The Land of Green Plums
Encyclopedia
The Land of Green Plums is a novel by Nobel Prize
-winning author Herta Müller
, published in 1994 by Rowohlt Verlag. Perhaps Müller's best-known work, the story portrays four young people living in a totalitarian police state under the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship in Romania
, ending with their emigration to Germany. The narrator is an unidentified young woman belonging to the German minority
, much like the author herself. Müller said the novel was written "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceauşescu regime".
Like many of Müller's books, The Land of Green Plums illustrates the position of dissidents from the German minority in Romania, who suffered a double oppression under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu
. The rural German-speaking
community tries to preserve its culture by strictly enforcing traditional rules; once the main characters escape this environment through university study in the city, they suffer, as political dissidents, the oppression exercised by the totalitarian regime. Those who flee the country for Germany find themselves cultural outcasts: they are not considered German but rather Eastern Europeans. Critics read the novel as giving testimony of abuse and the ensuing trauma. Normal human relationships are rendered impossible by the lack of freedom of expression; the threat of violence, imprisonment, and execution; and the possibility that any personal friend may be a traitor. Written in a paratactic
style, full of flashbacks and time shifts, the very language of the book reflects trauma and political oppression.
After its publication in German
and its translation into Dutch
, the novel received moderate attention, but it gained an international audience when the English translation by Michael Hofmann
was published in 1996. In 1998 this translation won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
, the largest prize given for a single work of fiction published in English. Following the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
for Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums entered the bestseller list on Amazon.com
.
Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites." The four are from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers complaining about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who were members of the SS
during World War II. They hide the diary and other documents, including photographs and books, in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate
, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four and begins to subject them to regular interrogations. Their possessions are searched, their mail opened, and they are threatened by the captain and his dog.
After graduation the four go their separate ways, but they remain in contact through letters and regular visits, although their letters are read by the Securitate. They take menial jobs: Kurt works in a slaughterhouse as a supervisor, for instance, and the narrator translates German manuals in a factory. A fifth member, Tereza, befriends the narrator even as it becomes clear that she is acting partly on Pjele's orders.
The lives of all five become more miserable, and each conforms to the regime's demands even as they lose their jobs for apparently political reasons. They discuss fleeing the country, and Georg is the first to do so; weeks after he arrives in Germany, he commits suicide by jumping out the window of a Frankfurt
hotel. The narrator and Edgar likewise acquire passports and go to Germany, still receiving death threats. Kurt remains in Romania, no longer working, and later found hanged. The novel ends with the same passage as it began: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves".
, with a former SS man for a father. Trained as a teacher, she lost her position after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate, and left for Germany in 1987. In a 1998 interview she mentioned that real persons can be recognized in some of her characters, including one in The Land of Green Plums: "That [recognition of characters] was already the case in my previous book [The Land of the Green Plums]. Because my best girlfriend died young, and because she had betrayed me, and because I had to despise her and could not stop loving her." In an earlier interview, with the Danish newspaper Politiken
, she went into greater detail about her friend, depicted in the novel as Tereza:
in many of its details, such as the green plums of the title. Mothers warn their children not to eat green, unripe plums, claiming that they are poisonous. Yet the novel regularly depicts police officers gorging themselves on the fruit: "The officers' lack of constraint in engulfing the fruit parallels the remorseless persecution of the human race" under Nicolae Ceauşescu
. The green plums also suggest childhood, or regression into childhood: "The narrator watches the Romanian police guards in the streets of the city as they greedily pocket green plums ... 'They reverted to childhood, stealing plums from village trees.' Ms. Muller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality."
, the poetic quality of the language is essentially connected to its author's objective: "the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania." Critics have generally shown appreciation for the novel's language, as did Nicholas Lezard
, writing in The Guardian
:
Though the novel's language, and Müller's language in general, is praised for its precision--Peter Englund
, secretary of the Swedish Academy
, noted her "extreme precision with words"—many things are left unsaid. As a reviewer for The Australian
noted, the narrator is never named, the words "totalitarian" and "liberty" never appear in the book, and even Ceausescu, usually referred to as the "dictator," is named only twice, first when one of the characters (a Jewish WWII survivor) notes how the greeting "ciao" is also the first syllable of the dictator's name and again when a comparison is made between Ceausescu, Hitler, and Stalin.
caused by fear permeates the novel: "Fear, isolation, and abandonment characterize the lives of the first-person narrator and her three friends....Müller describes how fear acquires a life of its own; it becomes independent of the subject's will." One critic argues that "Herztier was written in response to the trauma of life under the Ceauşescu dictatorship, when the citizens of Romania lived in constant fear of the secret police or Securitate." As Müller said in an interview, this fear in the novel is autobiographical as well.
According to Beverley Driver Eddy, The Land of Green Plums presents trauma as well as its testimony; the narrator gives her own testimony, and relates it to the testimony of her friends' suffering. The first of these is Lola, the friend who supposedly kills herself; her testimony is preserved in her diary, in which she wrote of her animalistic sexual exploits with nameless men and her struggle to cope with the guilt of having joined the Communist Party in an effort to better herself. For the narrator, preserving Lola's notebook (and sharing it with her three friends) becomes of paramount importance, especially since the memory of Lola was erased days after her death by the Party establishment. Additional complexity comes from Lola's testimony being interwoven in the narrator's own—"a testimony within a testimony." Müller herself, in an interview published in 1998, explained that "she is concerned with showing that the childhood experiences have been internalised by the narrator, and that the traumas of the frightened, non-conformist child are replicated to the larger traumas of the adult dissident." In the image of the weeds cut down by the narrator's father, an image presented early in the novel, the parallel between the father and the dictator is evidenced: "both 'make cemeteries' without fear of retribution." One symptom of the trauma this causes in its victims is disconnection, the strain of friendship resulting from lack of trust, disrupting normal human relationships for the remainder of the victim's life; Müller's novel portrays this disconnection and the ongoing trauma for survivors, even after the fall of the dictatorship.
Other critics have focused on different effects of trauma in the novel and in Müller's work in general. Lyn Marven argues that the Müllers poetics and style, characterized by paratactic
as well as syntactic and narrative gaps, illustrates one of the effects of trauma: "Trauma disrupts the structures of memory....Trauma cannot be integrated into narrative memory and exists only as a gap or blank spot; it therefore cannot be articulated, and returns in the form of surprisingly literal flashbacks, hallucinations, or dreams." Marven notes another effect: a "distorted body image" that often gives rise to a "radical metonymy," a fragmentation, surfacing most notably in a scene where Pjele, during an interrogation, lists the narrator's clothes and possessions, to which the narrator responds by listing her own body parts: "1 pr. eyes, 1 pr. ears, 1 nose, 1 pr. lips, 1 neck." Marven notes that Müller's collage
s, which Marven calls "central to Müller's œuvre," evidence the same fragmentation, and says that her "increasingly readable" prose (signaled also by Grazziella Predoui, who notes that Müller's prose is developing from parataxis toward more complicated syntax) coupled with recent collages moving toward narrative might suggest that there is "a possibility of overcoming trauma."
, translated as Nadirs in English, in which the German community holds on to its language and habits in an attempt to deny the Romanian dictatorship that rules them; one critic characterized this communal attempt in Niederungen as a "mechanistically followed tradition".
According to Glajar, this is the world of the narrator's mother, who writes of her sicknesses in her letters in the hope of keeping her daughter emotionally connected to her home village. The narrator's father was a member of the SS
(as were Müller's father and uncle), and thus presents a troubling example of Germanness. The novel proposes a tension inside Romania between the culturally totalitarian atmosphere of the Banat-Swabian community and the politically totalitarian world of Timişoara
, where the main characters attend college—between German and Romanian. But the main characters who move to Germany quickly discover that although they were German in Romania, they are Romanian in Germany. They face social and linguistic difficulties, resulting in Georg's suicide a few weeks after his arrival in Frankfurt.
, given the psychological pressure on the novel's characters, who grow up under a totalitarian regime; and ethnographic and literary studies of the German minority in Romania. On the latter topic, Valentine Glajar, now at Texas State University, published an article in 1997, and Herztier is one of the four titles treated in her 2004 monograph on German-language literature from Eastern Europe, The German Legacy.
in October 1994, analyzing the function of fear and praising the book as a "poetic epic", comparing transitions and structure to those found in Homer
. "Herta Müller", he wrote, "does not simply use the German language; she makes it her own, in an incomparable way. She invents her own language." A favorable review of the Dutch translation appeared in the national daily newspaper Trouw
in 1996. The English translation was likewise favorably reviewed: a review in The San Diego Union-Tribune
said "this heartbreaking tale is bitter and dark, yet beautiful". Larry Wolff, in his review for The New York Times, described the book as "a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania".
Radio Free Europe
reported that the novel is a favorite of Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, the Iranian pro-democracy activist, who read it (in the Persian translation by Gholamhossein Mirza-Saleh) shortly after being released from prison in 2009.
; Müller received £75,000, and translator Michael Hofmann
£25,000. In its comments the jury remarked on the main themes of the novel—politics, language, and allegory—in their report:
The IMPAC award drew a great deal attention to the novel, certainly in the United States, and by the end of the year it had been published in paperback in the US by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press.
. During the presentation ceremony, Anders Olsson
, member of the Swedish Academy
, referred to The Land of Green Plums as "a masterful account of the flight of a group of youths from the terror regime". Immediately following the announcement sales of this and Müller's other novels (only five had been translated into English by then) skyrocketed: "On Thursday morning, when the award was announced, The Land of Green Plums, by all accounts Müller's best book, was No. 56,359 on Amazon.com; by the close of business that day, it was No. 7".
(1992). It appeared in German in 1994, followed two years later by the English translation. The hardback was published in the United States by Metropolitan Books
in November 1996. A Dutch translation also appeared in 1996, but although French-language Swiss media had shown interest in the author the novel had not been translated into French by 1998. In May 1998 the author and its translator were awarded the IMPAC Award. Paperback editions of Hoffman's translation were published in the United Kingdom by Granta
later that year and again in September 1999 (with new cover art), and in the United States by Northwestern University Press
in November 1998. In November 2010, after Müller had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a new paperback was released in the United Kingdom and the United States by Picador
.
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
-winning author Herta Müller
Herta Müller
Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime which she experienced herself...
, published in 1994 by Rowohlt Verlag. Perhaps Müller's best-known work, the story portrays four young people living in a totalitarian police state under the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship in Romania
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
, ending with their emigration to Germany. The narrator is an unidentified young woman belonging to the German minority
Germans of Romania
The Germans of Romania or Rumäniendeutsche were 760,000 strong in 1930. They are not a single group; thus, to understand their language, culture, and history, one must view them as independent groups:...
, much like the author herself. Müller said the novel was written "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceauşescu regime".
Like many of Müller's books, The Land of Green Plums illustrates the position of dissidents from the German minority in Romania, who suffered a double oppression under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
. The rural German-speaking
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
community tries to preserve its culture by strictly enforcing traditional rules; once the main characters escape this environment through university study in the city, they suffer, as political dissidents, the oppression exercised by the totalitarian regime. Those who flee the country for Germany find themselves cultural outcasts: they are not considered German but rather Eastern Europeans. Critics read the novel as giving testimony of abuse and the ensuing trauma. Normal human relationships are rendered impossible by the lack of freedom of expression; the threat of violence, imprisonment, and execution; and the possibility that any personal friend may be a traitor. Written in a paratactic
Parataxis
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions...
style, full of flashbacks and time shifts, the very language of the book reflects trauma and political oppression.
After its publication in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and its translation into Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, the novel received moderate attention, but it gained an international audience when the English translation by Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English and a translator of texts from German.-Biography:...
was published in 1996. In 1998 this translation won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...
, the largest prize given for a single work of fiction published in English. Following the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
for Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums entered the bestseller list on Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
.
Plot
The first character introduced to the reader is a young girl named Lola, who shares a room with five other girls, including the narrator, in a college dormitory. Lola records her experiences in a diary, relating her efforts to escape from the totalitarian world of school and society by riding the buses at night and having brutish, anonymous sex with men returning home from factory work. She also has an affair with the gym teacher, and soon joins the Communist Party. This first part of the book ends when Lola is found hanging in the closet; she has left her diary in the narrator's suitcase.Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites." The four are from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers complaining about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who were members of the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
during World War II. They hide the diary and other documents, including photographs and books, in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four and begins to subject them to regular interrogations. Their possessions are searched, their mail opened, and they are threatened by the captain and his dog.
After graduation the four go their separate ways, but they remain in contact through letters and regular visits, although their letters are read by the Securitate. They take menial jobs: Kurt works in a slaughterhouse as a supervisor, for instance, and the narrator translates German manuals in a factory. A fifth member, Tereza, befriends the narrator even as it becomes clear that she is acting partly on Pjele's orders.
The lives of all five become more miserable, and each conforms to the regime's demands even as they lose their jobs for apparently political reasons. They discuss fleeing the country, and Georg is the first to do so; weeks after he arrives in Germany, he commits suicide by jumping out the window of a Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
hotel. The narrator and Edgar likewise acquire passports and go to Germany, still receiving death threats. Kurt remains in Romania, no longer working, and later found hanged. The novel ends with the same passage as it began: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves".
Characters
The narrator, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt hail from similar backgrounds. All are German Romanian and students at the same university. They all suffer persecution, and oppose the regime. The characters—especially Edgar, Georg, and Kurt—are quite deliberately not developed in great detail, as noted by critics. "Characterization is not the point here. Müller is primarily a poet", and this poetic interest likewise is said to explain the lack of chapter organization and of transitional phrases. Only two of the six main characters who suffer oppression survive: Lola dies by hanging, Georg commits suicide after fleeing to Germany, Kurt is found hanged, and Tereza, the narrator's friend who betrays her to the Securitate, dies of cancer.Autobiography
The novel is partly autobiographical. Like her narrator, Müller comes from the German-speaking minority in Romania, the Banat SwabiansBanat Swabians
The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians. They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Banat province, which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with Turkey. This once strong and important ethnic Banat Swabian...
, with a former SS man for a father. Trained as a teacher, she lost her position after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate, and left for Germany in 1987. In a 1998 interview she mentioned that real persons can be recognized in some of her characters, including one in The Land of Green Plums: "That [recognition of characters] was already the case in my previous book [The Land of the Green Plums]. Because my best girlfriend died young, and because she had betrayed me, and because I had to despise her and could not stop loving her." In an earlier interview, with the Danish newspaper Politiken
Politiken
Politiken is a Danish daily broadsheet newspaper, published by JP/Politikens Hus.The newspaper comes third among Danish newspapers in terms of both number of readers and circulated copies ....
, she went into greater detail about her friend, depicted in the novel as Tereza:
Allegory
The novel approaches allegoryAllegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
in many of its details, such as the green plums of the title. Mothers warn their children not to eat green, unripe plums, claiming that they are poisonous. Yet the novel regularly depicts police officers gorging themselves on the fruit: "The officers' lack of constraint in engulfing the fruit parallels the remorseless persecution of the human race" under Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
. The green plums also suggest childhood, or regression into childhood: "The narrator watches the Romanian police guards in the streets of the city as they greedily pocket green plums ... 'They reverted to childhood, stealing plums from village trees.' Ms. Muller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality."
Language and style
Critics have recognized Müller's writing as political, "as a form of manifest resistance against totalitarian claims to power," and have studied her "complex and ambiguous imagery." According to Larry Wolff, reviewing the book for The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, the poetic quality of the language is essentially connected to its author's objective: "the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania." Critics have generally shown appreciation for the novel's language, as did Nicholas Lezard
Nicholas Lezard
Nicholas Lezard is an English journalist and literary critic.Lezard has a weekly column, 'Nicholas Lezard's choice', reviewing paperback books for the Guardian. He also writes for the Independent, and writes the 'Down and Out in London' column for the New Statesman.-External links:* at journalisted...
, writing in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
:
The prose, while simple at the level of the sentence (and we can safely assume that Hofmann's translation is very faithful to the original), is shifty, blurred, to the point where at times we are left unsure as to what exactly is going on – a deliberate flight from causation, quite understandable in a country where everyone (even, we learn, the horses) has been driven mad by fear.
Though the novel's language, and Müller's language in general, is praised for its precision--Peter Englund
Peter Englund
Peter Englund is a Swedish author and historian, and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy since 1 June 2009.-Biography:...
, secretary of the Swedish Academy
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden.-History:The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
, noted her "extreme precision with words"—many things are left unsaid. As a reviewer for The Australian
The Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
noted, the narrator is never named, the words "totalitarian" and "liberty" never appear in the book, and even Ceausescu, usually referred to as the "dictator," is named only twice, first when one of the characters (a Jewish WWII survivor) notes how the greeting "ciao" is also the first syllable of the dictator's name and again when a comparison is made between Ceausescu, Hitler, and Stalin.
Trauma
Psychological traumaPsychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
caused by fear permeates the novel: "Fear, isolation, and abandonment characterize the lives of the first-person narrator and her three friends....Müller describes how fear acquires a life of its own; it becomes independent of the subject's will." One critic argues that "Herztier was written in response to the trauma of life under the Ceauşescu dictatorship, when the citizens of Romania lived in constant fear of the secret police or Securitate." As Müller said in an interview, this fear in the novel is autobiographical as well.
According to Beverley Driver Eddy, The Land of Green Plums presents trauma as well as its testimony; the narrator gives her own testimony, and relates it to the testimony of her friends' suffering. The first of these is Lola, the friend who supposedly kills herself; her testimony is preserved in her diary, in which she wrote of her animalistic sexual exploits with nameless men and her struggle to cope with the guilt of having joined the Communist Party in an effort to better herself. For the narrator, preserving Lola's notebook (and sharing it with her three friends) becomes of paramount importance, especially since the memory of Lola was erased days after her death by the Party establishment. Additional complexity comes from Lola's testimony being interwoven in the narrator's own—"a testimony within a testimony." Müller herself, in an interview published in 1998, explained that "she is concerned with showing that the childhood experiences have been internalised by the narrator, and that the traumas of the frightened, non-conformist child are replicated to the larger traumas of the adult dissident." In the image of the weeds cut down by the narrator's father, an image presented early in the novel, the parallel between the father and the dictator is evidenced: "both 'make cemeteries' without fear of retribution." One symptom of the trauma this causes in its victims is disconnection, the strain of friendship resulting from lack of trust, disrupting normal human relationships for the remainder of the victim's life; Müller's novel portrays this disconnection and the ongoing trauma for survivors, even after the fall of the dictatorship.
Other critics have focused on different effects of trauma in the novel and in Müller's work in general. Lyn Marven argues that the Müllers poetics and style, characterized by paratactic
Parataxis
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions...
as well as syntactic and narrative gaps, illustrates one of the effects of trauma: "Trauma disrupts the structures of memory....Trauma cannot be integrated into narrative memory and exists only as a gap or blank spot; it therefore cannot be articulated, and returns in the form of surprisingly literal flashbacks, hallucinations, or dreams." Marven notes another effect: a "distorted body image" that often gives rise to a "radical metonymy," a fragmentation, surfacing most notably in a scene where Pjele, during an interrogation, lists the narrator's clothes and possessions, to which the narrator responds by listing her own body parts: "1 pr. eyes, 1 pr. ears, 1 nose, 1 pr. lips, 1 neck." Marven notes that Müller's collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s, which Marven calls "central to Müller's œuvre," evidence the same fragmentation, and says that her "increasingly readable" prose (signaled also by Grazziella Predoui, who notes that Müller's prose is developing from parataxis toward more complicated syntax) coupled with recent collages moving toward narrative might suggest that there is "a possibility of overcoming trauma."
Banat-Swabians
The situation of the Banat-Swabians, the German-speaking minority in Romania, is a recurring theme in Müller's writing, and it is one of the central themes of The Land of Green Plums, investigated in detail in Valentine Glajar's 1997 article "Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and German: Conflicting Identities in Herta Müller's Herztier." The Banat-Swabian community, which the narrator is a member of, was described by Müller as extremely ethnocentric; while they had no desire to emigrate to Germany, they exerted an almost totalitarian control especially on their children to keep them in their community. Müller had already addressed this topic in her first work, NiederungenNadirs
Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical short stories by Romanian-German writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller. The stories center around life in the Romanian countryside and the violent, oppressive atmosphere of Romania in the mid-20th century.-Stories:* The Funeral Sermon* The...
, translated as Nadirs in English, in which the German community holds on to its language and habits in an attempt to deny the Romanian dictatorship that rules them; one critic characterized this communal attempt in Niederungen as a "mechanistically followed tradition".
According to Glajar, this is the world of the narrator's mother, who writes of her sicknesses in her letters in the hope of keeping her daughter emotionally connected to her home village. The narrator's father was a member of the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
(as were Müller's father and uncle), and thus presents a troubling example of Germanness. The novel proposes a tension inside Romania between the culturally totalitarian atmosphere of the Banat-Swabian community and the politically totalitarian world of Timişoara
Timisoara
Timișoara is the capital city of Timiș County, in western Romania. One of the largest Romanian cities, with an estimated population of 311,586 inhabitants , and considered the informal capital city of the historical region of Banat, Timișoara is the main social, economic and cultural center in the...
, where the main characters attend college—between German and Romanian. But the main characters who move to Germany quickly discover that although they were German in Romania, they are Romanian in Germany. They face social and linguistic difficulties, resulting in Georg's suicide a few weeks after his arrival in Frankfurt.
Academic interest
The book attracted academic interest very quickly, and scholars have discussed it in at least three distinct categories: language and style, often in relation to the politics of totalitarianism; trauma studiesPsychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
, given the psychological pressure on the novel's characters, who grow up under a totalitarian regime; and ethnographic and literary studies of the German minority in Romania. On the latter topic, Valentine Glajar, now at Texas State University, published an article in 1997, and Herztier is one of the four titles treated in her 2004 monograph on German-language literature from Eastern Europe, The German Legacy.
Attention in the press
In the German press, the novel's publication generated modest but positive attention. Rolf Michaelis reviewed the novel at length in Die ZeitDie Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...
in October 1994, analyzing the function of fear and praising the book as a "poetic epic", comparing transitions and structure to those found in Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
. "Herta Müller", he wrote, "does not simply use the German language; she makes it her own, in an incomparable way. She invents her own language." A favorable review of the Dutch translation appeared in the national daily newspaper Trouw
Trouw
Trouw is a Dutch daily newspaper. "Trouw" is a Dutch word meaning "fidelity", "loyalty", or "allegiance", and is cognate with the English adjective "true"...
in 1996. The English translation was likewise favorably reviewed: a review in The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San Diego Union-Tribune
-Predecessors:The predecessor newspapers of the Union-Tribune were:* San Diego Sun, founded 1861 and merged with the Evening Tribune in 1939.* San Diego Union, founded October 10, 1868.* Evening Tribune, founded December 2, 1895.-Ownership:...
said "this heartbreaking tale is bitter and dark, yet beautiful". Larry Wolff, in his review for The New York Times, described the book as "a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania".
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
reported that the novel is a favorite of Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, the Iranian pro-democracy activist, who read it (in the Persian translation by Gholamhossein Mirza-Saleh) shortly after being released from prison in 2009.
IMPAC Award
On May 18, 1998, the announcement was made that the novel and its English translation had been awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary AwardInternational IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...
; Müller received £75,000, and translator Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English and a translator of texts from German.-Biography:...
£25,000. In its comments the jury remarked on the main themes of the novel—politics, language, and allegory—in their report:
The IMPAC award drew a great deal attention to the novel, certainly in the United States, and by the end of the year it had been published in paperback in the US by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press.
2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
In 2009, Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
. During the presentation ceremony, Anders Olsson
Anders Olsson
Anders Olsson is a Swedish writer, professor of literature at Stockholm University, literary critic and member of the Swedish Academy...
, member of the Swedish Academy
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden.-History:The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
, referred to The Land of Green Plums as "a masterful account of the flight of a group of youths from the terror regime". Immediately following the announcement sales of this and Müller's other novels (only five had been translated into English by then) skyrocketed: "On Thursday morning, when the award was announced, The Land of Green Plums, by all accounts Müller's best book, was No. 56,359 on Amazon.com; by the close of business that day, it was No. 7".
Publication history
The Land of Green Plums is the second novel published by Müller since leaving Romania, after Der Fuchs war damals schon der JägerDer Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger
Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger is a book by Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller. It was first published in 1992....
(1992). It appeared in German in 1994, followed two years later by the English translation. The hardback was published in the United States by Metropolitan Books
Henry Holt and Company
Henry Holt and Company is an American book publishing company. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt...
in November 1996. A Dutch translation also appeared in 1996, but although French-language Swiss media had shown interest in the author the novel had not been translated into French by 1998. In May 1998 the author and its translator were awarded the IMPAC Award. Paperback editions of Hoffman's translation were published in the United Kingdom by Granta
Granta
Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...
later that year and again in September 1999 (with new cover art), and in the United States by Northwestern University Press
Northwestern University Press
Northwestern University Press is the university press of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA.- History :Northwestern University Press was founded in 1893, at first specializing in legal periodicals. Today, the Press publishes scholarly books of fiction, non-fiction, and literary...
in November 1998. In November 2010, after Müller had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a new paperback was released in the United Kingdom and the United States by Picador
Picador (imprint)
Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. Both companies are owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group....
.