Lowlands
Niederungen is Herta Müller's first work , which was published in Bucharest in 1982 and in a revised version by Rotbuch Verlag in Berlin in 1984 . The Rotbuch edition contains sixteen stories, some of which come from the Bucharest volume Niederungen (1982) and others from the volume Drückender Tango ( Kriterion 1984) and mainly deal with the life of the Swabians in a village in the Banat . The prose volume is named after the longest story, but at the same time "lowlands" can also be understood as the moral depravity of the villagers, who are the theme of all the stories. The narrator smashes the rural family idyll by telling of a joyless childhood full of horror, brutality, lust, alcoholism and the greed of adults. The Banat Swabians found this volume of prose to be dirty in their nest . Especially the preprint of the little satire "Das Schwäbische Bad" in the Timişoara daily newspaper Neue Banater Zeitung in May 1981, in which the author criticizes the cleanliness conceit of her compatriots, triggered a flood of indignant letters to the editor and many Banat Swabian readers opposed her debut volume in advance taken. This tense relationship on both sides still partly exists today.
content
The first story, "The Grave Speech", is a dream in which the narrator is supposed to give a speech at the funeral of her father, who has many dead on his conscience, but cannot think of anything, whereupon she explains that we will not be slandered , is sentenced to death. Herta Müller's father was a member of the Waffen SS .
In the story "The Swabian Bath", three generations bathe in the same water and rub off 'gray noodles' in the tub. The story "My Family" is about the fact that the fathers are not the fathers of the children who grow up in their families, but the fathers of the children who grow up in other families. It is also implied that the narrator is the daughter of the postman who always gives her a hundred lei for the New Year.
"Niederungen" is an approximately eighty page long story that describes everyday life in the village from the perspective of an imaginative girl who lives in a house where three generations live together. You learn about a game the girl is playing with her little brother: 'Adulthood'. She insults him as a bastard, drunkard and whore, then adjusts her fake breasts and her brother sweats under his mustache as they play husband and wife.
"Faule Pears" tells of a trip by father, aunt, cousin and the narrator to the mountains to sell tomatoes. At night she hears groans and gasps from her aunt's bed. When she returned the next evening she heard the same thing from her parents' bed. According to the narrator, the hot air from the belly of her somewhat older cousin smells like 'rotten pears'. The other stories vary from what has been told so far. They are called "Pressing Tango", "The Window", "The Man with the Matchbox", "Village Chronicle" and "The German Part and the German Mustache".
The last five stories tell of an overland trip ("The Overland Bus"), a failed vacation on the Black Sea ("Mother, Father and the Little One"), city life ("The Street Sweeper") and everyday life in the apartment block ("Black Park") ).
In the Bucharest first editions there are occasional deviations from the Berlin version in the individual texts; the arrangement of the texts in the first editions is as follows:
Niederungen ( Kriterion Verlag 1982, 128 pages):
1. lowlands; 2. The man with the matchbox; 3. The funeral oration; 4. The German parting and the German mustache; 5. The Swabian bath; 6. My family; 7. village chronicle; 8. The intercity bus; 9. The street sweepers; 10. The mind; 11. Mother, father and the little one; 12. Back in May; 13. Black Park; 14. Inge; 15. Mr. Wultschmann; 16th working day.
Pressing Tango ( Kriterion Verlag 1984, 84 pages)
1. Heath; 2. horse heads; 3. Troubled earth; 4. Black cloths; 5. thrush night; 6. The wolf in the mountain; 7. rotten pears; 8. The Box of Solitude; 9. The electric clock; 10. Mallows over empty streets; 11. The window; 12. red milk; 13. Who does not eat his plate empty; 14. The other eyes; 15. The little utopia of death; 16. The hook man; 17. The lifeline; 18. The pocket watch; 19. Three hundred and ninety-nine years; 20. The song of marching; 21. Pressing Tango; 22. When I move my foot; 23. It's Sunday; 24. School desk face; 25. The rain; 26. pieces of furniture; 27. That day; 28. A job; 29. You; 30. My fingers; 31. The light that falls from the trees; 32. Mr. Eugen; 33. The fixed place; 34. In a deep summer; 35. The antlers; 36. hair; 37. The cold song; 38. Lizards; 39. Stay to go.
reception
The literary scholar Friedmar Apel reported on the episode Das Schwäbische Bad : “In laconic repetition, the Saturday cleansing ritual, in which the family members rub off“ gray noodles ”one after the other, while the slowly cooling water changes its color, turns into a comical, disgusting allegory of the Banat Swabian village life: “The noodles of the mother, the father, the grandmother and the grandfather are circling over the drain.” The obvious satire was read as a “horror tale from Nitzkydorf” and brought the young author insulted vocabulary in the papers of the German minority the healthy folk feeling. "
The writer Friedrich Christian Delius said: "This author knows how to transcend the transitions between precise observation and continuously threatening fantasies so imperceptibly that new irritations and movements arise while reading."
Lucian Vărşăndan , director of the German State Theater Timişoara , saw lowlands as a political statement. “We are concerned today that we also present the topics to today's target groups of the German State Theater, such as life under dictatorship as it was over 20 years ago. And of course also to reconstruct against the context that Herta Müller exposed to this double contradiction at the time, on the one hand to dictatorship, to the communist system, but on the other hand also to the very limited framework conditions created by the own community, the very traditional German minority was. "
In the opinion of the Goethe-Institut Krakow , Müller described “in haunting scenes ... the life of the German-speaking Banat Swabians in communist Romania as a gloomy anti-idyll in an enclave that is characterized by fear, hatred, intolerance and immobility. The censored volume was published in Bucharest in 1982 after a two-and-a-half year delay. The story "Das Schwäbische Bad", published in the Neue Banater Zeitung in May 1981, deeply angered the Banat Swabians. "
literature
- Herta Müller: Lowlands. Prose. [Criterion booklets] Bucharest: Criterion 1982
- Herta Müller: Pressing tango. Prose. [Criterion booklets] Bucharest: Criterion 1984
- Herta Müller: Lowlands. Berlin (West): Rotbuch 1984 and 1988, also Rowohlt Taschenbuch 1993
- Herta Müller: Niederungen , Hanser Verlag, Munich 2010 ISBN 978-3-446-23524-3
- Herta Müller: Pressing tango. Stories. Rowohlt Paperback 1996
- Diana Schuster: The Banat Authors' Group. Self-presentation and reception in Romania and Germany. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2004 ISBN 3-89649-942-4 (also Diss. Phil. Univ. Iași 2004)
- Symons Morwenna: Room for Maneuver. The role of intertext in Elfriede Jelinek 's “ The Piano Player ”, Günter Grass ’s “ Ein Weites Feld ”, and Herta Müller's “Niederungen” and “ Travelers on One Leg ”. London 2005, ISBN 1-904350-43-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Friedmar Apel : There is no prince in the German frog. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 30, 2010
- ^ Friedrich Christian Delius : Every month a new broom. In: Der Spiegel from July 30, 1984
- ↑ Thomas Wagner: Envy, lust for power and mendacity celebrate happy origins. World premiere of the stories by Herta Müller in the German State Theater Temesvar. In: Deutschlandfunk from July 29, 2012
- ↑ Goethe-Institut Krakau : Literature lesson on Herta Müller. April 10 - April 26, 2013