NOBEL PRIZE-LITERATURE-2009

Romanian born German author Herta Mueller won the Nobel Prize for literature-2009. In the packed hall of the Stockholm Stock Exchange, Peter Enguland the Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy said in statement, “The Nobel Prize in literature for 2009 is awarded to the German author Herta Mueller, who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,". She has had first hand experience of life in a totalitarian state. In her books she portrays life in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescus’s. In 2007 Mueller wrote an article in which she described Ceausescu “A parvenu with water taps and gold cutlery with a real weakness for palaces”. Besides novels she also writes poems and essays. Describing Mueller as a truly phenomenal writer Peter Englund says " I think it is a combination of a very, very distinct special language on one hand and then on the other, she has really a story to tell about growing up in a dictatorship but also growing up as a minority in another country and also growing up sort of a stranger for your own family. It is a very strong; very, very strong story to tell”.
According to Enguland “Her writings are about alienation toward the ruling powers but also toward her own family. She had a cruel, alcoholic father and a mother who never recovered from her sufferings in the Soviet camps. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents were horrifically wounded and marked by what they had been through. But the great thing with Herta Müller is that she sees these forces and this remoteness in herself too,”
Mueller was born on 17 August 1953 at Nitchidorf, in Banat in western Romania. Her father worked in the Nazi SS during the Second World War The Romanian Communists deported her mother to a labour camp in Ukraine in the USSR.
She worked as a translator in the beginning. But she was sacked from the job for refusing to work for Ceausescus’s secret police. She found solace in literature. Her ‘Niederungen’ (‘Nadir’), a collection of short stories finished in 1978, was published in 1982 after mutilated by the censors in Romania. However, in 1984 it was published in the Federal Republic of Germany exactly as she wrote it. In 1987 she and her husband escaped to Germany. The ‘Passport’ one of her remarkable novels came out in 1996 in Germany. ‘The Appointment’, another novel, appeared in 2001.
Her works portray life in Ceausescus’s Romania. She also dwells on corruption, repression, intolerance and her fight for freedom of expression. Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy described her language as ‘fantastic’ and ‘very distinctive’ and ‘extremely precise’. She writes ‘short sentences with lots of images’.
Major Works:-
•Niederungen-.1982.
•Druckender Tango (Opressive Tango)1984
•Hunger and Seide (Hunger and Silk) 1995.
•Heute war ich mir libernicht begenet (The Appointment) 1997
•Im Haarknoten wohnteine Dame ( A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot) 2000
•Die blassen Hrren mit den Moakkatassen ( The Pale Gentleman with their Espresso Cups) 2005
•Atemschaukel 2009.