines and fashion glossies to the organic shop's advertising leaflet. 'I'm probably the only person who likes these leaflets,' she laughs. 'They use a printing font that looks like handwriting, which looks good optically. I always take two or three of them.'

Scattered here and there are piles of broken magazines, the lectern and the chairs next to it are littered with pieces of paper.'Look,' shouts Müller, 'then I'll take a picture, and then I'll have all these words here.'

She takes a white postcard on which a few words have already been glued, rummages among the clippings, shuffles words like hundepfoten and schuldigen, finally fishes out und. 'Up here I need a big und, down here a small one,' she points out. 'From a word I have in my head, a little story develops. When I have the right words and the picture, I start arranging them on the card, paying attention to size and colours, because they have to go together. I have to see it on the table. The collage has to look nice, it has to have inner rhyme, and rhythm. I don't like this brightly coloured word für anymore, I want a more neutral one. And hast should also disappear, I want the green out. And then I'll replace der for a soft red, to match the colour of the fox from the picture.'

How many cards do you have in your head?

'I don't have them ready-made in my head, I just know: I want to do something with this. Then I have to work on them. That takes a week on average.'

You need a week for one collage?

'Yeah, guess what, it's not easy! I'm working on it all day, totally absorbed in it. Even when I go outside, it's constantly in my head: whether it's right or not, whether a certain word should be removed, or I accidentally find a word that should be in there and then it throws the whole text upside down. Whereas sometimes I have already worked on it for three days and have to cut out all the words I had already stuck in. But as with prose, you can also destroy it if you can't stop. Then you keep improving until it deteriorates.'

Does such a visual poem start with text or with images?

'Usually it starts with text, occasionally with images. The image has to relate to the text. Sometimes I don't want to abandon certain words and then I end up having to make another image. I also sometimes panic: then the collage is almost finished and a certain word doesn't fit. Aahh! I sometimes have to put a lot of effort into getting it all on there.'

Never thought: I'll take bigger cards?

'No, this is the format. This is how it should be. Since I started, I have been using the same cards. I like the fact that they are small objects. I like a lot of small things, things that don't take themselves so seriously, don't act so important. Which only become interesting when you look at them closely.'

Are poetry collages a substantially different form of expression from essays and novels for you?

'No, it's not something else. You only have one head. It's a different way of doing the same thing. There are things from my prose that reappear in my collages. Not because I consciously want to, but because then suddenly my head is back in that place. Then things get connected behind my back.'

Yet the poems are lighter in tone, more playful, with more humour.

'Yes, because that comes from the material I work with. Each word comes from a different magazine and looks different, which creates lightness. The texts are small and contain rhyme, which is painful in prose. Here, it is actually beautiful when words unobtrusively rhyme, the rhyme binds small words and still does so five or six sentences on. There is something haunting about it. There is also brave rhyme, which is fluid, as in sonnets. But this way, rhyme is a riot-cracker that throws you off guard.'

Dictatorship

Müller has sometimes been accused of always writing about the same thing. Her entire oeuvre revolves around the impact of repression and dictatorship on the lives of ordinary people. Müller's books are as beautiful as they are gruesome. In poetic and original terms, she manages to make the unspeakable sayable: how all-destructive such a regime operates and what it means when fear permeates every facet of life.

In the impressive collection of essays The king bows, the king kills she recounts her personal experiences, in language that could be described as 'condensed' , so much eloquence is sometimes condensed into one word. Müller writes about 'the strange look' that remains when someone has escaped an existence completely corrupted by the secret service, in which nothing and no one can be trusted - not even your own perception. The nerves are shattered and the view of the world has become forever a different one; even innocent ducklings drinking water in the sunlight can suddenly evoke an association with Ceausescu's golden taps and cutlery, leaving the present unintentionally and without warning blackened by the past.

The Nobel Prize Committee awarded Müller's powerful prose for her relentless efforts to paint this 'landscape of the miserable'.

When you won that prize, you hoped it would raise awareness of oppression and the consequences of dictatorships. Almost two years on, do you feel it has indeed contributed anything?

'I think these issues are talked about more. The West had its freedom and people did not realise that the East was a prison, even in Germany. Many West Germans know more about Greece and Italy where they go on holiday than about the GDR.'

For us in the Netherlands, World War II ended in 1945, but for Eastern European countries it did not end until late 1989.

'Yes, all those countries - Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and many others - were under the noose of the Soviet Union. No country could develop its own identity. There was one ideology put over Eastern Europe like a bell jar. In these countries, people could not talk about their own history. For example, there are still huge open wounds here because of the wrongdoings of the Nazis towards Poles. The Polish people are actually only now free to think and speak about it, and to honour their dead and heroes.

Actually, you could say that history was in a frozen state. Here in the West, people could talk about the Nazi era for 60 years. In the GDR, you couldn't do that at all. The GDR acted as if the Nazis and the war were only in the West; everything was hushed up and distorted. I was in Buchenwald shortly after the fall of the Wall. At the memorial in that concentration camp, the Jews were not mentioned at all! Imagine how manipulated everything was. Unheard of! Monstrous it was.

The other side of the coin is that when a people are finally free to decide for themselves after such a long occupation, there is a catch-up and nationalism flourishes. And in the wake of nationalism, all sorts of right-wing thinking once again emerges. This is basically a vicious circle.'

Do you think the 'strange look' you describe is hereditary? Will it still be there in a few generations?

'Probably so. Every person carries his experiences in his head. History repeats itself forever. My mother spent five years in a Soviet labour camp and she never talked about it, but I saw the damage in her. That's how it gets into people's 'blueprint', into families. It gets etched in the memory. Every family has someone who has been through something like this. As a child, you notice that there is a weight attached to someone, even if you don't know the reason, and you learn how to behave. There are people who don't talk about it at all, ever. Writing is a strength, talking is also a strength. But both can also be destructive.'

Are your books meant to break the silence?

'Ah, I wouldn't put it that way. That's so big. Of course, when you speak, you break the silence. But it's not like I feel I have that mission. When I write about a labour camp, it starts much smaller. I had a mother who went through that, in a village where countless others were in the same situation. Then I also had a father who had been in the SS, which I also understood only later. My mother, who did not participate in the war, paid for my father being in the SS: he had had a share in the destruction of the Soviet Union and my mother was deported for the sake of reconstruction. When such things have happened in your family, you start thinking: what is history anyway? Nothing but tig thousand life events all together. It started with these things, with little stories of individuals whose history I wanted to know - not with the fact that I wanted to break the silence. Many people read their history in a book that has nothing directly to do with them.'

Does literature bring the truth to light?

'It's not about that at all. To this end, it is more important that there is non-fiction and that historians and scientists deal with the subject, that statistics are produced: how many people were cremated and deported, what was the situation on the spot? Literature can at most describe details and details, which professional literature, on the contrary, cannot. I have read a lot about camps, the gulag, about what it was like there. It is incredible how similar camp systems are. A labour camp had a different purpose than a POW camp, yet exactly the same things happened there and they had the same structures, sometimes down to word level. That astounded me. The oppression, the detachment, the way human traits change during a catastrophe, when people starve... We are all the same when we find ourselves in such situations.'

What has winning the Nobel Prize meant to you personally?

'The first year and a half was actually terrible. I am not a public figure, I do my work alone. Being constantly in the limelight is another profession, which has nothing to do with writing. With that status, I don't do very well. And then all those people who want to take photos... My nerves are going. But I welcome the recognition and it's nice to get so much money. If you use it wisely, you won't have money problems anymore. That's great because I know what it's like to have no money. In Romania, I had no money for many years, nothing, just debts. I was fired and couldn't get another job because the secret service came everywhere telling me I was an enemy of the state. There was no way out. And óf I know how it is! It is very bitter and you are really under enormous pressure. At the same time, I was picked up by the secret service at regular intervals and they accused me of being a parasite because I was not working. And then you also fear daily that they will kill you, because you are threatened all the time. Madness! But I couldn't deny myself. I was seventeen when I moved to the city, the same age as my father when he joined the SS. I knew: if I adapt to the dictatorship now, I may never blame him again either.'

Isn't it a cruel twist of fate that the horrors you experienced are simultaneously the basis for your successful writing?

'Yes, but I believe everyone's biography is the basis for what someone writes. Authors like Jorge Semprún or Primo Levi went through extreme situations and were damaged to the bone. Then that damagedness is the theme. I think it is natural to write about what you have survived. Other people have experienced different things that are more beautiful. But I didn't have a choice. I would have preferred to do without it. I could also have been born in the Netherlands. If only that were true, right?'