When Herta Muller was awarded the Nobel
Prize in literature in 2009 the reaction in Romania, the country of Muller’s
birth, was one of hostility (and in the English-speaking world was probably:
Herta who?).
As has become customary over the past few
years, when a European writer no one outside of the author’s borough has heard
of, wins the Nobel, a slew of the author’s novels get unleashed on the English
speaking world. Since Muller’s Nobel triumph, a number of her novels have
appeared in translated form in English.
The first of the novels—although, at just
over ninety pages, it is more like a novella—to appear in English was The
Passport, originally published in 1986.
The Passport tells the
story of Windisch, an ethnic German in the Banat region of Romania, who is more
desperate to immigrate to West Germany than Michael Douglas for sex.
Banat, originally a Hungarian province of
the Hapsburg Empire, was divided, after the First World War, between Romania
and Yugoslavia. It has a sizeable German population, which came to view itself
as trapped after the Second World War. The Ceausescu's Communist regime in Romania was said to be
particularly vicious because, unlike other Eastern Block Communist
dictatorships (for example the GDR), there was no guarantee in Ceausescu’s Romania
that you would be left alone even if you behaved. The Germans and the
Hungarians, both ethnic minorities in Romania, were said to have suffered
disproportionately under Ceausescu. The regime made it so unpleasant for the
ethnic Hungarians that many crossed the border and went to Hungary. As for the
Germans, the regime allowed them passports and exit visas only after hefty sums
were paid.
It is necessary that you know all of the
above beforehand if you are to make any sense of what goes on in this strange
little novel.
Windisch, a German, is a miller in a
dirt-poor Romanian village. He lives with his wife, another ethnic German, who,
the reader is informed on more than one occasion, was deported to Russia during
the Second World War (along with almost 100,000 Germans), where she survived
five harsh Russian winters by (in the words of her daughter) whoring. Windisch
and his wife (whose name is Katherine) have a grown up daughter named Amalia,
who lives in a nearby town and is a Kindergarten teacher. The village in which
Windisch lives seems to be inhabited by other spectral figures, none of whom
happy. Windisch’s wife refuses to have sex with him and instead pleasures
herself, pulling a ‘slimy finger’ out of her ‘hair’, as Windisch witnesses when
he returns home early one day. A joiner in the village grabs his wife between
her legs as she bends over a table and her big breasts tremble. The
night-watchman of the mill, where Windisch works, talks in his dreams in which
he sees an earth-frog that has the flabby thighs of his wife. A skinner in the
village has a son, Rudi, who is mentally imbalanced and spends the best part of
the year in a sanatorium at the top of the mountains. The truckers in the
village give money to a gypsy girl and ask her to lift up her skirt. Not a
bunch of people you’d want as your next door neighbour. An apple tree in the
church yard sprouts lips and begins eating its own apple. The village seems
straight out of a medieval horror story where strange things happen and
superstition reigns.
The Germans lead an uneasy co-existence
with the Romanians, and there is little love lost between the two communities,
which have derogatory epithets for each other.
Windisch does not want to live in Romania.
He wants to immigrate to West Germany. However, he knows that obtaining
passports for his family won’t be easy. The palms of the militiaman will need
to be greased. The desires of the priest (who issues baptism certificates) will
need to be satisfied. Windisch bribes the militiaman over several months with
sacs of flour, but gets nowhere. The reason, which the night-watchman helpfully
explains to Windisch (although he must have known it at some level), is that
the militiaman and priest will not do anything until their lusts are satisfied.
‘Your wife is too old for them,’ the night-watchman tells Windisch. ‘But then,’
he adds gleefully, ‘it will be your daughter’s turn. The priest will make her
Catholic and the militiaman will make her stateless.’ Windisch tries to delay it,
but eventually bows down to the inevitable. Amalia (who also wants to
immigrate) allows herself to be had by the two men and the family gets its
passport.
Reading The Passport is akin to
watching a surreal film by David Lynch; the whole novel has a dreamlike, unreal
quality. It is a curious and often unsettling mixture of the literal and
abstract; and the two often intrude in such a way that at times it is not easy
to make sense of that which is being conveyed. The narrative lurches from
detailed descriptions of, say, a fly flying in a room and settling on hands and
faces of various people in the room (including a corpse) to a man walking
through a field turning into a black thread (in the mind of Windisch).
In-between there are cocks that go blind and young owls that fly into the
village. It is all a bit bizarre.
The prose of The Passport is
excessively elliptical, which contributes substantially to the opaqueness of
the narrative. It is always difficult to get a feel of the style of the prose
in a translated piece of work, but, based on what is on display in The
Passport, you get the impression that Muller is a writer who writes
with minimum of stylistic fuss. The prose is pared down to the bare bones, with
several sentences no more than a few words. Some chapters (probably
unwittingly) resemble an essay by a precocious primary school pupil.
None of the characters in the novel is
particularly noteworthy and stays in your mind, with the possible exception of
Amalia, Windisch’s daughter. The hallucinatory quality of the novel makes it
difficult for the reader to empathize with them. It is as if you are looking at
their lives through an opaque glass.
The novel does not really explain why
Windisch (along with some other Germans in the village) is so desperate to
immigrate. The village is described in stark terms and the bleakness of the
villagers’ existence is conveyed in a manner that forces itself bluntly on the
reader’s senses. However, as you read the novel, you also get a sense that
Windisch is not an economic migrant; that there is something sinister lurking
under the surface that is blighting his existence. To the reader’s irritation,
the menace is never fully explained. That’s why, as I have mentioned earlier,
unless one is fully cognizant of the political and social situation in Romania
under Ceausescu, with specific reference to the German problem, it is
impossible to make any sense of what is happening in the novel. The novel was
published when Muller still lived in Romania under Ceausescu’s regime, and one
wonders whether the censorship to which novels of rebel novelists must have been
inevitably subjected to has anything to do with the obliqueness of prose.
Herta Muller, according to the entry on her
in WikiPedia, was born in Romania in 1953, and lived there till she was in her
mid-thirties. She published her first book in Romania in1982. She attempted to
immigrate to West Germany in the mid-eighties, but was denied visa. She
eventually managed to immigrate in 1987, and has lived in Berlin since. She
believes that she was harassed and persecuted not only by the Ceausescu regime,
but also subsequently by the Romanian secret service (when she was living in Germany). A former agent in the
Ceausescu regime (who spied on Muller) described her (following her Nobel win)
as suffering from psychosis and out of touch with reality. He claimed that
Muller’s account of persecution at the hands of the Ceausescu regime was
grossly exaggerated. The truth, according to this spy (who admitted to bugging
Muller’s house) is that she in fact got away lightly compared with many others.
This, the agent claimed, was because Muller was always surrounded by the West
German secret service and the regime decided, in the interest of keeping
cordial diplomatic relationship with West Germany, to leave her alone.
Be that as it may, if you champion a virtue
in literature that seems to have fallen out of fashion these days, namely,
clarity; or if you hold the view that the writer should work harder writing a
book than the reader does reading it, The Passport is not a novel that will
linger in your mind.
