Nr. 3 (32) anul IX / iulie-septembrie 2011 - ROMDIDAC

Empire had brought the Swabs to the southwestern Romanian province of
Banat. They were late arrivals to this space and distinguishable from the other
German community of southern Transylvania known as Saxons, who had
settled here in the 13 th century. Since the Swabs took their cultural dictates
from Vienna rather then Bucharest, Romania’s capital, Muller chronicles a time
of well-known political oppression, especially for the ethnic German minority,
at the height of Ceausescu’s dictatorship in the 1980s. Specifically, Muller
engages contemporary politics and history while miraculously incorporating
narrative techniques as inventive strategies to circumvent the censorship
imposed by Ceausescu’s draconic politics and by the Communist Partymandated
socialist realism.
Privileging literary devices that convey remembered experiences - from
her father, a former SS who came from the war and until his death, caused
by excessive drinking, sang songs to the Fuhrer, to her own student days and
subsequent employment as a translator of manual instructions for hydraulic
machinery to emigrating to Germany - Muller’s approach is not intended to
depoliticize or dehistoricize the reality of Communist Romania; rather, it focuses
on the specificity of the experience of Ceausescu’s repressive regime. 3
Her sensitivity to the historical and political changes affecting Romania
during the 1980s translates into seeing the world as an alien space. Her
narratives allude to and mimic the atrocities of the Romanian police state and
the country’s prison-like landscape. A novel like The Appointment is not only a
miniature odyssey through a city sprung forth from the narrator’s imagination;
it also brings forth the all-too-real site of deserted grounds where the Swabs,
including Muller’s own grandparents, were deported in the early days of the
Soviet colonization (1944-1958). In Muller’s account as told by her grandfather,
such locations of the extended Romanian Gulag where entire families of
deportees lived in holes they had to dig up themselves in the ground offer
testimonies of the people’s suffering and degradation:
Some four hundred and fifty families [were] dumped out in front of a wooden
marker set in the middle of nowhere. Rows of stakes in dead straight lines, sky
above, clay below, with nothing between but the damned crazy thistles and
us. The sun scorched everything in sight. For several days your grandmother
and I did nothing but dig ourselves a hole in the ground in front of our stake
and cover it with thistles. The wind from the west was searing, and then the
thirst, no water for three kilometers... Many of us lost our wits, one at a time
or in couples, it didn‘t matter any more.
In The Land of Green Plums, a novel that illustrates some of the atrocities
of the Communist regime in Ceausescu’s time, the narrator is very close to her
three German friends - Georg, who is sent to teach in an industrial town after
graduating from college and later, after emigrating to West Germany, jumps
out of a window in what may be a murder staged as suicide by the Securitate
agents who have orders to kill even outside Romania’s borders; Edgar, sent
to teach in a village after graduating from college and living a miserable life
among his students who eat mulberries to improve their voices that sing
hymns of praise to the Communist Party and who play soccer to improve their
muscles and legs, even though their insides suffer from diarrhea caused by
bad food and their outsides are covered with lice; and Kurt, sent to work as
an engineer in a slaughter house who later hangs himself.
But the characters who shape for the most part the script of Muller’s
narratives are allegorical embodiments of women portrayed against the notions
Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
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