>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> Georgette Dorn: Before I turn over the podium to Mr. Eckstein, who will introduce Frau Muller, and Professor Pfeiffer, I would like to share with you a few facts about the Library that may not be widely known. Despite its name the Library of Congress is also the National Library of the United States, and part of its mission is to collect and preserve a universal store of knowledge and cultural achievement for future generations. The German language is no small part of our mission, with about three-and-a-half million items, books, and four-and-a-half million other items. Germany accounts for more than - more items in our collections than any other language, except English. The achievements of German literature have played a strong role in the Library's development. Even at the height of World War II the Library remained dedicated to collecting and presenting the work of German writers. In January 1942, only a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany, the Library of Congress appointed its first consultant in Germanic literature. This man was none other than Thomas Martin [assumed spelling], who remained in that capacity for three years, gave a number of lectures here, and was a Fellow of the Germanic Literature at the Library until his death in 1955. This bit of history reflects perhaps a fundamental belief that has always inspired the Library's mission since the time of Jefferson, that whatever may divide us for the moment, it is the common human striving for knowledge and creative expression that can unite us and open the opportunity for mutual understanding. The German language, of course, is a fundamental part of Herta Muller's work. It is more than just a language in which she has chosen to write, but also an identifier of culture and ethnicity for her characters. Few of us can know the world of ethnic Germans living in Romania, but through Herta Muller we come to know it, she has touched billions in her writing because it speaks to universal desires that make us all human, the desire for self-expression, the desire for justice, the desire for freedom. That is why, Frau Muller, I am very honored to welcome you at the Library of Congress this evening. You're adding your powerful voice and experience to the Library's ongoing mission to preserve that which remind us all of our common humanity. I turn the podium over now to Wilfred Eckstein of the Goethe Institute in Washington, who will introduce Frau Muller and the Moderator, Professor Pfeiffer. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Wilfred Eckstein: Good evening. [Foreign Language] Dear Mrs. Herta Muller, and Mr. [inaudible], distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. My name is Wilfred Eckstein. I'm the head of the Goethe Institute, and also I will speak on behalf of the Friends of the Goethe Institute here in Washington. I have the great pleasure tonight to welcome the Nobel Prize Laureate, Herta Muller, here at the Library of Congress. Thank you, Herta Muller, for honoring us with your presence and your work. As a writer you have produced some of the 20th Century most imminent German language literature. Today we have gathered here in the Library of Congress, the world's leading archive of thought and literature and a trove of human testimony to history and memory. Thank you to you, Georgette Dorn, Acting Chief of the European Division, for making all this possible, together with your colleagues, Robert Casper [assumed spelling] from the Poetry and Literature Center, and David Morris [assumed spelling] from the German Desk, and as I learned a lot more colleagues who were involved in preparing this. You all embrace the chance of having Herta Muller here tonight with enthusiasm, and we are very happy about that. Therefore, Herta, Frau Muller, you must have heard your biography many times over the past couple of weeks in New York and Boston and Chicago. As prominent fellow poets, she was at The PEN in New York, political representatives and internationally renowned orators introduced you. It's impossible for me to summarize my impression of your books. If I were to try to describe the images and deep thoughts the work provokes in me I would fail to do them justice. I can find no words to express how much I praise your writing. For us, the reading audience, you have given a voice to the victims of oppression. Your razor sharp words and sentences produce a truthful image of human suffering. And it is human beings who inflict pain and cruelties on fellow humans. Your novels reflect this pain and despair. Your words allow us to comprehend and see through to the naked truth. For those who are about to be forgotten, for those who are speechless because they cannot find words to match their despair, for those whose intellect is helpless in the face of senseless suffering, you have found words, and for that we are forever grateful. When I consider Germany's reputation following the Second World War I believe that you have given us back our language and its dignity. Through your unrelenting focus on human torture from so many angles you have managed to grasp sensations, transform words, and bring forth a new vision and that of suffering. From my perspective, you have rewritten the German language for suffering. Your crystal clear, beautiful language expresses new meanings and produces valuable images that have never before been defined. Thank you. I would like to introduce briefly three participants. Herta Muller was born in a German speaking region of Romania, called the Banat. She studied German and Romanian literature and languages in Timisoara [assumed spelling], and subsequently would act as a translator in a factory, until she resigned, rather than become an informer for the Romanian Secret Service and report what her family, friends, colleagues would have to say about the party politics and the system. She said no then and ever since. She has been an opponent of any kind of state oppression in any country, in any region of the world. This alone is reason enough for her presence today here in the Library of Congress. Sometimes an outsider's perspective inspires and gives guidance. Herta Muller's first collection of stories, Niederungen Nadirs [assumed spelling], appeared in Bucharest in 1982. Even though it was censored, the quality in thought was so impressive that the Union of Writers have ordered her a prize. In 1984 the uncensored version of her book appeared in Germany, published by Wood Falach [assumed spelling], the publishing house that has played a pivotal role in forming modern Germany after the 1930s by continuing to present German culture and strive for democracy. Herta Muller's book was received not as literature about Romania, but as a reflection on today and on atrocities inflicted on Germans and others, whether by Germans, themselves, or others. Germany today has developed a culture of memory, which embraces the evils of the past as part of our present, and is a burden and reference point for the future. Herta Muller's literature plays an immensely important role in this context. Three years after Herta Muller became known to the German audience, through this book she moved from Romania to Germany. These are the highlights on her path towards becoming a German writer. One scholar who has followed the literary path ever since her first publication at Wood Falach is Peter Pfeiffer. He is an ardent reader of Herta Muller and Chair of the German Department at Georgetown University, where as his students know, the book by Herta Muller has been part of his course on Contemporary German ever since. He has given two talks about Herta Muller at the Goethe Institute, and he will serve today as the Moderator of her reading and of the discussion and dialogue. Allow me also to introduce Philip Boehm, he translated this version of The Hunger Angel, which you can buy at the desk, and I hope you will buy it all. He will serve as Herta Muller's translator and as reader, and he will read excerpts from some books and from some stories in English. And thank you very much, Mr. Boehm, for being here and for continuing to accompany [inaudible]. Philip Boehm and Peter Pfeiffer have known each other for a long time. In fact, they were student pals. They lost contact with one another over the years, but are reuniting this evening, as Herta Muller brings them back on the same path. Ladies and gentlemen, Herta Muller will read one passage, and Philip Boehm will read some other passages in the English language so that you have the chance for each to hear the German language and the German voice and the voice of Herta Muller. And I wish you all a good, entertaining evening. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Philip Boehm: Thank you very much, and thanks to the Library of Congress, thanks to the Goethe Institute and all who have helped make this event possible. Many thanks, once again, to Herta Muller for entrusting this remarkable novel into my hands as a translator. Before I start reading from the first chapter of The Hunger Angel, I'd like to say a couple words about the setting, the historical setting. Some of you may know that by the summer of 1944 the Red Army had advanced deep into Eastern Europe. During the war Romania had been on the side of the Third Reich, that there was a Fascist government. As the Soviets moved west the Dictator Atonescu was deposed, essentially, and the government abruptly switched sides very late in the game and suddenly allied themselves with the Soviet Union. Thus, the Soviet allies were now, the Romanian allies of the Soviet Union worked hand in hand with the Soviet Police and in executing orders by Stalin to round-up members of the German minority for purposes of what they called reconstruction in the Soviet Union. And so a wave of deportations took place in which Germans between the ages of 17 and 45 were shipped to labor camps, mostly in the Ukraine. Unpacking suitcases, all that I have I carry on me or all that is mine I carry with me. I carried all I had, but it wasn't mine. Everything either came from someone else or wasn't what it was supposed to be. A gramophone box served as a pigskin suitcase. The light overcoat came from my father. The fancy coat with the velvet collar from my grandfather. The knickers from Uncle Edwin. The leather gators came from our neighbor, Herr Karp [assumed spelling]. The green woolen gloves from Aunt Femie [assumed spelling]. Only the burgundy silk scarf and the toilet kit belonged to me, presents from the previous Christmas. The war was still on in January 1945. In their dismay at my being shipped off in the dead of winter to who knows where in Russia, everyone wanted to give me something that might be of use even if it couldn't help, because nothing in the world could possibly help. I was on the Russian's list, and that was that. So everyone gave me something and kept their thoughts to themselves, and I took what they gave. I was 17 years old, and in my mind this going away couldn't have come at a better time. Not that I needed the Russian's list, but if things didn't turn out too badly, I thought, this leaving might even be a good thing. I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes. Instead of fear I felt a secret impatience, and I had a bad conscience about it because the same list that caused my relatives such despair was fine with me. They were afraid something might happen to me in a foreign country. I simply wanted to go to a place that didn't know who I was. Something had just happened to me, something forbidden, something strange, filthy, shameless, and beautiful. It happened in the Alder Park [assumed spelling], far in the back, on the other side of the short grass mounds. Afterward, on my way home, I went to the pavilion in the middle of the park where the bands played on holidays. I sat there awhile. Sunlight came stabbing through the finely carved wood. I stared at the empty circles, squares, and trapezoids held together by white tendrils with claws, and I saw their fear. This was the pattern of my aberration of the horror on my mother's face. In the pavilion I vowed I'm never coming back to this park. But the more I tried to stop myself the faster I went back, after two days for a rendezvous, as it was known, in the park. The next rendezvous was with the same first man. He was called The Swallow. The second man was new. His name was The Fur. The third was The Ear. Then came The Thread, then Oriole [assumed spelling], and Cap. Later, Hair, Cat, Gold, then The Pearl. Only we knew which name belonged to whom. The park was a wild animal crossing. I let myself be passed from one man to the next. And it was summer, with white skin on birch trees, and shrubs of elderberry and mock orange, leafing out to form an impenetrable wall of green. Back then, before my time in the camp, as well as after I returned, and all the way up to 1968 when I left the country, every rendezvous could have landed me in prison, minimum five years if I'd been caught. Some were, they went straight from the park with the baths [assumed spelling] to a brutal interrogation and into jail, and from there to the penal colony on the canal. Today I know that almost nobody came back from there. The ones who did were walking corpses, old before their time and broken, of no use for any love in the world. And in the camp, if I had been caught in the camp I'd be dead. My boots were laced up. I sat at the table waiting for midnight, and midnight came, but the patrol was late. Three more hours had to pass, that's almost too much for anyone, and then they were there. My mother held up the coat with the black velvet collar, and I slipped inside. She cried. I pulled on the green gloves. On the wooden walkway just next to the gas meter my grandmother said I know you'll come back. I didn't set out to remember her sentence, I carried it to the camp without thinking. I had no idea it was going with me, but a sentence like that has a will of its own. It worked inside me more than all of the books I had packed. I know you'll come back became The Heart-Shovel's accomplice and The Hunger Angel's adversary. And because I did come back I can say a sentence like that keeps you alive. We were now in the Russian night. Romania lay behind us. We felt a strong jolt and waited for an hour while the train axels were switched to stepped gauge to accommodate the broader Russian track. There was so much snow outside it lit up the night. Our third stop was in an empty field. The Russian guards shouted, [Foreign Language]. All the doors of all the cars were opened. We tumbled out, one after the other, into the low lying snow land, sinking in up to our knees. Without understanding the actual word we sensed that [Foreign Language] meant a communal toilet stop. High overhead, very high, the round moon, our breath flew in front of our faces, glittering white like the snow under our feet. Machine pistols on all sides leveled, and now pull down your pants. The embarrassment, the shame of the world, how good that the snow land was so alone with us that no one was watching it force us close together to do the same thing. I didn't need to, but I pulled down my pants and crouched. How mean and how still this night land was. How it embarrassed us as we attended to our needs. How to my left Trudy Pelicon [assumed spelling] hoisted her bell coat up under her arms and pulled her pants below her ankles, the hissing between her shoes. How the lawyer, Paul Gast [assumed spelling], groaned as he tried to force a movement. How his wife, Heidren's [assumed spelling] bowels, croaked from diarrhea. How all around the stinking warm steam immediately froze and glistened in the air. How the snow land meted out its drastic treatment, leaving each of us to our desolation, our bare bottoms, and the noise of our intestines. How pitiful our entrails became in their common condition. Perhaps it was my terror more than myself that grew-up so suddenly that night. Perhaps this was the only way for us to recognize our common condition because every one of us without exception automatically turned to face the track as we took care of our needs. All of us kept the moon to our backs. We refused to let the open door of the cattle car out of our sight. We needed it like the door to a room. We had the crazy fear that the doors might shut without us and the train drive away. One of us cried out into the vast night, so here we are, the shitting Saxons wasting away in more ways than one. Well, you're all happy to be alive, I'm right aren't I? He gave an empty laugh like tin. Everyone moved away from him. Then he had room around him, and took a bow like an actor, and repeated in a solemn, lofty tone, it's true, isn't it, you're all happy to be alive? An echo rang in his voice. A few people started to cry, the air was like glass. His face was submerged in madness. The drool on his jacket had glazed over. Then I noticed his badge. It was the man with the albatross buttons. He stood all by himself, sobbing like a child. Now all that was next to him was the foul snow, and behind him the frozen world and the moon as on an X-ray. The locomotive let out a dull whistle, the deepest woo I ever heard. Everyone pushed to get to the door. We climbed in and rode on. I would have recognized the man even without his badge, but I never saw him in the camp. So now I'm going to jump to another chapter. First, I'm going to get a glass of water. And this chapter is entitled The Zeppelin, and for this chapter you should know the word Natchinique [assumed spelling], which is a type of overseer in the camp, a Russian word. The Zeppelin, behind the factory is a place with no coke ovens, no extractor fans, no steaming pipes, where the tracks come to an end, where all we can see from the mouth of the coal silo is a heap of rubble overgrown with flowering weeds, a pitiful bare patch of earth at the edge of the wilderness, crisscrossed by well-trodden paths. There out of sight to all but the white cloud drifting from the cooling tower far across the step is a gigantic rusted pipe, a discarded seamless steel tube from before the war. The pipe is seven or eight meters long and two meters high, and has been welded together at the end closest to the silo. The end that faces the empty fields is open. A mighty pipe, no one knows how it wound-up here, but everyone knows what purpose it has served since we arrived in the camp. It's called The Zeppelin. This Zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift. It's a by-the-hour hotel tolerated by the camp administration and the Natchinique's, a twisting place, where the women from our camp meet with German POWs, who are clearing the rubble in the wasteland or in the bombed out factories. Wildcat weddings was how Anton Kovatch [assumed spelling] put it. Open your eyes sometime when you're shoveling coal, he told me. As late as the summer of Stalingrad, that last summer on the veranda at home, a love thirsty female voice had spoken from the radio, her accent straight from the Reich, every German woman should give the Furor a child. My aunt Femie asked my mother how are we to do that? Is the Furor planning to come here to Transylvania every night or are we supposed to line-up one by one and visit him in the Reich? We were eating jugged hair [assumed spelling]. My mother licks the sauce off a bay leaf, pulling the leaf slowly out of her mouth. And when she had licked it clean she stuck it in her buttonhole. I had a feeling they were only pretending to make fun of him. The twinkle in their eyes suggested they'd be more than a little happy to oblige. My father noticed, as well. He wrinkled his forehead and forgot to chew for awhile. And my grandmother said I thought you didn't like men with moustaches. Send the Furor a telegram that he'd better shave first. Since the silo yard was vacant after work and the sun is still glaring high above the grass, I went down the path to The Zeppelin and looked inside. The front of the pipe was shadowy, the middle was very dim, and the back was pitch dark. The next day I opened my eyes while I was shoveling coal. Late in the afternoon I saw three or four men coming through the weeds. They wore quilted work jackets, like ours, except theirs had stripes. Just outside The Zeppelin they sat down in the grass up to their necks. Soon a torn pillowcase appeared on a stick outside the pipe, a sign for occupied. Awhile later the little flag was gone. Then it quickly reappeared, and disappeared once more. As soon as the first men had gone, the next three or four came and sat down in the grass. I also saw how the women in the work brigades covered for each other. While three or four wandered off into the weeds, the others engaged the Natchinique in conversation. When he asked about the ones who had left, they explained it was because of stomach cramps and diarrhea. That was true, too, at least for some, but of course he couldn't tell for how many. The Natchinique chewed on his lip and listened for awhile, but then kept turning his head more and more frequently in the direction of The Zeppelin. At that point, I saw the women resort to a new tactic, they whispered to our singer, Loney Mi [assumed spelling], who began singing loud enough to shatter glass, drowning out all the noise made by our shoveling. Evening spreads across the vale, softly sings the nightingale. And suddenly all the women who had disappeared were back. They crowded in among us and shoveled away, as if nothing had happened. I liked the name, Zeppelin. It resonated with the silvery forgetting of our misery and with the quick cat-like coupling. I realized that these unknown German men had everything our men were lacking. They had been sent by the Furor into the world as warriors, and they were also the right age, neither childishly young, nor overripe, like our men. Of course, they, too, were miserable and degraded, but they had seen battle, had fought in the war. For our women they were heroes, a notch above the forced laborers, offering more than evening love in a barrack bed behind a blanket. Evening love in the barrack remained indispensable, but for our women it smelled of their own hardship, the same coal and the same longing for home. And it led to the same worn out give and take, with the man providing the food, while the woman cleaned and consoled. Love in The Zeppelin was free of all concerns, except for the hoisting and lowering of the little white flag. Anton Kovatch was convinced I would disapprove of the women going to The Zeppelin. No one could have guessed that I understood them all too well, that I knew all about arousal in disheveled clothes, about roving desire and gasping delight in the Alder Park [assumed spelling] and the Neptune Baths. No one could imagine that I was reliving my own rendezvous more and more often - Swallow, Fur, Ear, Thread, Oriole, Cap, Hair, Cat, Seagull, and Pearl. No one had any idea I was carrying so many cover names in my head and so much silence around my neck. Even inside The Zeppelin love had its seasons. The wildcat weddings came to an end in our second year, first because of the winter and later because of the hunger. When The Hunger Angel was running rampant, during the skin and the bones time, when male and female could not be distinguished from each other, coal was still unloaded at the silo, but the paths and the weeds were overgrown. Purple tufted vetch [assumed spelling] clambered among the white ero [assumed spelling] and the red oritch [assumed spelling], the blue burdocks bloomed, and the thistles, as well. The Zeppelin slept and belonged to the rust, just as the coal belonged to the camp, the grass belonged to the step, and we belonged to hunger. So now, ladies and gentlemen, Herta Muller will read a later chapter in German. So please welcome Herta Muller. [ Applause ] >> Herta Muller: I will read Passionate Miser [assumed spelling]. [ Foreign Language ] Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Philip Boehm: And then just to end the reading, we're going to jump to the last chapter of the book, which I need my glasses - On Treasures. Little treasures have a sign that says here I am. Bigger treasures have a sign that says do you remember? But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying I was there, I was there with Turpreclulage [assumed spelling], was the Kapu [assumed spelling], claimed should be written on treasures. My Adams apple bobbed up and down under my chin as though I'd swallowed my elbow. The barber said we're still here, that's five coming after nine for you. Back then in the barber room I thought that if you didn't die in the camp then everything later would be after, that we'd be out of the camp, free, possibly even back home. Then we could say I was there, but five comes after nine. We've been lucky, but our luck is a little balamouck [assumed spelling], and we have to explain where and how. So why should someone, like Turpreclulage go back home and claim he never needed any luck? Perhaps even back then someone from the camp had already decided to kill Turpreclulage, someone who was running around with The Hunger Angel, while Turpreclulage was strutting in his shiny patent leather, purse-like shoes? Perhaps during the skin and the bones time someone standing at role call or locked up inside the concrete box was rehearsing how he might split Turpreclulage's forehead in two, or was this someone up to his neck in snow beside a train embankment or up to his neck in coal at the Yama [assumed spelling], or in sand at the Cadere [assumed spelling], or inside the cement tower? Or did he swear revenge when he was lying on his bunk unable to sleep in the yellow light of the barrack? Maybe he planned the murder on the datatour [assumed spelling] with his oily gaze, was at the barber's talking about treasures, or at the moment when he asked me in the mirror, so how are things in the cellar? Or at the very instant I was saying cozy, every shift is a work of art. I guess a murder with a tie in the mouth and an ax on the stomach is also a work of art, a belated one. By now I've realized that what's written on my treasures is there I stay, that the camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head. Since I came back my treasures no longer have a sign that says here I am or one that says I was there, what's actually written on my treasures is there I'm stuck. The camp stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right. So when I talk about what's inside my skull I have to talk about an entire camp. I can't protect myself by keeping silent, and I can't protect myself by talking. I exaggerate in one case just as I do in the other, but I was there doesn't fit in either, and there's no way of getting it right. But there are treasures. Turpreclulage was correct about that. The fact that I came back is a stroke of crippled luck that's permanently grateful, a survival top that starts spinning at the least damn thing. It has me in its grip, just like all my treasures, which I cannot bear but also can't let go of. I've been using them now for over 60 years. They are weak and pushy, intimate and disgusting, forgetful and vindictive, worn out and new. They are Turpreclulage's dowry, and I can't tell one from the other. When I list them I start to stumble. My proud inferiority, my grumbled fear wishes, my reluctant haste. I jump from zero, all the way to a hundred. My defiant compliance, I acknowledge that everyone is right so I can hold it against them. My fumbled opportunism. My polite miserliness. My wearied envy of yearning, of others who know what they want from life, a feeling like stiff wool, cold and frizzy. My steep sided hollowness. I'm all spooned out, hard-pressed on the outside and empty on the inside ever since I no longer have to go hungry. My lateral transparency, that I fall apart by going inward. My burdened afternoons, time moving with me in between the furniture, slowly and heavily. My fundamental leaving in a lurch. I need much closeness, but I don't give-up control. I'm a master of the silken smile, even as I shrink back. Since The Hunger Angel I don't allow anyone to possess me. The most burdensome of my treasures is my compulsion to work. It is the reverse of forced labor, an emergency exchange. In me sits The Merciful Compeller, a relative of The Hunger Angel. He knows how to keep all my other treasures in line. He climbs into my brain, pushing me into the enchantment of compulsion because I am afraid of being free. From my room I can see the clock tower of the Schlossberg here in Graz. At my window is a large drawing table. My latest blueprint is lying on my desk, like a faded tablecloth. The paper is full of dust, like the summer on the streets outside. When I look at it it doesn't remember me. Every day since spring a man has been passing in front of my apartment, walking a shorthaired white dog. He has a black walking stick, extremely thin, with just a slight curve for a handle, like a giant vanilla bean. If I wanted to I could greet the man and tell him that his dog looks exactly like the white pig that my homesickness used to ride through the sky. The truth is I'd like to have a word with the dog. It would be good if the dog would only walk by himself for once or just with the vanilla bean and without the man. Maybe that will happen someday. In any case, I'll be staying where I am and the street will stay where it is, and there's a lot of summer left. I have time and I wait. What I like best of all is sitting at my little white Formica table, one meter long and one meter wide, a square. When the clock tower strikes half past two, the sun falls into the room. The shadow on the floor from my little table is a gramophone suitcase. It plays the Daphne [assumed spelling] song or the Pleated Paloma [assumed spelling]. I pick-up the cushion off the sofa and dance into my awkward afternoon. There are also other partners. I've danced with the teapot, with the sugar bowl, with the biscuit tin, with the telephone, with the alarm clock, with the ashtray, with the house key. My smallest partner is a torn-off coat button. Not true, once a dusty raisin was lying underneath the little white Formica table, and I danced with the raisin, then I ate it, and then there was a distance deep within me. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Peter Pfeiffer: Especially with the last section, that was great. I was reminded of a review of The Hunger Angel by the very noted writer, Wood Krueger [assumed spelling], who praised it and who found in it a very new kind of writing about the camp and the camp experience. Wood Krueger is a survivor of the Holocaust, and I remember her also talking to me about that book. That was thankfully before the Nobel Prize, so we could talk a bit more at ease about it, without the admiration that would have immediately slipped in. One issue with camp books is the fact that most of them are written by people who have actually been in the camps. And, of course, your collaboration with Oskar Pastior on some very fundamental aspects of the book would come to the fore, so could you expand a little bit more on this combination of the authenticity of the experience and also including some of the central words and phrases that you use in the book that derived from Oskar Pastior and how you incorporate that, especially in some of these very intense moments, like this sort of reflecting back on his experience and on his survival? >> Herta Muller: Yes, I understand more than I can say. I understood now. I think so. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So it's important to keep in mind that it's a labor camp and not a concentration camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: This labor camp is [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Not to be compared with a concentration camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Because in the labor camp, of course, the point was labor and not the extermination as in death camps. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Of course, I wasn't there myself, but my mother was deported for five years. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And even as a child I could sense that my mother was carrying something around with her. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And not just her, but it was a collective experience for her generation. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: All the people who were ever too young or too old for the war were deported. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I come from a small village, and everyone knew each other. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Everyone knew who had been deported, but was forbidden to speak about it because of the sheer experience of the labor camp did remind people about the time when Romania was allied with Fascist - it was a Fascist government. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: People only whispered about it or when they met each other privately. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But My mother didn't speak, and I thought - I had the feeling that my mother was an old woman, even when I was little, she was always an old woman. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And she had said these kind of half sentences to me when I was little, like wind is colder than snow, and thirst is harder to bear than hunger. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When she combed my hair she would tell me how she had been - how her head had been shaved and how often her head had been shaved. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I had braids as a child, everyone did. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I wanted to cut-off my braids so that I could comb my own hair so that she wouldn't tell me about all the time when her head had been shaved. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And for her it was a moment that always came. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And she showed me hundreds of times how one peels potatoes. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: That was the basic nutritional element in the camp, and you either would starve to death because of the lack of potatoes or you survived due to them. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I had to peel the potatoes in one piece, I had to peel in one piece and so thin as possible so that nothing would be wasted. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And we had plenty of potatoes. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so she has some kind of complicity with the potatoes. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So I didn't know what this complicity was, I was a child. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I didn't understand the contents. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I didn't know what deportation was or camp, but I felt it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When she told me people had frozen to death, and I was always made to wear so many clothes, she was ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I had to put on much more clothes than anyone else so that I didn't freeze. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But she never really told about it, talked about it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I always wanted to write about it and I met with several people from my village. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And then I took down, I recorded some of these conversations. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But those were all farmers, and farmers don't really talk about themselves. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They're not used to it, and in their world it's not something one does. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I knew - I had known Oskar Pastior for several years, and I knew that he had also been deported. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But that's all I knew and he - because he didn't speak about it either. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And then one time we were on a reading, because he's a writer, as well, and so we were out for a reading. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: We were in southern Titel [assumed spelling] in the mountains. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And they had picked us up in a car and we kept on driving through these forests of fir trees. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I said these fir trees are so boring trees. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They're lazy, they just sit there the whole year, and they always look the same. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Then why are you worshiping these fir trees so much? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Other trees work all year long. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They have leaves, they have fruit, they ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Flowers. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And why don't we bring back, of all trees, why do we bring the fir tree into our homes for Christmas? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so Oskar said I shouldn't say anything about - against - I shouldn't have anything to say bad about these fir trees. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Because we had been in the camp, he had taken his green glove and taken, made of wool, and he had unraveled the glove and he had taken this unraveled wool, these pieces of green wool, and put it on a wire frame and created a little fir tree for himself. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: That was the last spark of civilization. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he talked about how it had been in the barracks and how everyone was so happy for its presence. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that moved me greatly. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that moment I realized that if I were going to write a book about this I would have to do it with Oskar Pastior. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Because I needed those kind of details, every day, the details of everyday life. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And no one else had told me anything like that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And then so I asked him and then we started working. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he told me things, and there were certain words, such as The Hunger Angel, that was a word from him. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he had thought up this word -- in German it's one word, and he had thought of this word in the camp, it wasn't ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Hunger was a monster that - and he had to deal with this monster, he had no other choice because, after all, most people in the camps they died either of hunger or they froze to death, so that's why he personified hunger in order to help him better cope with it, to grapple with it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so that by personifying hunger it put him in a position where he was better able to grapple with this problem. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The Heart-Shovel is another such word, but it's a technical word because it describes a shovel that is shaped like a heart. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And Oskar Pastior was in love with these material things. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: He knew all the types of sand. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Which color belonged to which type of sand. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: From deep to brown, the different types of cement. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And the grades of coal. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: My favorite coal, he said. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And, of course, his favorite coal was the one that was easiest to unload. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he thought, well, if this type of coal is so easy to unload then it is treating me well, it's a good type of coal because it's being kind to me. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so I was able to travel with Pastior into what is now the Ukraine. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: In the Donyest [assumed spelling] Region [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: This wonderful area where we know that Stalinists are still found. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The red coal barons. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Yes, and Demochinko [assumed spelling] is [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: In one of these factories that was part of the camp, which is now located in the Ukraine, in ruins. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Because Ukraine has recently gained independence we were lucky we were able to visit this factory, this ruined factory. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he showed me everything. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The Zeppelin was still there. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And the cooling tower. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The coke batteries. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The door to the cellar where he had worked on a shift. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I saw the landscape. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I could see the sky and the plants and what a step is. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And for two or three years we made our - we took down our notes. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: One time I said, well, let's - we can write this book together. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And we had some passages and a shorter passage we'd already finished. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When all of a sudden he died. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: He was at the Frankfort Book Fair and he had a heart attack, and he just fell over. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And we hadn't been ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... we had assumed we had all the time in the world because we didn't - we thought we'd be able to work on it at our own pace. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And there was so many things - there were so many things I hadn't been able to ask. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And after he died, a whole year passed and I was unable to even look at these notes. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I had lost a very dear friend. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And writing was not the main - most important thing then. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And later I thought, well, he spent the last three years of his life telling me these things about the camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he so greatly wanted this book to [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It was the first time that he had spoken to anyone about the camp, as well. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he would show me these things, like how you shovel coal. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: His body had memorized how to shovel, and he showed me how to do this. And I watched him do it, and I was - and I watched him very carefully so that I could write down how you shovel, how one shovels in order to spare - not to waste your energy. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And they had a quote in it, what is fulfilled and never punishment, bad punishment. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so he would start to describe these things and I would write it down, and sometimes I wouldn't catch-up with him, and I would have to tell him to stop and then he would have to start from all over again because of this was something his body had memorized, 60 years afterwards. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It was frightening for him. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And when we were in the Ukraine, these places, he was so happy. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I thought he wasn't ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... able to stand it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And we had purchased the type of plane cover you can - you could return at will. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But he didn't want to leave. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: He ate so much, he ate all day long, he ate. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The first day we were there he said I fed his soul, his soul had been nourished. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I was deeply disturbed that he was so happy. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I was always surprised he [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Shortly before [inaudible] death. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: [Inaudible] had gone to Bugenbag [assumed spelling] to the grounds of the former concentration camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: [Inaudible] had been running around Bugenbag, also, laughing like a child, and the [inaudible] director asked ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... and the director ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... are you happy? And he said, of course, I'm at home here. I've come back home. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that's the same [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I was so dumb, I hadn't understood that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that's what the trauma was because that was normal [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: There was a cursed intimacy that you couldn't, it wouldn't go away, and that was ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Something you can't stand, you can't get rid of, you need it in some way. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It was otherwise inexplicable. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so I thought to myself, I decided, well, I had to write this book on my own. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And if it doesn't work out then I'll just have to tell myself, well, I tried but it didn't work out. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And if it does work out then that's something I'm doing for him. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And for my mother. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So he provided the framework for the novel, and the experiences of the total novel came from him, but as far as the women, describing the women in the camp, I did a lot of research and I ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... read about the women in Gulag [assumed spelling]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Personal accounts. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But most of the characters in the novel are invented. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I was - but I might have a name, a last name, but I would have to invent a first name and then I'd have to ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I - from a church I had a list of people who had died in the camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And then since the people who had been deported, something had to happen among these characters, and so I had to admit that, as well. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And there was a character in the novel who is a mentally disabled person, and I knew that there was such a person but I had to give her sentence, I had to give her words. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But Oskar had provided me with such a sensual, a highly sensual number of details that that enabled me to invent things based on what he had told me, even if I had to invent these details myself. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And it was a great stroke of fortune that I was able to travel there. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: That I had seen the grounds of the camp, and that he had shown me these places. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that I had seen the landscape. And so then I was able to trust myself that I could invent these things. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Now I think I have spent a long time answering this one question. [ Applause ] >> Peter Pfeiffer: That was extensive, it was not long. And in some ways you almost began to answer my second question in that because I - because when I prepared for this I started to reread some of the - your books and, in particular, I looked at Nedohome [assumed spelling], and I was struck because it - I had read it twice before, but I suddenly realized that one of the traumas that is not spoken about in the whole book, but that is one of the sort of aspects that feeds the suppression and the sort of violence in that village is precisely the not talked about experience of having been deported to the labor camps. I don't know how I missed that the first two times, but that's how it goes. To some extent it almost seems now looking at the first book, at Atemschaukel, it's almost as if you're coming home to some of the - or to some of the themes that to some extent, as you now mentioned a few times saying your mother's experience seemed to have been with you from the very beginning - is that a fair ... >> Herta Muller: Atemschaukel, I understood and I understand. [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: That came - of course, is present in this first book, as well. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But I was always of the opinion that I had to write about that and just that book dedicated to that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But I didn't have the confidence to write it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So in all these conversations with my mother, and that's the way mothers are, I mean you go there and she says - the first thing she says is all the people who have died. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so I thought, well, if wait any longer there's not going to be anybody left. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Once I told myself I - it's now or never. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Of course, I was never in a camp, myself, and I can't compare the life under the dictatorship, under [inaudible] with life in a camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But I experienced so many terrible things with the Secret Police ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... fear of dying and persecution. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And these experiences also helped me. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They helped me imagine things in the book, to imagine what things might be like. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Imagine it's all the same if you were there or not. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And when I was working with Oskar Pastior I kept on telling him, Oskar, you have to get out of the camp and I have to get in. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that's [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: He often went on for hours telling me things. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But mostly about himself. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I was lucky, I was very fortunate because, first of all, he was a great writer, himself, and in addition he was an intellectual and I needed that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Without him I couldn't have produced the book. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Nor did I know who might, other than he, who might be able to provide me with such details. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And his [inaudible] being in love with exactly that which had almost killed him. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When I asked my mother how many beds were in the barracks, and she said I can't remember. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I said you have to remember whether there's five or 10 or 30? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: She said I don't - I no longer remember. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Perhaps she couldn't talk about it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Being able to say nothing, to be silent is also a strong - a strength. >> [Inaudible] >> Philip Boehm: He just asked me if her mother has read this book? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: She says she has. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: My mother is a very simple woman. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It's not too interesting when I'm writing. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I'm her child, not her author. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I think that's the way it should be. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I think it's nice how she - when she just tells me not to worry, that I'll get -- or have a nervous breakdown, or. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: She says and she knew that I was working all this time with Pastior, but what are you going to do if the publishing house won't even accept it? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Then she asks very normal questions. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that's very important for me, I consider these things very important. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I actually borrowed the book from my husband when [inaudible] ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... she thinks he must be embarrassed. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But now she said that's exactly how it was. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I do believe that she's read it because she says that's exactly how it was. >> Herta Muller: Yes. >> Peter Pfeiffer: Okay, maybe we can open it up to maybe three or four questions that some people might have, if you do? >> Thank you, first of all, it was absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much. But did people, like her mother and Oskar, were they able to reconcile with the people who did that to them? And if I - I suppose were these Russians that had put them into camps? And then did they hold grudges for years against them? And how did they feel about Romanians, who I guess didn't do anything to stop these camps? [ Pause ] >> Peter Pfeiffer: Okay, could we get another one, one or two? And I will just leave it up to Frau Muller to answer questions. >> Yes, and I will say it in English first and then in German. When I read accounts of concentration camp survivors there seems to be a strong theme of community in the camps and in the barracks, even though there are some occurrence of one man or one woman against the other, but there's also friendships and relationships. And in Atemschaukel, in The Hunger Angel, I found that it was only the protagonist, Leopold, and The Hunger Angel, there was really no friendship or any human warmth, is that what you got from Pastior, or was that really more of a literary approach that you took? [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: She -- it's fine, she understood. >> Oh, you understood. Okay, great. >> Philip Boehm: Yes. Thank you. >> Peter Pfeiffer: And maybe one more? >> What-- does she see any importance, given the fact that German was also the language of the oppressors during the concentration camp experience, what the writing in German has a role for her? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: You can only forgive individuals. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But you can't forgive a camp system. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: There was a rage that people had and probably, also, they despised. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They were all afraid of the Russians. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that perhaps hasn't changed to this day. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Yes, because we don't have so much cause. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Romania wasn't the only camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: You have the Baltic States and all of Eastern Europe. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So and the reason that so many Eastern European countries wanted to go into the European Union was they were afraid of the Russians. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Perhaps today they might have second thoughts, but then again tomorrow they might not. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Putin is an old fox. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And KGB, fox. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Yes, and they're striving for power again. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Eight years we had to study Russian. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: My mother told me you didn't really - you don't really have to learn Russian. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: My parents were very ambitious, they always wanted me to have good grades. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Except for in Russian. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I can hardly read in Russian, no one really studied, no one tried to learn it. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Nice because for the Russian language, and, of course, the literature is not to blame, and the Russian literature is fabulous. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But we had ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But our textbooks were Stalinist teaching guides and ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And no one, you couldn't tell from them that the Russians had a great literature from those books. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Of course, there were relations in the camp. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But I also don't think that there aren't - that it's not true that in the book The Hunger Angel that there aren't. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The friendship with Trudy Pelicon ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... is important [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It's a close relationship. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And, of course, there weren't just friendships. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I can't say how others might have described it, but I've ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... but there isn't much difference between what I've written myself and I've also read many books about concentration camps. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: [Inaudible] >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I think there weren't just friendships. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And psychologically that would be impossible. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When a person is on the brink of death and wants to survive ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... and that one's better characteristics aren't - it's hard for them to come out. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Survival means [inaudible]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Yes, because I had to show these bad sides, because these worst traits because these people were living in such horrible misery. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And Pastior told me that the people who failed, the people who were the first to fail were the intellectuals. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: They were the first ones to ditch their own morals. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Because they were used to public performances and appearing in public and the social life. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And, of course, that wasn't always the important thing. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And they were unable to maintain their moral system, their virtues in these new circumstances. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And the people with the - the simplest people were the ones who were most simply able to maintain these. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: This is proper, and this isn't. This is what - one doesn't do that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The people who were able to say simply this is good, and this is bad, and they were the ones who were able to ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... maintain their moral system the longest when there was no civilization to support them. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I can't say anymore to that. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The question is about German, German is also the language of the National Socialists, and what can I do? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Of course, that was a problem, a German minority in Romania. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And this minority was on the side of Hitler, of course. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: My father's generation ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: When I was young and I went from the village into the city it was very difficult for me, it almost tore me apart. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I read the [inaudible] Silon [assumed spelling], who was also from Romania, from the Book of Ina [assumed spelling]. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I knew the subject. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And the subject of the extermination of the Jews in the Book of Ina, there's no one left, they all were up in the chimneys or they fled. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I knew that my father, had they been given the assignment, he would have killed the Besalance [assumed spelling] Family. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But what am I to do about that? >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I didn't choose my own father. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I would happily have chosen a different father. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I read everything that was to be found in Romania at that time about the Holocaust. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I was 17 years old when I left the village or into the city. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: I was 15 when I went and I was - by the time I reached 17 I was - had been in city for two years. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: By then I had - I was very well aware that I was within a dictatorship. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And I realized that I was the same age as my father was when he joined the SS. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And if I'm going to accuse my father or hold it against him that he joined the SS, and that's what I - and I always did hold it against him that he joined the SS. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Then I can't have anything in common with a dictatorship in which I am living. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And so I had to distance myself from this dictatorship no matter what the cost might be. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So my father's biography, his history was a warning for me as applied to a later dictatorship. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: [Inaudible] also wrote in German. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he even says I write in the language of the murderers. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: It's like what I said earlier about the Russian, the Russian language is not to blame. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: So the Germans, consequently, the German language ... >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: ... is not to blame. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: The Nazis, themselves, are to blame. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: Hitler didn't even understand German very well, his language wasn't very good, he's got the most vulgar, the most ordinary German. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And he was the low end of the German language. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: But it's my mother language. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: That's the only one I can write in. >> Herta Muller: [ Foreign Language ] >> Philip Boehm: And that's the way it is. [ Applause ] >> Peter Pfeiffer: Thank you very much, Frau Muller. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.