Trauma
Psychological trauma caused by fear permeates the novel: "Fear, isolation, and abandonment characterize the lives of the first-person narrator and her three friends....Müller describes how fear acquires a life of its own; it becomes independent of the subject's will."[5] One critic argues that "Herztier was written in response to the trauma of life under the Ceauşescu dictatorship, when the citizens of Romania lived in constant fear of the secret police or Securitate."[7] As Müller said in an interview, this fear in the novel is autobiographical as well.[9]
According to Beverley Driver Eddy, The Land of Green Plums presents trauma as well as its testimony; the narrator gives her own testimony, and relates it to the testimony of her friends' suffering. The first of these is Lola, the friend who supposedly kills herself; her testimony is preserved in her diary, in which she wrote of her animalistic sexual exploits with nameless men and her struggle to cope with the guilt of having joined the Communist Party in an effort to better herself. For the narrator, preserving Lola's notebook (and sharing it with her three friends) becomes of paramount importance, especially since the memory of Lola was erased days after her death by the Party establishment.[7] Additional complexity comes from Lola's testimony being interwoven in the narrator's own—"a testimony within a testimony."[7] In an interview published in 1998,[16] Müller said that "she is concerned with showing that the childhood experiences have been internalised by the narrator, and that the traumas of the frightened, non-conformist child are replicated to the larger traumas of the adult dissident."[7] In the image of the weeds cut down by the narrator's father, an image presented early in the novel, the parallel between the father and the dictator is evidenced: "both 'make cemeteries' without fear of retribution." One symptom of the trauma this causes in its victims is disconnection, the strain of friendship resulting from lack of trust, disrupting normal human relationships for the remainder of the victim's life. Müller's novel portrays this disconnection and the ongoing trauma for survivors, even after the fall of the dictatorship.[7]
Other critics have focused on different effects of trauma in the novel and in Müller's work in general. Lyn Marven argues that the Müller's poetics and style, characterized by paratactic as well as syntactic and narrative gaps, illustrates one of the effects of trauma:
"Trauma disrupts the structures of memory....Trauma cannot be integrated into narrative memory and exists only as a gap or blank spot; it therefore cannot be articulated, and returns in the form of surprisingly literal flashbacks, hallucinations, or dreams."[17]
Marven notes another effect: a "distorted body image" that often gives rise to a "radical metonymy," a fragmentation, surfacing most notably in a scene where Pjele, during an interrogation, lists the narrator's clothes and possessions, to which the narrator responds by listing her own body parts:[17] "1 pr. eyes, 1 pr. ears, 1 nose, 1 pr. lips, 1 neck."[18] Marven notes that Müller's collages, which the critic says are "central to Müller's œuvre," show the same fragmentation, and says that her "increasingly readable" prose, coupled with recent collages moving toward narrative, might suggest that there is "a possibility of overcoming trauma."[17](Grazziella Predoui also noted that Müller's prose is developing from parataxis toward more complicated syntax.[19])
Banat-Swabians
The situation of the Banat-Swabians, the German-speaking minority in Romania, is a recurring theme in Müller's writing. Historically, Germans were recruited by the Austria-Hungary to repopulate southern areas following the expulsion of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. They were given special privileges, allowed to keep their language and Roman Catholicism, even in areas in which the Orthodox Church was paramount. Their communities spoke German into the 20th century. They were among ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, whom Adolf Hitler proposed to unite in a greater Germany. Millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from eastern Europe after the war; thousands were forced into labor camps. Even years later, they were often discriminated against in Romania under the communist government.
By the late 20th century, their status is one of the central themes of The Land of Green Plums; this idea is explored in detail in Valentina Glajar's 1997 article "Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and German: Conflicting Identities in Herta Müller's Herztier." The Banat-Swabian community, of which the narrator is a member, was described by Müller as extremely ethnocentric. Following persecution after the war, while remaining survivors had no desire to emigrate to Germany, they exerted an almost totalitarian control, especially on their children to keep them within their community.[5] Müller had already addressed this topic in her first work, Niederungen, translated as Nadirs in English, in which the German community holds on to its language and habits in an attempt to deny the Romanian dictatorship that rules them. One critic characterized this communal attempt in Niederungen as a "mechanistically followed tradition".[20]
According to Glajar, this is the world of the narrator's mother, who writes of her sicknesses in her letters in the hope of keeping her daughter emotionally connected to her home village. The narrator's father was a member of the SS (as were Müller's father and uncle), and is a troubling example of Germanness. The novel proposes a tension inside Romania between the culturally totalitarian atmosphere of the Banat-Swabian community and the politically totalitarian world of Timișoara, where the main characters attend college—between German and Romanian. But the main characters who move to Germany quickly discover that although they were German in Romania, they are Romanian in Germany. They face new social, cultural and linguistic difficulties. Georg commits suicide a few weeks after his arrival in Frankfurt.[5]
