Carry with me (Atemschaukel)

Carry with me (Atemschaukel), Herta Müller, Alzira, Bromera, 2010 (2009)
Atemschaukel is the original title of the latest novel by Herta Müller. A new sample of reflection on the silence that can move people into a life of inertia and, in the case of the author, reflects the desire to explain the repression of Romanians of German culture after the Second World War. His own mother was deported to the Soviet Union and spent five years in a labor camp in Ukraine, the father, was the victim. However, this is a novel sensations, reflections on the limits of the human condition in the most extreme situations.

Müller, offers a community’s nakedness, belonging to a foreign culture to the nation that oppresses them. If the author did in 1987 out of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania, for installation in Berlin, her characters, no. So, this time, the protagonists bear with resignation the condition of oppressed and struggling every day for survival. Its protagonist, a young man of 17 years, is brought forcefully to work in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. The paradox of history forces the oppression of one community, a victim of Nazism, once the war ended, are guilty of complicity with the nation which inherited culture. Thus, a Jewish character, David Lommer, is also subject to imprisonment in the field, along with other members of the German minority.

This is a novel that the writer was carrying on with the advice of the poet Oskar Pastior, also from the German minority in Romania, who died in 2006. From his experience, as well as others who lived similar experiences of the protagonist, Müller has built one of the most bitter and intense texts of his career. We have an elaborate poetic prose, exquisite, without concessions to the reader, where the same reality seen from different viewpoints. Similar to The passport (1986), with a protagonist resignedly, in Windisch, Atemschaukel final history is a multifaceted vision of reality that is dependent on the particular vision of the protagonist and the other characters that questioned. With a concise syntactic construction, specifically, the author offers a retrospective of Leopold Auberges testimony from the first moment of the deportation in 1945 until the return of 1968, with the simplicity of one who says “all I have, I carry on above. ” Twenty-five years lived with the fear of those who do not know if it will survive the imprisonment in the lager, the store where people who live like beasts.
We know a voice and intimate, sincere, which covers topics as diverse as the absurdity of politicians, the national consciousness of the German minority in Romania, homosexuality in a homophobic society or cancellation of individuality for the benefit of the collective school. A special mention is the expression of appetite: “No words to describe the pain of hunger.” The words of the protagonist are a prelude to the construction of the symbolic character of the angel of hunger, a ubiquitous presence in the consciousness of the protagonists. A story, then, that has been prominent in our literature sample, within this theme, such as books K. L. Reich Piniella Joaquim Amat o Benguerel defeated Xavier and the initiatory path parallel to The war by Rodoreda in much, much war … In the case of the Nobel-winning writer, this is undoubtedly more complex history and intense narrative architecture that offers closer to formal perfection, where all elements inserted perfectly respond to the initial objectives of the author: the denunciation of oppression in all its forms. The reference to the simplicity, the dishes that accompany the traveler on the road of suffering of Herta Müller in their accounts, make up a masterpiece of world literature.