Traveler on one leg

Travelers on One Leg (1989) is the title of a narrative collage by Herta Müller . The work has been interpreted from different perspectives: as a thematization of an artist's existence, as a narrative about alienation in a certain sociocultural situation between East and West, as a representation of homelessness that affects everyone, or as a statement about the function a marginalized perspective has can. The instability of the protagonist Irene and her strength are mainly expressed in the writing style. Even the narrative can only move forward by hopping on one leg. Irene seeks a way out of her traumatization by trying out what a fluid subjectivity feels like with the help of a collage of newspaper snippets. There are different views as to whether there is a thread or not. As you read it, you can feel for yourself what Irene's thin skin feels like.

Together with Man is a Big Pheasant in the World (1986) and Barefoot February (1987), travelers on one leg can be counted among Müller's “transit texts”, whereby travelers refer to the arrival after departure. It is a snapshot of West Berlin and Europe in the late 1980s, in which West Berlin is presented as a city characterized by poverty and alienation, lack of material goods and social and spatial exclusion. Herta Müller rewrites the genre of the big city novel from the point of view of a foreign German-speaking woman with travelers on one leg .

In an interview on June 23, 1989 in zitty Berlin , Herta Müller stated that this was an attempt not to consider oneself, but to process a collective experience in a literary way. After the novel was published, Müller said in a lecture as part of her poetics guest lectureship at the University of Paderborn about the artist Irene: “As if she were cutting out the moments in her life, as if she were holding in her hand what happens to her and others every day, this is how Irene puts the collage together. So for Irene the collage is put together according to her own, impenetrable beats. "

The title traveler on one leg can be understood in the plural or as a feminine singular. The name Irene is derived from a city name that occurs in The Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino . A state of transition is already addressed in Müller's title, and the work primarily describes the course of action and experience. For Calvino, the city of Irene is a symbol of something that is in transition. Müller has this passage quoted by the German man Franz. As the motto for travelers on one leg , Müller selected the opening sentence “We were still very young” from The Devil on the Hills (1948) by Cesare Pavese and changed it to: “But I was no longer young”, which is repeated in the text Irene herself is related.

2013 travelers on one leg in the third paperback edition published (Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag). The first edition was published in 1989 by Rotbuch-Verlag in Berlin, and from 2010 by Hanser in Munich, also as an e-book.

content

Irene is in her mid-thirties, she is leaving an “other country” ruled by the military with official approval and comes to West Germany with a single suitcase, where she hopes to find a new home. What should be trusted, however, also seems to be “another country”. She was admitted to a temporary home and was finally granted German citizenship after months. Irene has not yet "found her way around the people, things and places of the new world".

The first two chapters take place in the “other country” back then, but the memory remains present in the new environment. Irene states that she understood “in the other country” what destroys people and could see the reasons every day, “here” it hurts her “not to see the reasons every day” (p. 138/139) The repression of the Romanian state is not only more transparent, but also seems more familiar to Irene than that in the system of the Federal Republic. “The exuberance of desires and the austerity of external things had overlapped. What was never allowed to meet was one and the same in the other country. [...] Irene felt fooled for years. Challenged and betrayed. ”(P. 134) She still actively suppresses any feeling of homesickness, but physical symptoms show her that this is not without consequences.

Irene lets life go by almost indifferently and does not get the second leg on the ground because she only perceives the supposedly golden west as something that is opaque gray. As a city runner, she explores the new city spatially and experiences it as an observer and not as a participant. Irene realizes that her life has curdled into observations that render her unable to act. One day Irene creates a collage from newspaper clippings, the disparate areas of which appear strange to her. She tries to grasp her own picture by feeling it and walking through it with her eyes: “Irene hung the picture on the kitchen wall. She was sitting at the kitchen table. Their looks were steps. ”(P. 50) In the penultimate chapter a visitor comes and comments on the collage: It is reversed, empty and dead. Irene then shows him in which of the pictures the figures resemble him, little crooks with a peaked cap and that they flee the cities. (P. 156)

At the beginning of the last chapter, Irene receives two letters. She recognizes the first one by the envelope, it is from a friend from the other country. The second is a letter from the Senate of Home Affairs stating that she will be granted citizenship. “Irene wasn't happy. She read on as if this message wasn't about her. Irene did not understand the connection in which the words 'banquet' and 'welcome speech' were used in the last paragraph. "(P. 167) Then she wants to deal with the content of the first letter:" The stomach floated between throat and knee. She sat down at the kitchen table to catch him. ”(P. 167) She reads about the death of a friend who hanged himself and remembers an encounter with him. Then Irene takes another look at the collage and states: "The man you only saw from behind was the main character on the collage." (P. 168)

In the end, Irene comes to terms with a situation that she doesn't see through. They prefer to stay where they are instead of accepting new insecurities elsewhere. She also feels the desire to go far away as an addiction, which makes the situation ambivalent. The last two sentences are: “Irene was lying in the dark and thinking about the city. / Irene refused to think about parting. "(P. 176)

Interpretations

In Travelers on One Leg, Herta Müller addresses the incomparability of worlds of experience, according to Norbert Otto Eke 1991, Brigid Haines formulated in 1998 that Irene describes her feeling of disorientation. “I'm not homeless. Only abroad. / Foreigner abroad. / He laughed. Only. ”(P. 65), so Irene in a dialogue with an Italian who calls himself homeless - he was born in Switzerland and belongs to the second generation of foreigners. Antje Harnisch wrote in 1997 that this is a paradoxical description for someone who is treated as an emigrant with a swift naturalization, since according to official politics she comes because of being German, writes Antje Harnisch in 1997. In the paradox of the self-designation "foreigner abroad", the alienation is expressed twice . Irene's living conditions are characterized by prolonged oppression and a constant attack on the cohesive entity called Irene. There is no home anywhere anymore, according to Hans Ester in 1993. She is on her own and the “discourse of being alone” is driven on by the self-talk that Irene conducts with the male characters as if they were dialogues. Doppler says in 1991 that closeness and foreignness, home and exile relate to one another several times and mostly in paradoxes. Even if the narrative construction focuses on Irene, according to René Kegelmann in 2009, Irene is characterized by the external images of other people. He refers to a work by Paola Bozzi from 2005, in which she explains that Irene has at most a relative identity based on subjective ascriptions by others: When one speaks of Irene, one says something about different Irenes. Irene's indecision can be understood as the ambivalence of the alien, and Müller uses it to describe a transitory space in which almost all of the other characters appear to be.

In her love affairs with three men, Irene makes the experience that it is impossible to overcome the barriers between the sexes. There is a foreignness inherent in all phenomena that prescribe a connection to one another, and it is not meant in their love relationships either, but is missed, according to Maria Kublitz-Kramer 1994. Schulte asked 1997 "to what extent Irene's mental disposition contributes to the failure of these relationships" and notes that in the case of the student Franz, who is ten years younger than Irene at the age of 25, “it is his controlled, ingrained posture [...] that keeps Irene at a distance.” For Harnisch, disappointed love is a symptom of Strangeness in Irene's relationships is less based on the psyche than on "the situation of the resettled woman in Germany", for the closeness to a "German German" (Herta Müller) is not possible and this is shown in the lost closeness to Franz by the two perceive and interpret the same reality fundamentally differently. For Irene, only the longing for Franz is real, but he himself is as much a fiction as a Germany in which she can feel comfortable. Kublitz-Kramer considers “whether Irene can be used as a model for the general marginal position of women, which is exacerbated in the text by Irene's biography of a politically exiled person”.

Irene sees points of contact between East and West in Berlin using the example of the common swift, writes Harnisch: The bird makes the wall that can be seen from Thomas' apartment his home and ignores the border, just as the cloud does pulling straight west from the other part of town. Thomas also bridges the opposition between women and men because he lives gay. What Irene has in common with Thomas is that they are marginalized in their position. From this point of view, Irene is able to “discover aspects of reality that are hidden beneath the surface”, and everyday German life is alienated: “From the perspective of the periphery, the Federal Republic experiences a critical relativization,” for example the commodity character of reality and the commercialization of objects, bodies and human relationships. Irene sees this particularly clearly in advertising, which she exposes as absurd and manipulative. By observing incoherent details, she explores the ambivalent freedoms granted to city dwellers under capitalism. Schulte suggests a passage from Kafka's parable about the prison cell as a parallel reading because Irene is coming to terms with her situation. "The fact that she does not develop, that she can bear to remain a stranger, is what defines her autonomy, her development," is Doppler's conclusion about the figure Irene.

Traveler on One Leg productively plays with trauma as the ›signature of modernity‹ by showing how the structure of trauma offers a way out of stuck postmodern constructions of subjectivity, according to Brigid Haines 2002. On the one hand, Irene's experiences are typical of people who Live with a post-traumatic stress disorder , on the other hand, specific aspects of your personal history are made clear. The latter can be localized, for example when Irene in Berlin at the location of Rosa Luxemburg's murder is shocked that the dictator's wife from the other country (Elena Ceaușescu) looks similar to Luxemburg. Haines gives further examples: Irene only recognizes 'the other Irene' in a photo of herself. She can only live in the now by denying the desire to understand and control and instead focusing on the details of a collage, where she tries out flowing new formations in a tension between design and chance.

Big city novel subverts

In her contribution from 1997, Antje Harnisch works out how travelers on one leg can be read in the tradition of the poetology of modernity, in which foreignness and homelessness are ciphers of the artist's existence. For this she names various elements: the reflection on the alienation of reality through montage , symptoms of the big city, in which reality is constantly increasing in complexity, alienating images as well as short simple sentences in paratactic order. As early as Rilke's The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), the experiences of a foreigner in Paris alternate with the artist's existential homelessness. A male city runner is not insulted as a whore, however. In contrast to him, for Irene as a flaneur it is not about the intoxication of abundance, but passers-by are “an obstacle or perhaps a threat”. Harnisch states: Müller rewrites the male-dominated tradition of the big city novel "from the perspective of the strange woman" in Travelers on One Leg .

Moray McGowan, on the other hand, in his contribution from 2013 takes the position that the alienated confusion of the protagonist Irene can hardly be read as the perspective of a female flaneur and justifies this with the fact that Irene is intimidated by the self-confidence of the children who play on the street One boy calls her a hooker because she walks the street alone. McGowan thus questions the subverting of the masculine genre of the modern city as an effect of portrayal. In the same year, however, Binder tended to follow the previous position in her contribution by writing that Irene, as a flaneur, subverts stereotypes of the feminine.

style

Seldom has homelessness been written so intensely, says Ester in 1993. The torment of Irene's sensory experience is aptly expressed in isolated sensory perception. The protagonist Irene cannot overcome her loneliness, because normality, which is publicly displayed, appears to her to be full of falsehood and vagueness. But your language can withstand it. The world is perceived from Irene's fragmented, fragile perspective. The newspaper snippets and collages also express Irene's feeling of fragmentation, adds Lyn Marven in 2013.

Surface snapshots represent what Irene sees and does in short, open-ended sentences, often not grouped into paragraphs. On the textual level, many line breaks, missing question marks and exclamation marks as well as dialogues without quotation marks, in which neither facial expressions nor gestures are described, contribute to the fact that the language appears disembodied. Müller's prose is pale, sparse and reduced, which corresponds to the feelings and expressions of her heroine. And that although there are many different images, says Ester. The language images are semantically resistant and syntax and punctuation are fragmented and condensed, which means that Müller's prose eludes a totalizing language.

Brigid Haines said in 2002 that travelers on one leg were an exception in Herta Müller's work both thematically and stylistically. This is about a nomadic subjectivity that is appropriately expressed in an open and impressionistic style. Schulte observed in 1997 that Müller's previous works were more about inner perception of the past. Travelers is "apart from a few essays, the most prosaic work of Herta Müller" and this is due to the perspective and the fact that the perception is based on current impressions. “The individual parts, fragments of the perceived reality, are poetic-bizarre and have a surrealistic relationship effect .” Schulte sees a “sharp, corrosive observation” at work, and he comments that it leads “to a literary collage”, “which sometimes does Tendency towards experimental poetry. ”The following passage is suitable as an example:

“I keep writing you cards. The cards are full. And I empty. "

- Herta Müller : Travelers on One Leg (1989, 3rd edition 2013, page 134)

Here it is made clear not only grammatically but also visually what happens to Irene through repeated card writing. The written card is much fuller than the sentence afterwards with "I". Only the first sentence is still grammatically complete, the following two are missing the verb. And from the first to the second to the third sentence, not only the number of words is reduced, but also the number of syllables .

According to Ursula Homann, Müller has dispensed with a storyline and describes Irene's impressions, experiences, scraps of thought and emotional segments. You only learn that Irene has emigrated from Romania to the west and has several lovers with whom relationships have fizzled out. Behind the surface of things, she cannot make out the reason for her discomfort. Kegelmann sees it differently: a clear course of action can be reconstructed, even if external descriptions are permanently mixed with memories, associations and feelings of Irene. There is no such thing as a narrator who oversees everything. Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler call it “resistence to plot” with a focus on details. It is told by a laconic voice in the third person who refuses to give an interpretative framework. Schulte imagines what “on one leg” means - namely to hop - and he writes as a reason why he describes the work as a narrative collage : “In the narrative, the leaps and bounds of the hopping movement become noticeable. “If you were to make a description of the contents based on the division into chapters, argues Schulte, this would“ give the impression of the erratic sequence of the scenes, of constant movement with constant standstill. This impression of the simultaneity of the heterogeneous is concentrated in the image of the collage [...] The constant movement of the parts is not limited to this image of the collage, it functions as a meta-textual principle of the entire system and the formation of travelers on one leg . "

reception

2013 travelers on one leg -Taschenbuch published by Fischer in the Third Edition. Between 1990 and 2013, Travelers on One Leg was translated into at least 9 languages. There is not yet a translation into French.

Norbert Otto Eke gave an overview of the earliest reception in 1991. In the reviews, Müller's tone in Travelers on One Leg was described as concise, brittle and expressive, but also as nagging - when it comes to the reality of the Federal Republic of Germany - which is disturbing and hardly illuminating was felt. On the one hand, Müller's language was described as masterfully associative, on the other hand, as a sometimes clumsy expressionist crackle. Müller's pictures were perceived as accessible, but also as crooked. Some of the reviewers lacked a thread that they could use for orientation. In other ways, Müller's way of always letting details correspond with the whole seemed overstrained in the exemplary narration. Eke quotes from Günther Franzens meeting that Müller's perceptual optics allow “the bloated exterior of society to shrink until the archaic foundation becomes visible.” Finally, Eke mentions an example from a university newspaper in which a “failure in conveying personal and social issues ”, because in the review it says, where the author expresses her diffuse inner conflict, she suffocates in metaphors and trivialities are dramatized and mystified. Eke notes that Müller met with “sharpened attention” in the criticism, because in 1989 she first discussed life in the Federal Republic in Travelers on One Leg , with the “strange” gaze of an arriving person.

Reading experience

In the opinion of Hans Ester, travelers on one leg are not a pleasure to read, because everything of what Irene's thin skin feels is felt by the reader himself. We look over Irene's shoulder into a deep abyss of futility. Irene is not a patient from whom we could distance ourselves, but she sees extremely precisely what we ourselves would like to negate. Drawn into Irene's gaze, what is known to the reader is cut up into fragments of perception and shown as something strange and desolate, says Peter Laudenbach. Irene cannot and does not want to think of something beautiful and is paralyzed by a desolation and hopelessness that ultimately carries over to the reader, as Ursula Homann experienced while reading. Karl Schulte read the work with the help of the picture of a rigid yet circling object: “As a whole, the narrative resembles a mobile, on which shreds of reality hang, which are constantly moving and yet remain in place.” Susanne Schaber stayed behind reading back the painful experience of being exposed to the world, an irritation that is not so easy to shake off. Travelers on one leg is not easy to read, summarizes Binder, because alienated illusions, dreams and visions that only later turn out to be such, create a “kind of implicit“ poetics of uncertainty ”that is carried over to the reader.

expenditure

• First edition:
  • Travelers on one leg , 165 pages, Rotbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88022-747-0
• Later print editions:
  • Hardcover: 175 pages, Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23534-2
  • Paperback edition: 201 pp., Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-18778-2
• E-book: Carl Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23626-4

In manuscripts. Zeitschrift für Literatur (Graz), also in 1989, published an almost five-page article by Herta Müller with the title “Travelers on one leg”. It tells of dialogues between Irene and Stefan as well as an encounter with a clerk. In a phone call, Irene tries to reach a Jens, for whom she saw a number in a graffiti, and Franz is also briefly mentioned. Overall, Irene is less of a focus than it is later in the book. The sentence “travelers on one leg and lost on the other” occurs in this version. Bernhard Doppler thinks that with Müller's plans from the beginning of 1989, the story from autumn that year is hardly recognizable: “A story about four people without development, as she emphasizes; Everyday topics, such as strangeness and loneliness, which should be discussed in relationship conversations, and in the center the breakup of a marriage in the new country after the partners leave the country together, but not at the same time. "The outlined conclusion, however," partly literally "agrees with the later story . Müller said in January 1989: "I haven't finished writing the book, but now I know where it ends, what happens to the person - namely nothing."

Translations

In 1990 travelers on one leg appeared in Danish, Rejsende på et ben (translated by Nanna Thirup), in 1991 in Swedish Resande på ett ben (translated by Karin Löfdahl) and was translated into Dutch in 1992 with the title Reizigster op één been: roman ( translated by Gerda Meijerink ) as well as in 1993 into Italian as In viaggio su una gamba sola (translated by Lidia Castellani) and into Greek, with the title Μετέωροι ταξιδιώτες in a translation by Katerina Chatzē. In 1998 the work was published in English translation by Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere with the title Traveling on one leg . And after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, the work was published in Romanian in 2010 with the title Călătorie într-un picior , in a translation by Corina Bernic, and also in Chinese in 2010, with the title 独腿 旅行 的 人 (in a Band together with Die Welt ist ein große Pheasant ) and translated by Min Chen and Ni A. A Turkish translation was published in 2013 with the title Tek bacaklı yolcu (translated by Çağlar Tanyeri).

Reviews

Until 1993 (selection):

• Verena Auffermann : “Danger of falling into space. West Germany as seen through Herta Müller's resettled eyes. Herta Müller: Travelers on one leg ", in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 10, 1989
• Sibylle Cramer : “Westward on the wings of feeling. Herta Müller. Travelers on one leg ”, in: Tagesspiegel , October 11, 1989
• Christian Huther: “Sentences tinkling coldly. Herta Müller's story “ Travelers on one leg ”, in: General-Anzeiger , October 11, 1989
• Peter Laudenbach: “Everyone is a passer-by for everyone. Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: taz , October 24, 1989
• Günther Franzen: “ Test the west. Herta Müller's prose, Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Die Zeit , November 10, 1989
• Katja Rauch: “A balancing act in the new country. Herta Müller Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 23 November 1989
• Susanne Schaber: “With one foot in the east, the other in the west. Travelers on one leg , a story by the Romanian Germans Herta Müller ”, in: Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten , December 29, 1989
• Susanne Schaber: “With hand luggage and shoes that are too thin. The long way from Banat to Berlin ”, in: Die Presse , 17./18. March 1990
• Rita Terras: “Travelers on one leg”, in: World Literature Today , v64 n3 (Summer, 1990): 455.
• Inge Meidinger-Geise: “Herta Müller. Travelers on one leg ", in: Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter , Volume 39 (1990), p. 79.
• Ursula Homann: “Herta Müller. Travelers on one leg ”, in: Deutsche Bücher , Volume 20 (1990), pp. 109–110.
• Norbert Otto Eke: “Herta Müller. Travelers on one leg ”, in: Halbasien , Volume 1 (1991), Issue 2, pp. 67-72.
• Hans Ester: " Most stimulating op één been ", in: Trouw 18 (1993), p. 4.

From 2009 (selection):

• Aldawen (forum guest): " Herta Müller - travelers on one leg ", literaturschock.de , October 15, 2009, with comments, accessed on May 10, 2014 and June 8, 2014.

Research literature

• Julia Müller: Speech clock. Herta Müller's literary style of representation , (Dissertation Jena 2009) Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-412-22151-5 Table of contents
• Lyn Marven: “‹ The structure was so strange ›: The Interaction between Visual and Verbal in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages”, in: Herta Müller , edited by Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0 -19-965464-2 , pp. 135-152. contents
• Karin Binder: "Travelers on one leg (1989)", in: Handbuch der Deutschsprachigen Exilliteratur. From Heinrich Heine to Herta Müller , edited by Bettina Bannasch and Gerhild Rochus, De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-025674-1 , ISBN 978-3-11-025675-8 , pp. 464–471.
• Moray McGowan: “‹ City and Skull ›, ‹Travelers›, and ‹Verlorene›. City, self, and survival in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Herta Müller , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, pp. 64–83.
• Maria-Leena Hakkarainen: “‹ [...] and poverty, these are the strangers ›. Experienced Exclusion in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg “, in: On the representation of contemporary history in contemporary German literature (VII) , Volume 7: Poverty , edited by Martin Hellström and Edgar Platen, Iudicium, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86205-309 -4 , pp. 279-291. contents
• René Kegelmann: “Emigrated. On aspects of foreignness, language, identity and memory in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg and Terézia Mora's Everything “, in the perception of German (language) literature from East Central and Southeast Europe - a paradigm shift? New readings and case studies , IKGS-Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-9811694-2-3 , pp. 251-263.
• Morwenna Symons: "Intertextual Inhabitations of the ‹Foreign›: Travelers on one leg ", in: Room for Maneuver. The role of intertext in Elfriede Jelinek's 'The Piano Player', Günter Grass's 'A Wide Field', and Herta Müller's 'Niederungen' and 'Travelers on One Leg' . London, Maney Publishing, for the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2005, ISBN 978-1-904350-43-9 , pp. 133-155. contents
• Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler: "Herta Müller, Travelers on One Leg (1989)", in: Contemporary women's writing in German. Changing the subject , Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, pp. 99-117.
• Thomas Krause: “Between the past and the future. Herta Müller's story, Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Log , Volume 25 (2003), 100, pp. 20–28.
• Brigid Haines: “‹ The unforgettable forgotten ›. The traces of trauma in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg “, in: German life and letters , 55 (2002), 3, pp. 266–281.
• Brigid Haines: “Let's live in detail. Herta Müller's micro-politics of resistance ”, in: Herta Müller , edited by Brigid Haines, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1998, ISBN 0-7083-1484-8 , pp. 109–125.
• Ralph Köhnen: “Via corridors. Kinesthetic Images in Texts by Herta Müller “, in: The pressure of experience drives language into poetry. Imagery in texts by Herta Müller , edited by Ralph Köhnen, P. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30662-8 , pp. 123-138.
• Antje Harnisch: “‹ Foreigner Abroad ›. Herta Müller's travelers on one leg ", in: Monthly books for German teaching, German language and literature , 89 (1997), 4, pp. 507-520.
• Karl Schulte: “ Travelers on one leg . A Mobile ”, in: The pressure of experience drives language into poetry. Imagery in texts by Herta Müller , edited by Ralph Köhnen, P. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30662-8 , pp. 53-62.
• Maria Kublitz-Kramer: “The freedom of the street. On Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Women in Literary Studies , Rundbrief 41, April 1994, pp. 5-8.
• Bernhard Doppler: “Home is exile. A development figure without development. To travelers on one leg ”, in: The invented perception. Approach to Herta Müller , edited by Norbert Otto Eke, Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1991, ISBN 3-927104-15-9 , pp. 95-106.
• Norbert Otto Eke: “Herta Müller's Works in the Mirror of Criticism (1982–1990)”, in: The invented perception. Approach to Herta Müller , edited by Norbert Otto Eke, Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1991, ISBN 3-927104-15-9 , pp. 107-130.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Hans Ester: " Reizigster op één been ", in: Trouw 18 (1993), p. 4.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Karl Schulte: “ Travelers on one leg . A Mobile ”, in: The pressure of experience drives language into poetry. Imagery in texts by Herta Müller , edited by Ralph Köhnen, P. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30662-8 , pp. 53-62.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Brigid Haines: “‹ The unforgettable forgotten ›. The traces of trauma in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg “, in: German life and letters , 55 (2002), 3, pp. 266–281.
4. ↑ Julia Müller: Speech clock. Herta Müller's literary style of representation , (dissertation 2009) Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-412-22151-5 , p. 181
5. ^ ^{A b c} Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler: "Herta Müller, Travelers on One Leg (1989)", in: Contemporary women's writing in German. Changing the subject , Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, pp. 99-117.
6. ↑ Maria-Leena Hakkarainen: “‹ [...] and poverty, these are the strangers ›. Experienced Exclusion in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg “, in: On the representation of contemporary history in contemporary German literature (VII) , Volume 7: Poverty , edited by Martin Hellström and Edgar Platen, Iudicium, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86205-309 -4 , pp. 279-291.
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Antje Harnisch: “‹ Foreigner Abroad ›. Herta Müller's travelers on one leg ", in: Monthly books for German teaching, German language and literature , 89 (1997), 4, pp. 507-520.
8. ↑ ^{a b c d} René Kegelmann: “Emigrated. On aspects of foreignness, language, identity and memory in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg and Terézia Mora's Everything “, in the perception of German (language) literature from East Central and Southeast Europe - a paradigm shift? New readings and case studies , IKGS-Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-9811694-2-3 , pp. 251-263.
9. ↑ Herta Müller: “The Rift as Chronology and Continuity of Events”, lecture manuscript of the poetics guest lecturer “The completely different discourse of being alone”, University of Paderborn, winter semester 1989/1990, p. 11. This is quoted in: Petra Renneke: Poesie and know. Poetology of Modern Knowledge . Winter, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8253-5510-4 , p. 278
10. ↑ This comment on the later title was made by Bernhard Doppler in 1991 in comparison with the title planned by Herta Müller in January 1989: residents with hand luggage .
11. ↑ ^{a b} Ralph Köhnen: “About aisles. Kinesthetic Images in Texts by Herta Müller “, in: The pressure of experience drives language into poetry. Imagery in texts by Herta Müller , edited by Ralph Köhnen, P. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30662-8 , pp. 123-138.
12. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Karin Binder: "Travelers on one leg (1989)", in: Handbuch der Deutschsprachigen Exilliteratur. From Heinrich Heine to Herta Müller , edited by Bettina Bannasch and Gerhild Rochus, De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-025674-1 , ISBN 978-3-11-025675-8 , pp. 464–471.
13. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Bernhard Doppler: “Home is exile. A development figure without development. To travelers on one leg ”, in: The invented perception. Approach to Herta Müller , edited by Norbert Otto Eke, Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1991, ISBN 3-927104-15-9 , pp. 95-106.
14. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Herta Müller, Travelers on one leg , Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main published, 3rd edition 2013
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Ursula Homann: “Herta Müller. Travelers on one leg ”, in: Deutsche Bücher , Volume 20 (1990), pp. 109–110.
16. ↑ ^{a b c} Maria Kublitz-Kramer: “The freedom of the road. On Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Women in Literary Studies , Rundbrief 41, April 1994, pp. 5-8.
17. ↑ ^{a b c} Norbert Otto Eke: "Herta Müller's works in the mirror of criticism (1982–1990)", in: The invented perception. Approach to Herta Müller , edited by Norbert Otto Eke, Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1991, ISBN 3-927104-15-9 , pp. 107-130.
18. ↑ ^{a b} Brigid Haines: “‹ Let's live in detail ›. Herta Müller's micro-politics of resistance ”, in: Herta Müller , edited by Brigid Haines, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1998, ISBN 0-7083-1484-8 , pp. 109–125.
19. ↑ Moray McGowan: “‹ City and Skull ›, ‹Travelers›, and ‹Verlorene›. City, self, and survival in Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Herta Müller , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, pp. 64–83, p. 72. (McGowan's argument does not refer to the one referred to here Contribution by Harnisch 1997, but on Haines 2002: 71, Kublitz-Kramer 1993 and Littler 1998 as well as on Bozzi 2005: 97.)
20. ↑ ^{a b} Lyn Marven: “‹ So strange was the structure ›: The Interaction between Visual and Verbal in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages”, in: Herta Müller , edited by Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-965464-2 , pp. 135-152.
21. ↑ Günther Franzen: “ Test the west. Herta Müller's prose, Travelers on One Leg ”, in: Die Zeit , November 10, 1989
22. ↑ Peter Laudenbach: “Everyone is a passer-by for everyone. Herta Müller's Travelers on One Leg ”, in: taz , October 24, 1989; cited in Eke 1991, p. 124.
23. ↑ Susanne Schaber: “With one foot in the east, the other in the west. Travelers on one leg , a story by the Romanian Germans Herta Müller ”, in: Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten , December 29, 1989; cited in Eke 1991, p. 124.
24. ↑ Herta Müller: "Travelers on one leg", in manuscripts. Zeitschrift für Literatur , 103 (1989), pp. 40-44.
25. ↑ “COLD COUNTRY COLD HEARTS CALL JENS. And a telephone number. ”Quotation from the first version in: Manuscripts. Zeitschrift für Literatur , 103 (1989), p. 41
26. ↑ Quoted in Doppler 1991 from: residents with hand luggage. Emigrated from the Banat - An interview with the writer Herta Müller. In: Die Presse , 7./8. January 1989.