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When the Nobel literature laureate Herta Müller was growing up in a dreary village in western Romania, in the 1950s heyday of communism, she soon learnt that there was one household rule that really mattered: to peel potatoes with extreme care. Her mother had spent five years close to starvation in a Soviet labour camp, one of tens of thousands of Romania’s German minority deported to the USSR after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
“My mother demanded that the peel be in one piece: wafer-thin and circular, like a coiled ribbon,” writes Müller. “She would scream at me if my knife slipped too deep into the potato . . . Her chronic hunger, once she had returned from the camp, was the source of her lifelong complicity with the potato.”
There is a pitiless quality to Müller’s writing. But then again the wellspring of her acclaimed novels — and now her memoir The Village on the Edge of the World — is Romania under its dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his dire predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. This was a landscape so beaten down by suspicion and fear that all but the last vestiges of decency and dignity were extinguished.
Müller’s ethnic German community in the Banat had a particular stigma in the eyes of the Romanian Communist party, which branded them as traitors. Many of the men had joined the Wehrmacht; (the inconvenient truth that the Romanian army had marched alongside the Nazis into the Soviet Union was airbrushed from Romania’s history.) Müller’s father had joined the SS. To the end of his life when he was drunk, he sang SS anthems.
With a fearful and demoralised mother who beat her regularly, and an unrepentant fascist father, her childhood was bleak, even by the constrained standards of the Soviet bloc. But this is not a misery memoir. It abounds with magical memories of the taste of rotting fruit, the cornfields, the author’s young fascination with owls, all set against the unrelenting blandness of the breadbasket Banat region.
Yet in Kate McNaughton’s soulful translation from German, the reader never loses sight of the dehumanising grimness of life behind the Iron Curtain. This is also a clinical and piercing reflection on life under tyranny, on the compromises that so many have to make, on choices and consequences. Müller’s description of the dress, manner and peevish mindset of the presiding bureaucrats captures so well the banality yet also cruelty of the system. “They were narrow-minded, heavy-handed, unscrupulous, cynical, capricious, horrifyingly uneducated,” she writes. “They didn’t need to be knowledgeable about anything of course, not even about Communism . . . For the hot summers . . . the functionaries had their mustard-green suits . . . On top of this sense of ‘big city fashion’ the comrades also acquired a certain shiftiness: the oblique look . . . and vulgar swagger of shysters.”
Every now and then, she recalls seeing a flash of sympathy or empathy. There is the moment when someone drops dead on the street. One passer-by drapes a newspaper on the dead man’s face. Another removes it, bravely crumples up the paper that bore a huge picture of Ceauşescu, and replaces it with a handkerchief. There is the account of her friend Jenny, whose support sustains her when she is facing extreme pressure from the Securitate secret police — until Jenny later betrays her.
Müller’s account of her stint in a state factory is heart-stopping in its depiction of the harassment she faced for refusing to do the Securitate’s bidding. Some of it was outwardly petty: she ended up having to turn up to work and sit doing nothing on a staircase, day after day. It was also relentless psychological torture. She would be picked up off the street as if on a whim for interrogations. “The Securitate was a colossal Fear Station,” she writes. “The only productive sector of the economy under Socialism was the production of fear.”
Müller was eventually allowed to emigrate in 1987 — just two years before the anti-communist revolution that led to the overthrow and execution of Ceauşescu. Romania was then so desperate for hard currency that it sold its German minority for cash.
One of her writer friends decides to stay. “Only Roland Kirsch, the youngest among us, said he wanted to stay a while longer, and that he would come later,” she writes. “We all know how that ended. Two years later he was found hanged. His last card read: ‘Sometimes I have to bite myself on the finger to feel that I still exist’.” (As for Müller herself, on her arrival in Germany after all her sufferings, she found herself accused of being a Securitate spy.)
At a time of renewed scrutiny of the excesses of capitalism, there is a growing tendency in the west to indulge in rose-tinted reappraisals of communism. Müller’s memoir says it all as a riposte to such sentiment, not least in her observations of the lack of beauty, creativity and colour in the drab world in which she was raised.
But this is not a political book. It is a timeless account of humanity and also what it really means to be a writer. Writing, she suggests, has a parallel with dealing with a totalitarian system. “You weigh up speaking and staying silent, and both remain tangled up in each other. Allusion and omission — it’s all one big labyrinth.”
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceauşescu’s Romania by Herta Müller, translated by Kate McNaughton Granta £16.99, 256 pages
Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor
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