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106
Herta Müller, Paper Collages, 2012

Chapter: wordsearch - Concept and Poetry

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Longing for Freedom
Freedom grows the more words we are able to claim for ourselves,” the German-Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller once said. To understand her poetic collages, one must imagine what it means for that freedom to be curtailed. Müller was born in Romania in the early 1950s as a Banat Swabian. She belongs to a German minority that was expropriated by the communist regime after 1945 and deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor, among them Müller’s own mother. In the 1970s, Müller studied German and Romanian literature. She was persecuted not only because of her background, but also because of her writing. 

Resistance to the Regime
She refused to collaborate as an informant for the notorious Romanian secret police, the Securitate. Until she was permitted to leave for West Germany in 1987, Müller was repeatedly harassed, interrogated, and threatened with death. She later processed these experiences and their historical context in her literary work, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009. She began creating collage poems around 1987. Their origin was also pragmatic: unable to find suitable postcards during her travels, she instead sent collages composed of words cut from newspapers. 

A Vocabulary in the Truest Sense
Müller became, quite literally, addicted to words. At home she set up a “word table,” which soon proved too small; she bought boxes and drawers and began arranging her collected fragments alphabetically. From the mass press she assembled a veritable vocabulary. Like the Surrealists and the Dada movement before her, Müller employs the technique of collage. The poems that emerge—seemingly absurd at first glance—differ from her prose, yet they explore related themes. She plays with a variety of typefaces and consistently incorporates small images or graphic elements, emphasizing the visual character of the cut-out words. In one essay she writes: “What is said must be careful with what is not said.” In this sense, her collages are also about the whiteness of the page, the emptiness between the words, and the visualization of the unsayable.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Herta Müller, 1069 vom 04.07.2012, 2012 
Paper collage
© Herta Müller
Written Art Collection

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