{"id":997,"date":"2019-04-26T12:08:27","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T16:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=997"},"modified":"2019-04-26T12:08:27","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T16:08:27","slug":"life-transposed-into-words-literature-and-truth-in-the-works-of-herta-muller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2019\/04\/26\/life-transposed-into-words-literature-and-truth-in-the-works-of-herta-muller\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLife Transposed into Words: Literature and Truth in the Works of Herta M\u00fcller\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By August Hagemann<\/p>\n

On Tuesday April 23rd, Miami University\u2019s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies hosted its annual lecture, this year delivered by the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta M\u00fcller.\u00a0 M\u00fcller was accompanied by her preferred English translator Philip Boehm, a playwright, prolific translator to English from German and Polish, and founder of the Upstream Theatre in St. Louis.\u00a0 Through her work and life experiences, M\u00fcller discussed the role of literature, truth, and art in combating Ceausescu\u2019s dictatorship in Romania, and dictatorship in general.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the discussion, which also featured the Director of the Havighurst Center, Stephen Norris, and Professor of German, Nicole Thesz, M\u00fcller talked about her notion of objective truth; she talked about how she would not write if she did not believe such a thing did exist, and that she had some sort of access\u00a0 to it.\u00a0 That is not to say that she feels she is able to write down objective truths — rather, M\u00fcller attributes her thoughts on truth in writing to the writer Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.\u00a0 That is, that literature is life transposed into words.\u00a0 It is not a falsification, but an interpretation of the truth.\u00a0 M\u00fcller also believes that it is impossible to really express the whole truth without literature.\u00a0 While historical and documentary works are useful and necessary tools for working through the tragedies of dictatorship, M\u00fcller believes that literature is the only way to understand what people experienced and how they felt.\u00a0 Thus, the full understanding of any dictatorship is dependent on literature.<\/p>\n

According to M\u00fcller, this ability of literature to reveal a critical and otherwise hidden part of the truth is what makes it such a threat to dictatorships.\u00a0 She argues that one of the hallmarks of any dictatorship is their constant need to falsify.\u00a0 This is essential while the dictator is in power, so that power can be maintained, as well as after the fact, so that people can justify their actions under the dictator, and excuse the crimes and atrocities that were committed.\u00a0 Literature, as an illuminator of true lived experiences, undermines these falsifications, and so cannot coexist with dictatorship.\u00a0 Either the dictatorship will suppress and control the literature, or the literature will gradually erode and, potentially, play a role in the collapse of the dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The Romanian dictatorship fell into this pattern, relying on falsehood to maintain its legitimacy.\u00a0 Falsification was also a critical element in how the Ceau\u015fescu regime went about persecuting those who posed a threat to it.\u00a0 M\u00fcller recalls how she was never brought in for interrogation explicitly because of her writing — after all, for the dictatorship to admit that they were engaged in an existential battle with literature and the truth would have undermined their legitimacy as much or more than the literary works that such a battle aimed to suppress.\u00a0 Instead, the government would arrest and interrogate M\u00fcller and other writers on whatever made-up charges they wanted; oftentimes, it was an accusation of prostituting oneself to foreign visitors, and accepting payment only in valuable Western currencies.\u00a0 By involving literary figures, who dealt in truth, with the world of dictatorial untruths, the regime was able to preemptively undermine what was perhaps its most fundamental ideological opponent.\u00a0 This policy only made literature that much more valuable a tool of resistance, however.\u00a0 Since literature, as M\u00fcller mentioned, is capable of capturing individual experience, and exists as an interpretation of objective truth, it could capture the contradictions inherent in a system founded on falsification.\u00a0 This is not to say that pro-regime literature did not exist; it certainly did.\u00a0 However, anti-regime literature could not be spun the same way that anti-regime facts or anti-regime news items could be.\u00a0 Anti-regime literature was concerned with individual experience, so a dictatorship, which, according to M\u00fcller, is inherently a collective experience, could not coopt it to its own purposes.\u00a0 The Ceau\u015fescu regime could only counter literature by silencing it.<\/p>\n

Also essential to the government\u2019s whole power structure, according to M\u00fcller, was fear.\u00a0 A primary purpose of the interrogations, the constant impending sense of being criminalized, the thought that one\u2019s neighbors could at any time be reporting one\u2019s activity to the secret police, was to instill fear.\u00a0 It was the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, that got M\u00fcller fired from her job at a factory,\u00a0 and it was those same secret police who then harassed her for being unemployed.\u00a0 This fear further contributed to the regime\u2019s ability to falsify in order to support themselves, as people who are afraid are far less likely to try and share their individual experiences; that is, they are less likely to do perhaps the only thing that had any chance of directly undermining the regime\u2019s power.<\/p>\n

As a result of this widespread fear, being interrogated also often lead to social isolation.\u00a0 M\u00fcller recalls how the only people one could expect to stand by them after coming under government suspicion for any sort of crime, no matter how implausible, would be one\u2019s closest friends and family.\u00a0 Most people simply wanted to be left alone to continue living their lives, and the best way for them to do that was to distance themselves from anyone who had gotten on the wrong side of the Ceau\u015fescu regime.\u00a0 Initially, M\u00fcller herself admitted she did not plan on being a writer; she thought that maybe she could be a hairdresser, or a tailor.\u00a0 M\u00fcller was drawn to writing because it allowed her to have some creative thing that was entirely her own.\u00a0 Only gradually over time did her writing also became a way to expose the crimes of the Ceausescu regime, a way of remembering and defending her friends who had been killed and then classified as suicides to cover up what was really happening.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller\u2019s life and her work both testify to the power of literature to combat dictatorship.\u00a0 M\u00fcller said that she hoped to write for all Romanians who suffered under dictatorship, and the experiences of evaluating and rebuilding that followed.\u00a0 Only through the individual, interpreted truths that literature is able to capture can the fabrications of dictatorship be revealed as the falsehoods they truly are.<\/p>\n

August Hagemann is a junior majoring in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.\u00a0 This past academic year he has served as a Havighurst Center fellow responsible for covering the ongoing series about “truth and power.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By August Hagemann On Tuesday April 23rd, Miami University\u2019s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies hosted its annual lecture, this year delivered by the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta M\u00fcller.\u00a0 M\u00fcller was accompanied by her … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-havighurst-lecturers","category-lecture_reviews","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}