Atemschaukel

What a revelation for me! Until the Nobel Prize 2009, Herta Müller was not known to a wide audience, but always acclaimed by the critics. Atemschaukel describes how a young man of German descent from Romania gets deported to a Stalinist labor camp in the Ukraine. Basically as payback for Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union. It is based on real life experiences of the author’s mother and the long-term friend and poet Oskar Pastior. It is nothing like so many other accounts of a life in a GULAG. She finds very poetic expressions, where the unreal reality shines through. I listened to it and therefore it might have had even a higher impact on me than pure reading it. She invents so many words and it sounds like poetry, that you need hear it. Sound and meaning sink into you. The book is now being translated into English, go and get it. I hope the translator will find an adequate language.