Olga Grjasnowa’s debut novel The Russian Is One Who Loves Birch Trees, revolving around themes such as national and linguistic boundaries, borderline transgressions and border crossings, the sense of home and the sense of alienation and the search for one’s own identity in the face of a life in the threshold of cultures. Using the example of a young woman who has emigrated from Azerbaijan, who was traumatized as a child, and who is trained as an interpreter in Germany, the article explores subjects such as loneliness, identity, limitations and hunger for language. By making interpreting her profession, the figure solidifies the leap from one culture to the next as a pattern of action and acts transculturally between different spaces. She finds access to marginalized groups, she has ambivalent erotic experiences with men as well as with women, which reflects her cultural indecision.
Herta Müller has written several volumes of postcards, describing the work on the collages as a “relaxation exercise” from the laborious epic work. Her collage work is heterogeneous, works with the principle of chance, deals with clippings. The author tries o writing with scissors that can be positioned somewhere between literature and the fine arts. The volume Father Telephones with the Flies enables a political reading in which an I speaks about his traumas during the dictatorship, about interrogations, shadows and also includes the family sphere. Image and writing complement each other.
Through the emergence of a mysterious wall a nameless protagonist is forced to lead a life of isolation behind this wall. Through the resulting threshold the space is divided into a separate space of the defunct civil society and an interior, insulated survival space. The exterior space is marked by elements of dissatisfaction, basically caused by the lack of interpersonal communication. The initially hostile enclave gradually becomes a space of militant feminism, in which a recluse is compelled not only to surviving but also to establishing herself at the zero point of civilization. The paradisiacal environment, leading to the dissolution of formal boundaries and to the comunion with the nature is visibly disturbed by the appearance of a stranger. It congeals to a space of creation, as the unnamed woman writes down her experiences in this place on the backs of old calendar pages. The natural environment of the mountains becomes through writing a place a self-insurance.
The border experience is the basic experience in the novel Engelszungen. There are characters who escape, emigrate, moving between several countries whose identity is unstable and changing. Life between cultures and with different identities determined their nomadic wandering around, where the transit movement as the basic experience has also a political dimension. The scientific contribution analyzes inner and outer boundaries, examines identitary border crossings, illuminates the major characters, their different identity designs, the restless in theirwandering and strategies of adaptation to the West.
The article focuses on Herta Müller and Mircea Cãrtãrescu, two authors from the same generation, who in their respective novels Herztier and Orbitor gave different accounts on the situation in Romania during the 70s, the 80s, of the terror during the Ceaușescu-dictatorship, and on the December revolution. Multiple factors allow a parallelized and comparative description of these two novels: biographical and work-immanently factors. A similarly described world, marked by Kafkaesque elements – Romania amid the dictatorship of Ceauºescu, as well as similarly handling elements of oppression, fear, humiliation, forms of survival, description of the totalitarian state representatives, accurate highlights of the December revolution connect the two autobiographical novels. While the reader can sense in Müllers book the fear and the terror very deeply, as the death and the emigration are solely alternatives for the protagonists, Cãrtãrescu’s universe has signs of grotesqueness and ridiculousness. Cãrtãrescu doesn’t accentuate the terror, the hopelessness, the fear, but mocks the reality, and he laughs at Ceausescu’s stupidity. The author satisfies his desire of revenge for his stolen youth in the communist period.
The intercultural novel of Julya Rabinowich The Earth-eater is fed with complex motivs and intertextual allusions, shows the physical and psychological ruin of a migrant, forced by social conditions to sell her body to survive. Closely interwoven are memories of her childhood and her previous, bitter life. Rabinowich gives an insight into the hardened and thoroughly abysmal emotional world of her protagonist, who belongs to those who „get up and go on”, but also into the capitalist value system, which judges man according to his productive power. In the end, the novel leaves the reality plane and echoes into the surreal to signal the complete descent of the figure into madness and death. In order to better illustrate the psychosis caused by uprooting and abandonment, Julya Rabinowich makes bonds in the Jewish literary traditions.
Die Essayistik Herta Müllers
(2022)
The article follows the two volumes of essays The King Bows and Kills (2003) and Always the same snow and always the same uncle (2011) written by Herta Müller. Politics and aesthetics define the Nobel laureate’s writing, with her essays anchored in Romania’s recent history. They are of a political nature, offer retrospectives on their life in Romania beyond the Iron Curtain, insights into the dictatorial past, persecution by the secret service, the betrayal of closest friends, but also contain reflections on the role of the language, the preference for Romanian, on the use of “The King” in their fictional texts, explain their “alien gaze”. Always the same snow and always the same uncle focuses on the deportation of the Romanian Germans to the Ukraine, with the information serving as a companion work to the novel Hunger angel. The betrayal of closest friends is also discussed, whereby the insight into their files and the past of Oskar Pastior/Otto Stein’s files are used.
Using the example of the village novel Three Kilometers from the final phase of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, the article follows the discovery of memory, examining the image of the Banat village community, which is dominated by hopelessness, fear and thoughts of flight. The emptiness and the cold motif used at the end point to the dissolution of the Swabian village world. The Banat village is presented at the interface between real life reality and a landscape of memories.
