Packing his improvised suitcase – made out of a gramophone case – seventeenyear-old Leo, the protagonist of Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel, takes several books with him to a Soviet labour camp in the Ukrainian steppe. Among these, there are “[k]eine Romane, denn die liest man nur einmal und nie wieder” (13). Contrary to the narrator’s conviction, by analysing the genre, Müller’s writing technique, and the work’s inherent controversy, which stems from its ambiguous relation vis-à-vis fiction and reality, I have found Atemschaukel to be certainly worth reading more than once. Each new reading can be seen as a metaphorical unpacking of Leo’s suitcase that may reveal an entirely different vision of the work. It is not just the newly discovered relationship of the work to the real and fictional worlds, but also a new state of things, that can be perceived through careful analysis of the novel’s language. Given the potential heterogeneity of meaning, in my analysis of the text, I set out to problematize the claims of some reviewers about the documentary precision of Müller’s novel, while simultaneously presenting a coherent vision of the work’s poetics through interpretation of its key conceptual metaphors. The thesis of this essay is that precision and unambiguousness are essential – yet foreign and parasitic – elements in the otherwise highly poetic autofictional work. The autofictional text serves the purpose of self-preservation for the protagonist and develops a key trope for creative writing (breathswing) as a form of resistance to oppression. However, the novel does not comply with the classical notion of autofiction as requiring that the author’s personal life be fictionalized: this has led some critics to claim that the problem with the narration in Atemschaukel lies in its inauthenticity (e.g. Radisch). Herta Müller was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Atemschaukel, published several months before, was immediately proclaimed one of Müller’s major works (Gauss). It was lauded for its meticulousness and precision on the one hand and for its rich metaphorical imagery on the other. Some critics went so far as to claim that Müller’s first-person narrative novel told the true story of the Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, here reimagined as the fictional Leo Auberg (Jung). It is true that, beginning in 2001, Pastior shared his experience of living in the labour camp in the Soviet Ukraine with Müller. They even planned

Unpacking the Suitcases: Autofiction and Metaphor in Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel

What is going on? How can silence be said, and be a source of meaning? Silence is defined as a complete absence of sound, an absence of information, or even a temporal limitation of speech. Silence is not a failure of language to communicate. When people get short of words, feelings, safe space, or even want to flee from punishment, they choose to keep silent. Yet, silence could be a smart tactic to cross borders, to personify agony, and to engage others’ imagination. Silence can open up new contexts and reveal hidden feelings in an unprecedented manner. The oeuvre of the Romanian writer Herta Muller exemplifies the absence of sound and even the absence of life itself. Muller manages to break through the formal constraints of language in a significant and artistic manner. She has a peculiar and creative way of describing her world. Her creativity is not limited to language as she always questions the power of language to express thoughts and feelings. Language could be a space where Muller can bend words, forms, colors, and shapes. In her collage poetry, Muller can defamiliarize language in an unconventional manner. She uses a unique art form, the art of cut-ups that makes the words and images speak for themselves. Faced with physical threat and psychological repression of the oppressive and dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, Muller resorted to silence to say what can’t be said. This paper aims at highlighting the art of collage as a tool used by Herta Muller to express silently incongruent images and texts to express fear and oppression. It will scrutinize the authenticity of the collage poetry of Herta Muller and how her rich and colorful images helped her to gain a foothold in the new setting. It also attempts to elucidate the difference between the silence of language and the silence of things.

https://jfehls.journals.ekb.eg/article_160393_a681ab82906e6021fd08cdd1b32358ad.pdf

What Can't Be Said Can Be Written: The Representation of Silence in Herta Müller's Visual Texts

Uncomfortable spaces: language and identity in herta műller ś work

This article analyzes the metaphorical mapping between language and destruction in the work of Herta Müller. Using conceptual metaphor theory, the study demonstrates how Müller applies the more concrete concepts of destruction and damage in order to reason about language and to convey effectively her understanding of it to readers. The concepts of destruction and damage allow Müller to convey to the reader the impact of and influence on language. The essay concludes that the metaphorical conceptualization of destructive and destructible language is an integral part of Müller’s poetics and its functioning in her texts relies on conceptual and linguistic conventions.

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/254774/1/HEFCE%20Exception%20sheet.pdf

Metaphorical Conceptualization of Destructive and Destructible Language in the Work of Herta Müller

With reference to Herta Muller’s fiction and non-fiction, my essay explores how the trope of silence is engaged to make sense of more abstract concepts. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, I arg...

/pdf/the-trope-of-silence-in-the-work-of-herta-muller-bnw1og9911.pdf

The Trope of Silence in the Work of Herta Müller

'In Allem Ist der Riss': Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Body in Herta Muller's Prose and Collages

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'In Allem Ist der Riss': Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Body in Herta Muller's Prose and Collages