Main focus of Friday, October 9, 2009

Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The German-Romanian writer Herta Müller has won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. With their decision the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee paid tribute on Thursday to the works of a woman who grew up in the Banat region in Romania before emigrating to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987, where she continued to be persecuted by the Securitate, the secret service of communist Romania. According to the jury, Müller's language paints "landscapes of homelessness".

România Liberă - Romania

In her books the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature Herta Müller deals among other things with her life under the Romanian dictatorship, writes the daily România Liberă: "The combination of these personal elements and the experiences of her parents' deportation in World War II from Dobrudscha [region in south-east Romania] and the USSR ... gives Herta Müller's texts a tragic dimension that transcends personal experience and makes her the spokeswoman of a larger message, that of the collective destiny of an archetype of suffering. ... Her writings bear a symbolic relevance not only for the Banat Swabians and not only for German culture on the Danube and in the Carpathians, but also for all those who were trodden underfoot by the communist system. We as Romanians have lost decades, sometimes amid desparation, persevering in the hopes of a better life. ... Herta Müller has not repudiated her country of origin and those who live here. ... Her various public statements ... are proof that the country she hails from still causes her pain, and that these wounds will never heal." (09/10/2009)

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Germany

"A great day for German Literature," Tilman Spreckelsen comments in delight in the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the news that German-Romanian writer Herta Müller has the Nobel Prize in Literature: "Right up to her latest novel, Atemschaukel [Everything I Possess I Carry With Me], she describes again and again what state repression does to those who are subjected to it. In this respect she resembles Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature seven years ago. And by awarding Herta Müller this prize the Stockolm Academy is sending a message that could erase the memory of some of the foolish decisions of the past years. It is a tribute to skill and ethics as two sides of the same coin, and not least to a shattered diaspora culture and its most verbally skilled guardian. For this reason too, the Stockholm decision is a great day for German literature." (09/10/2009)

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La Repubblica - Italy

"When we are silent we become unpleasant, when we speak we become laughable," quotes the left-liberal daily La Repubblica from the novel Herztier (The Land of Green Plums) by the newest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature Herta Müller. This is a book "with feverent language that renders palpable the omnipresent fear under barbarous regimes like that of Ceausescu, where all human relationships, even the most intimate, were pervaded by suspicion and denunciation, and where the trees, the stones of a river and the sky above couldn't help but reflect the horrible and grotesque signs of state control. Herta Müller is a chronicler of daily life under the dictatorship. She is not ready to forget - not even now - when many in the West prefer resignation, and who in view of the fact that the Wall has fallen and [Nicolae] Ceausescu is no longer there, would rather just forget about the past." (09/10/2009)

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Dziennik Gazeta Prawna - Poland

In the daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna Jacek Wakar writes that the Nobel LIterature Prize for German-Romanian author Herta Müller failed to cause much of a stir: "The Academy's announcement this year was received without emotion - as if it was just one more piece of news among many. The prize for Herta Müller is simply not a scandal, and there have been a few of those in the past ten years. Take the prize for [author and theatre director] Dario Fo, who is regarded as a political agitator even in his home country of Italy in the area of theatre. [The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Müller] on the other hand, is not an event that will change the hierarchy in world literature in any way. So it was no doubt a worthy decision to award the prize to this author, but it's nothing special." (09/10/2009)

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