The award of the IMPAC literary prize to Herta Muller for The Land Of The Green Plums took the publishing world by surprise and sent critics scurrying to find out more about the author. An English translation of the novel is currently available only in the US, although Granta plans to rush out an edition next month on the strength of the award. But nobody was more surprised by the book's success in English than the author herself.
"I had been told that there was no demand in the English-speaking world for this kind of writing and I accepted that. But I've been very lucky. I've always been very lucky," she says, speaking in Berlin.
Reading The Land Of The Green Plums, however, which Muller acknowledges is based on her own experience in Ceaucescu's Romania, it is hard to trace much evidence of this history of good fortune.
The book tells the story of a group of friends who refuse to accept the official verdict of suicide following the death of Lola, a young student who has become a burden to her lover, an influential member of the communist party. They become targets for the Securitate secret police and are subjected to such terrifying psychological pressure that two are driven to suicide.
"I wrote this book because I had two friends who were murdered by the secret service. One had already left Romania and he threw himself out of a window in a transit home in Frankfurt. In that sense, he may have done it himself. But his nerves were in such a state, they had tormented him so much and he had left too late. He couldn't cope any more and he wasn't able to grasp that he was no longer in Romania and he was afraid of police everywhere. He couldn't behave any differently. The other friend was found hanged in his apartment. There was no autopsy and he was buried as quickly as possible. This was a common pattern - murder presented as suicide," she says.
The story is interwoven with memories of a harsh childhood among the German-speaking minority in the Banat region of Romania, where Mueller was born in 1953. The German minority settled in the region 300 years ago and held firm to their Swabian customs and folklore despite numerous changes of sovereignty. Part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire until 1918, the region was then incorporated into Romania. Hitler embraced the German-speaking minority as "Germans overseas" and many young men from the region served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Muller's father joined the SS.
"He never really distanced himself from National Socialism. He sometimes spoke about the horrors of war and fear of death but it was always with reference to himself. But he wasn't interested in the fact that he had carried out Hitler's work, invaded countries, probably killed people and destroyed villages. When he met his war comrades, which is how they always referred to one another, they spoke about the war as if it was a big adventure. They all came from the same village, which was a dump and the war took them out of this dump for the first and the last time," she says.
Muller horrified the German minority in 1982 with her merciless portrayal of their lives in her first collection of stories, Niederungen. She poked fun at their image of themselves as the embodiment of the traditional German virtues of hard work, orderliness and cleanliness and their sense of superiority over the Romanian majority. And she suggested that their cherished traditions were not only useless and stagnant but were tainted by their association with National Socialism.
It was not until she moved to Timosoara at the age of 15 that Muller began to speak Romanian and to become fully aware of the nature of the dictatorship under which she was living. She met a group of young German-speaking intellectuals who called themselves Aktionsgruppe Banat, who had long since attracted the attention of the secret services.
"They had been interrogated, thrown out of university or college. And they had already formulated their idea of literature - that no literature that deserves its name should be subservient to power. That literature must remain independent and sovereign. That literature comes from personal experience. That a critical perspective is a prerequisite for literature. The standard phrase in Romania at the time was `literature that we need' or `music that we need'. But as soon as this state needed you, you were no longer worth taking seriously," she says.
The central characters in The Land Of The Green Plums are based on the members of this group and Muller portrays the hopeless nobility of their struggle and their suffering with uncompromising clarity. Their story is told in the past tense while Muller writes the narrator's childhood memories in the present tense and the third person. But she shifts into the future tense for the emotional crux of the book, the story of the narrator's betrayal by her friend Teresa.
While Muller insists that most characters in the novel are composites of a number of people, she acknowledges that Teresa is based on a single person, a rebellious, privileged woman who supported the Aktionsgruppe Banat and occasionally hid manuscripts for them. She was one of Muller's closest friends before the writer moved to Germany in 1987 and the two women trusted one another completely.
"During all the time I was there, I believe she was loyal. Of course you never know. This sympathy she felt for me - it may even have been love because I was the closest person too her - one does not exclude the other. And that's the most terrible, destructive thing. Secret policemen who present themselves as such, a captain who interrogates me in his office, I know what I'm dealing with there. But when it's people you don't suspect, people who you are close to and your trust is abused, that's when things happen which hurt most," she says.
After Muller moved to Berlin, her friend came to visit her and admitted that she had been sent by the secret police to warn the writer to stop criticising the Ceaucescu regime. Muller, who had been receiving death threats since she arrived in Germany, was horrified to discover that her friend had made a copy of the keys of her apartment, which she planned to give to her Securitate sponsors.
The woman, who was suffering from cancer at the time, is now dead and Muller is still tortured by the conflicting emotions she feels about an act of betrayal that was driven by love.
"She always said it was because she missed me. She wanted to see me. It was not her hatred for me but her love that made her do it. Both went together and that's what drove me mad," she says.
Muller sees both herself and her friend as victims of a system that turned moral values upside down, rewarding everything base in human nature while penalising virtue. But she cannot forgive her friend for allowing the state to invade the most intimate territory of their relationship.
"She allowed her personal intimacy to be used for political purposes. And despite everything, I can't excuse it. Because it was worse than if it had happened within our personal relationship. It was ripped out of our personal relationship and used against me. I can explain everything but that doesn't make it any less bad. Its consequences were clear and she knew that too. I know that love will do anything. Love runs all the way from tenderness to murder. In the name of love, anything is possible. But it's quite different if it's not part of the personal relationship but is orchestrated by the state," she says.
Muller steadfastly refused to leave Romania throughout most of the 1980s, despite constant surveillance and harassment from the secret police. Her success as a writer in Germany offered her a certain level of protection and, although she criticised the regime every time she went abroad, she always returned to Romania.
"I always maintained that this was my country. I was born here. The country belonged to me as much as to them or Ceaucescu. Only one had to go and all the rest could stay. Why should everyone else have to go so that he could stay? I've never destroyed anything here. The one who caused all this destruction is the one that ought to disappear. The whole population is leaving but this guy with his plan is staying," she says.
Finally, when the possibility of political change appeared most remote and the pressure from the secret police had become unbearable, Muller and her friends together applied to leave Romania. Two years later, Ceaucescu was overthrown and shot for his crimes against the Romanian people. Instead of feeling relieved that her tormenter had received a just reward, Mueller found the dictator's death distressing.
"For 15 years I wished him dead every day. I would have been happy at any moment if I heard that someone had shot him. I thought that when he was executed, I'd be so relieved because we could all breathe now because the threat had passed. But I had the opposite reaction. I had a crying fit and couldn't stop weeping. I found it hard to watch a man being shot. And he was a man for the first time. He was unshaven, he had this fear in his eyes. Yet this verdict was justified. He had put so many people below the ground. He deserved it. Even if the process was unbearable. I always thought when I was living in Romania that I could have shot him. But I probably wouldn't have managed it. That shocked me too. I wouldn't have been able to get through the moment," she says.
Although Muller is suspicious of the cult of the writer as the conscience of the nation, she remains convinced that the writer has an obligation to be a voice for justice in society but she has no plans to return to Romania.
"In a dictatorship, literature has to take on many responsibilities that have nothing to do with it. It's overloaded. But I still believe that literature is an ethical thing. A writer's moral sensibility shows itself in everything he writes, in the choices he makes, the sympathy he shows for individual characters. Literature is important for every society. At that time, I felt it was important for my country where I was. It no longer matters where I am. Things take their course."
The Land Of Green Plums will be published by Granta, in Michael Hofmann's English translation, on July 23rd.
