Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 2009, is Romanian but has lived in Germany since 1987
and writes in German (her first language).
The title of her novel translated as The
Passport is a Romanian saying, Der Mensch ist ein
großer Fasan auf der Welt (Man
is a Great Pheasant in the World) and we know what happens to
pheasants. It was published in 1986,
while Müller was still living in Romania, and writing it in those circumstances
dictated its allusiveness.
Windisch, a miller, is an ethnic
German living in Romania some time after the Second World War. Life in the Banat, where Müller herself is
from, is hard, with a sense that in Romania the Germans’ lives are not unique
in their drabness. He and his family
face poverty and corruption, with little hope of improvement in their
circumstances. It is an unsophisticated
rural community ruled by custom and superstition, where you can tell if a girl
is no longer a virgin by her toes pointing outwards. Windisch consequently wishes to emigrate to
the land of his ancestors in the West for a better life.
As if rural poverty and political
repression are not enough to contend with, this is a generation that had lived
through the Second World War.
Afterwards, many of the Germans, who had been settled in Romania for
generations, had been deported to Russia for forced labour. Windisch’s wife Katharina had been sent to
work in a mine and had had to first swap clothes, and then sex, for food in
order to sate the spiny ‘hedgehog’ in her stomach and survive, a fact with
which her unsympathetic husband reproaches her.
It requires great persistence to
obtain the necessary paperwork to be able to move to West Germany. To oil the wheels, Windisch bribes those in
authority with bags of flour, but having an attractive daughter means flour is
not enough. He is obliged to use his
daughter Amélie as a bargaining chip, hinting at a country that despite its
avowed communism still runs on cynical self-interest, with no one in authority
immune.
One might expect poor behaviour
from low-level bureaucrats, but far from providing spiritual consolation, the
local priest lasciviously seduces any woman he can, and Amélie has to provide
him with certain services in exchange for the baptismal certificates that are
part of the emigration application. Afterwards,
Windisch notices her toes now point outwards.
Eventually Windisch achieves his
aim, and even fulfils his fantasy of his family returning for a visit, driving
a Mercedes which, as it enters the village, passes scrawny horses pulling a
cart: modernity and the past juxtaposed.
The ill-fitting suit he was wearing when he left has been replaced by
one the right size, cut from the same cloth as his wife’s. ‘It’s as if we never lived here,’ Katharina
says as she looks round. The sacrifices
and accommodations have, one presumes, been worth it.
The story is told in an
elliptical style, with no obvious narrative direction. It consists of short sentences in a series of
brief chapters depicting the lives of the villagers, the dour fractured prose
reflecting a time out of joint. While
not explicity critical of the Ceaușescu regime, the cumulative impression is negative
at a time the Romanian government was attempting to display the country as a
success, and the mere fact of wanting to emigrate from the workers’ paradise
would have been controversial. The novel
works on a metaphorical level as well, because if one cannot protect one’s
child, and Ceaușescu is supposedly the father of the nation, what does that say
about him?
