HERTA MÜLLER

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Hello readers,

Today, I will write about a person that have received a Nobel Prize. Her name is Herta Müller. She was born in August 17th of 1953. She is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist. Born in Nițchidorf, Timiș County in Romania, her native language is German. Herta is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.

Müller was born to Banat Swabian Catholic farmers in Nițchidorf, up to the 1980s a German-speaking village in the Romanian Banat in western Romania. Her family was part of Romania's German minority. Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant, but his property was confiscated by the Communist regime. Her father had been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, and earned a living as a truck driver in Communist Romania. In 1945 her mother, then aged 17, was along with 100,000 others of the German minority deported to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, from which she was released in 1950.Müller's native language is German; she learned Romanian only in grammar school. She graduated from Nikolaus Lenau High School before becoming student of German studies and Romanian literature at West University of Timișoara.

In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime’s secret police. After her dismissal she initially earned a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons.

Müller's first book, Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania in German in 1982, in a state-censored version. The book was about a child's view of the German-cultural Banat. Some members of the Banat Swabian community criticized Müller for her unsympathetic portrayal of village life Müller was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German-speaking writers in Romania who supported freedom of speech over the censorship they faced under Nicolae Ceaușescu's government, and her works, including The Land of Green Plums, deal with these issues Radu Tinu, the Securitate officer in charge of her case, denies that she ever suffered many persecutions] a claim that is opposed by Müller's own version of her (ongoing) persecution in an article in the German weekly Die Zeit in July 2009.

Since the early 1990s she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

These are some of the awards that she has:

• 1981 Adam-Müller-Guttenbrunn Sponsored Prize the Temeswar Literature Circle
• 1984 Aspekte Literature Prize
• 1985 Rauris Literature Prize
• 1991 Kranichstein Literature Prize
• 1997 Literature Prize of Graz
• 2002 Carl-Zuckmayer-Medaille of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 2005 Berlin Literature Prize
• 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
• 2013 Best Translated Book Award, shortlist, The Hunger Ange

In my opinion, Müller is important because her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceausescu regime which she has experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania.