"Alles, was ich habe, trage ich bei mir." (All that I have I carry with me) This is the opening line (and title of the English edition) of Herta Müller's 2009 novel Atemschaukel (literally Breath-Swing). And we learn what the 17 year-old narrator Leo Auberg packs for his journey to the Soviet labor camp: the gramophone box, the velvet neckband, the silk scarf. Objects, things, loom large in Herta Müller's prose. Or rather, the words that signify objects. Over time, the meanings become detached from the things they signify and take on a reality of their own. The word, or word-sound (Wortklang) becomes the Ding-an-sich.
In her Nobel Prize Lecture, the significant object for Herta Müller is a Taschentuch - handkerchief. The handkerchief signified a mother's love, a talisman that helped her endure the inhumanity of Ceaucescu's Romania. Words may detach from their objects and deceive us, but they make us conscious of our being against the forces that would deny our existence.
Mir scheint, die Gegenstände kennen ihr Material nicht, die Gesten kennen nicht ihre Gefühle und die Wörter nicht den Mund, der spricht. Aber um uns der eigenen Existenz zu versichern, brauchen wir die Gegenstände, die Gesten und die Wörter. Je mehr Wörter wir uns nehmen dürfen, desto freier sind wir doch.
(It seems to me that the objects don't know their material, the gestures don't know their feelings, and the words don't know the mouth that speaks them. But to be certain of our own existence, we need the objects, the gestures, and the words. After all, the more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become.)
Herta Müller's Taschentuch appears in Atemschaukel as well: a peasant woman gives the starving Leo an immaculate white handkerchief since the boy reminds her of her own son, also sent away to a distant labor camp, This object, a thing of beauty, helps sustain him after his own silk scarf has been appropriated by the camp guard Tur Prikulitsch. Things sustain the young inmate, but will haunt him for the remainder of his life:
„Seit sechzig Jahren will ich mich in der Nacht an die Gegenstände aus dem Lager erinnern. Ich weiß nur seit sechzig Jahren nicht, ob ich nicht schlafen kann, weil ich mich an die Gegenstände erinnern will, oder ob es umgekehrt ist.“
(At night for the past sixty years I can't shake the memories of the things from the camp. For sixty years I can't decide if I can't sleep because I think of the things, or perhaps it's the reverse.)
Atemschaukel is quite different from other camp narratives we know from writers as diverse as Primo Levi or Scholsenizyn. The novel is comprised of 64 short chapters or fragments, often just brief meditations on a dream, a word or an image. But gradually we get a vivid picture of life in the camp and what it takes for Leo to survive his five years of imprisonment. God has retreated from this camp reality, the word God never appears. God has been usurped by the Hungerengel - the Hunger-Angel. The Hungerengel is omnipresent, watching from the corner, sitting on your shoulder, haunting your dreams and settling in your soft palate.
The hunger in Atemschaukel is all-consuming, crowding out all other sensations, including eroticism. Leo is gay, and his sexual appetite in his hometown gave rise to feelings of shame and isolation, so that he was almost relieved to be sent to the labor camp. But in the realm of the Hunger-Angel the body is no longer an object of desire. Instead, it is a receptacle for hunger. "Wir sind das Gestell für den Hunger." Paradoxically, although the Hunger-Angel feeds on the body's hunger, it also dispenses advice for survival: „Speichel macht die Suppe länger, und früh Schlafengehen macht den Hunger kürzer.“ (Saliva makes the soup last, early to bed makes the hunger shorter.)
As the body starves, the senses grow increasingly acute, the powers of observation become nearly superhuman. There are chapters that deal with fine distinctions in types of slag, categories of coal, techniques of shoveling coal, and a typology of lice. Pools of contaminated chemical waste become images of visual beauty, leading some critics to complain of Herta Müller's tendency to aestheticize suffering.
In the absence of food, it is words that sustain Leo. When packing for the camp he places Faust and Zarathustra at the bottom of the gramophone box, a foundation for his other few belongings. Above all it is the sentence uttered by his grandmother - ICH WEISS DU KOMMST WIEDER. (I know you will return.) - that gives him hope, even though it turns out to be a lie. For it is not Leo that returns home, but a damaged soul joined together forever with his Hunger-Angel. The Austrian novelist and poet Ilse Aichinger, who somehow survived the Holocaust as a Jew in Vienna, said: Man überlebt nicht alles, was man überlebt. ("You don't survive everything you survive.") Leo hangs on for sixty years after his ordeal, a much diminished man. But nothing can diminish Herta Müller's achievement with her amazing novel Atemschaukel.
See my reivew of Herztier.
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