The Hunger Angel

Afterword



By the summer of 1944 the Red Army had advanced deep inside Romania; the Fascist dictatorship was overthrown, and its leader, Ion Antonescu, was arrested and later executed. Romania surrendered and in a surprise move declared war on its former ally, Nazi Germany. In January 1945 the Soviet general Vinogradov presented a demand in Stalin’s name that all Germans living in Romania be mobilized for “rebuilding” the war-damaged Soviet Union. All men and women between seventeen and forty-five years of age were deported to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union.

My mother, too, spent five years in a labor camp.

The deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania’s Fascist past. Those who had been in the camp never spoke of their experiences except at home or with close acquaintances who had also been deported, and then only indirectly. My childhood was accompanied by such stealthy conversations; at the time I didn’t understand their content, but I did sense the fear.

In 2001, I began having conversations with former deportees from my village. I knew that the poet Oskar Pastior had been deported, and I told him I wanted to write a book on the subject. He offered to help me with his recollections. We began to meet regularly; he talked, and I wrote down what he said. We soon found ourselves wanting to write the book together.

When Oskar Pastior died so suddenly in 2006, I had four notebooks of handwritten notes, in addition to drafts of several chapters. After his death I felt paralyzed. His close presence in the notes made the loss even greater.

A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone. But without Oskar Pastior’s details about everyday life in the camp I could not have done it.

Herta Müller

March 2009





Translator’s Note



Amid all the upheavals and mass movements of the 1940s, Leo Auberg is doubly displaced—as an ethnic German deported from his home in Romania and as a man with poetic and erotic sensibilities at constant odds with his surroundings. As he says: “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.”

In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism. When the words cannot be found, she invents them. And when words do not suffice, she alloys the text with silence, creating striking prose of great tensile strength.

Translating this prose requires unpacking it in one language and repacking it in another. New coinages such as Nichtrührer or Atemschaukel defy literal rendering: “non-stirrer” and “breath-swing” fail to convey the layers of meaning lurking in these compound words that echo the wordplay in Oskar Pastior’s poetry. Even uninvented words strain against a single definition: Geschirr may be a bowl or a dish or a tin plate or a mess kit or simply a vessel waiting to be filled with something that will determine its meaning, like words themselves, especially in Leo Auberg’s world, where innocent expressions are frequently filled with lethal content. Words, too, can be displaced. My task was to preserve this fundamental displacement without adding undue dislocation.

In matters of style and punctuation I have kept close to the original, where the abandonment of question marks and semicolons reflects the unpunctuated thoughts of the narrator, the simultaneity of insight and experience, the blurring of past and present. Similarly, I have followed the author’s use of small capitals to mark certain words of iconic significance to the narrator.

All of these matters require careful consideration. Fortunately I have not been working alone, and I’m thankful to my family and friends for their kind assistance. Thanks to Herta Müller for indulging my many queries and to the staff at Metropolitan Books for their ongoing support. I am indebted to Ed Cohen for his usual creative scrutiny of the text and to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her invaluable ear in various languages. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Sara Bershtel for her consistently remarkable insights and generous engagement.

—Philip Boehm