Father telephones the flies

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Father calls the flies is a volume with collages by Herta Müller , which was first published by Hanser in 2012. It consists of five parts and contains 187 works in postcard format upright. Müller uses collage as a metaphor, as a structure and as an artistic practice. In more recent collages, the poetic and playful come increasingly to the fore. Compared to Müller's previous volumes, Father telephoned with the flies is less dominated by letters and colors, but rather individual writing elements are emphasized and how they interact with the picture elements in terms of type, color and size.

The paperback edition was published in 2014 by S. Fischer Verlag.

To the issue

There is neither a table of contents nor individual work titles, as is the case with volumes of poetry. The peculiarities would have come into their own if the editing had been more careful and a less lyric standardized work would have been a welcome result. With collage instead of normal letterpress, it is possible to make it clear how subversive the fun of combining and rhyming with allegories of power is.

The five parts have the following titles in capital letters: "A message that was clear as a knife"; "The snow is a play-free case"; "The word unconditional is tired of the word unconditional"; “Who knows who I'm stealing life from”; "The skin is just a stain of offended batiste".

Interpretations

The collages are described by Edith Ottschofski as passionate, playful, ironic, inwardly trembling, teasing and funny, profound and heartbreaking. Herta Müller does not see herself as a visual artist, because her collages are too instinctive and intuitive. The linguistic rhythm sounds like shaking rhymes or nursery rhymes, the rhymes are bizarre and of subversive power. Müller turns 'print waste' into literature, hidden media criticism? Asks Ottschofski. The poems look like blackmail letters from old films. Every word seems to be more stubborn than in a normal text, reports Susanne Messmer from the reading and first book presentation on September 7, 2012 in Berlin; and further: “This kind of poetry production is not the same as writing for them. Because, to a certain extent, she doesn't have to make up the words here. She just has to find it. ”Many of these poems are not least forerunners or followers of their major themes. Herta Müller cultivates a distrust of language because it is so easy to harness it to the cart of power. She puts the bland words in other contexts and breathes new life into them. In contrast to her prose, she succeeds in doing this with comparatively little effort in her poetry collages, says Messmer.

The texts in this volume are fascinating and dazzling, says Martin Krumbholz in his radio essay for Deutschlandfunk, and they leave a lot open, including the crucial. This also applies to individual words, for example Krumbholz calls “Eigenenschaf”: “You can tell that he is not missing anything”, not even a letter at the end. Each word also has its own physiognomy in terms of color and shape. Krumbholz gives the following examples from the same collage: bold and black are “peaches”, large and green on a black background are “wool”. “Feelings” would assert their space in proud capital letters and in bold italics on a pale green background, the “nice pharmacist” is spreading.

The collages are long sentences that can be read as contouring, according to Ralph Köhnen. Müller takes up the tradition of the aphorism and fabricates verses with rhyme, the images of which are constantly reorienting and dispersing. The verses are centered around key political concepts and become accusations and the "word-images proliferate and create assemblages in the form of chains of change and metamorphoses."

reception

“Actually, you don't want to quote these little miracles of words from their latest volume, Vater Telefoniert mit die Flies, or write about them, as probably hundreds of German scholars do in their theses and use them to build white front garden fences for the poetry of this Herta Müller. But the language of this author and she herself have not been locked in for a long time, ”says a report by Eva-Maria Manz on Herta Müller's reading on June 11, 2013 at the 8th World of Values ​​Forum at the University of Tübingen, which was held in the Stuttgarter Zeitung appeared.

exhibition

  • Exhibition HERTA MÜLLER [RO / D]: "FATHER TELEPHONED WITH THE FLIES", special at the Berlin International Literature Festival from September 8, 2012 to October 13, 2012

Reviews

Research literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the publisher's website for the paperback edition
  2. ↑ Lyn Marven: ›So strange was the structure‹: The Interaction between Visual and Verbal in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages, in: Herta Müller , Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, pp. 64–83.
  3. ↑ Hedayati-Aliabadi, Minu: The Stranger Look - a Strange Eye. Transmedia staging of text and images in Herta Müller's collages (this article is open access ) . Text practice. Digital Journal of Philology , No. 5, 2/2012
  4. ↑ a b c Edith Ottschofski, Vom “ Herzkran ” and the “Heimat zum Quadrat” , sevenbuerger.de , 23 September 2012
  5. ^ Paraphrased from a review at perlentaucher.de , reference: Catrin Lorch, Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 14, 2012
  6. ↑ Paraphrased from a review on perlentaucher.de , reference: Harald Hartung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 6, 2012
  7. ↑ Literature. Herta Müller's “Father calls the flies” , focus.de , August 31, 2012
  8. ↑ Susanne Messmer, "A stupid wacky louse". BIG WORDS (5). Herta Müller reads her poetry collages at the International Literature Festival. The Nobel Prize laureate has rarely been seen solved like this , taz.de (taz Berlin local, p. 41), September 8, 2012
  9. ↑ Martin Beyer, word findings on index cards stuck. Herta Müller: "Father calls the flies" , deutschlandfunk.de , November 26, 2012
  10. ↑ Ralph Köhnen: “The Signs of Trauma. Texts and picture collages of Herta Müller in rhizomal and virological reading ”, in: Herta Müller and the glitter in sentence: an approach to contemporary literature , edited by Jens Christian Deeg, Martina Wernli. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-8260-5746-5 , pp. 131–150, quotation from pp. 141–142.
  11. ^ Eva-Maria Manz: World of values ​​forum in Tübingen. At the border between words and silence , stuttgarter-zeitung.de , June 13, 2013
  12. ↑ Exhibition special with works from all previously published collage volumes and collections by the author. Ernest Wichner and HERTA MÜLLER (RO / D) moderated the vernissage on September 7, 2012 : »FATHER TELEPHONED WITH THE FLIES« , literaturfestival.com
Works by Herta Müller


Poetry

The cold ornament of life. Texts (1987) • The guard takes his comb (1993) • A lady lives in the topknot (2000) • Este sau nu este Ion (2005) • The pale gentlemen with the mocha cups (2005) • Eleven years later towards evening. 16 collages (2008) • Father calls the flies (2012)

prose

Lowlands. Prose (1982/1984) • Pressing Tango. Stories (1984/1988) • Man is a big pheasant in the world (1986) • Stories (1987) • Who only touches air… including short stories (1988) • Barefoot February (1987) • Travelers on one leg (1989) • The devil is sitting in the mirror. How perception invents itself (1991) • Back then, the fox was already the hunter (1992) • A warm potato is a warm bed (1992) • Arrived like not there (1994) • Heart animal (1994) • Hunger and silk (1995) • In the trap (1996) • I would rather not have met today (1997) • The burdock on the knee. Prose poem (1997) • The strange gaze or Life is a fart in the lantern (1999) • Home is what is spoken (2001) • The king bows and kills (2003) • The gaze of the small train stations (2009) • Breathing swing. Roman (2009) • Cristina and her dummy or what is (not) in the Securitate files (2009) • Always the same snow and always the same uncle (2011) • My fatherland was an apple core (2014)