Herta Müller’s The Passport

Essay by Leora Skolkin-Smith — Published on March 1, 2010

The Passport Herta Müller (trans. Martin Chalmers). Serpent’s Tail. 96pp, $12.95.

In Herta Müller’s short novel The Passport we move through a series of vignettes filled with thickets of opaque and mystifying images. A story begins to emerge. A man is trying to get a passport which will allow his family to return home to West Germany. He is a member of an isolated and oppressed community of East German Romanians living under a stifling communist dictatorship. Living behind the Berlin Wall they are stranded and mostly unseen by the Western world, victims of Stalin’s takeover after Germany fell to the Soviet Union in 1945. They have no real citizenship nor voice in this new world. All that is left as a semblance of their past lives are broken-down farmhouses, potholes, war memorials, and dilapidated churches where, “The church door is locked. Saint Anthony is on the other side of the wall. He is carrying a white lily and a brown book. He is locked in.”

Herta Müller herself was born into a household of German-speaking Romanians, a minority group in a remote village in Banat who were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945. Müller’s mother was sent to serve five years in a labor camp in the Ukraine. From 1973 to 1976, Müller attended the university in Timisara (Temeswar), majoring in German and Romanian literature. She soon joined a circle of dissident young German-speaking authors known as the “Aktionsgruppe Banat,” opposing the new Romanian dictator, Ceausescu. From 1977 to 1979, Müller found work as a translator at a manufacturing company. When she refused to be an informant for the secret police, she was dismissed, and afterward she was continually harassed by the Securitate. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Müller spoke powerfully about this period in her life:

[The Securiate man] called me stupid. [He] said I was a shirker and a slut, as corrupted as a stray bitch. . . . I stopped writing. I put down the pen and went to the window and looked out onto the dusty street, unpaved and full of potholes, and at all the humpbacked houses. . . . On Glory Street a cat was sitting in a bare mulberry tree. It was the factory cat with the torn ear. And above the cat the early morning sun was shining like a yellow drum. I said: N-am caracterul—I don’t have the character for this. I said it to the street outside. The word CHARACTER made the Securitate man hysterical. He tore up the sheet of paper and threw the pieces on the floor. With his briefcase under his arm he said quietly: You’ll be sorry, we’ll drown you in the river. I said as if to myself: If I sign that, I won’t be able to live with myself anymore, and I’ll have to do it on my own. So it’s better if you do it.

Müller’s first published work, a collection of short stories entitled Niederungen, was censored upon publication in Romania. Two years later, she published Drückender Tango in Romania, with a German edition of Niederungen coming out in Germany the same year. The settings and themes of both these works concern a small German-speaking village and its people suffering under Romanian communism. While the Romanian national press condemned her work, the German press outside Romania praised and recognized it as the major work of an urgently important literary voice. Gradually all Müller’s work was censored and banned in Romania, and, finally in 1987, Müller and her husband, the author Richard Wagner, succeeded in emigrating to West Germany.

A study of Müller’s work brings us closer to the divided post-War world during the Cold War. It puts us into a complex and splintered literary history, unexplored in Western Europe and the United States, severed from our awareness, lost and censored behind the Iron Curtain.

In The Passport, Windisch, a village miller, searches for a way to bribe the communist officials for a passport which will allow him and his family to return to West Germany. Each vignette tells us another story about those Germans left behind the Wall struggling to return to Western culture and government. Müller depicts the desolate remains of their farmlands with fierce intensity: “It was summer and the village was parched. And water from the well wasn’t rain water. . . . For seven days the sky burned itself dry. It had wandered to the end of the village.”

Many contemporary critics have emphasized Herta Müller’s “surrealism” in The Passport. After the surrealist movements ceased to be central in Western Europe by 1945, their impact spread to more isolated parts of Eastern Europe, where Soviet totalitarianism had taken hold. Beginning with the Romanian Dadaist and Symbolist poet Tristan Tzara, surrealism became a vital artistic movement in Eastern European literature. But Romanian literature was dramatically different from Western surrealism and the earlier Western European Cubist movements in how it expressed the unconscious’ role in shaping a modified reality. Instead of depicting dream-life through beguiling pictures and words, Romanian Dadaists showed powerlessness under an assault of external forces. The individual reflects helplessness and disorientation in a world destabilized by a foreign dictatorship demanding his or her submission to the pseudo-reality of its imposed tyranny. As in the art of the earlier European Dadaists and Cubists, Müller’s objects of nature and the human body are broken up and reassembled into abstract forms to create ambiguous, enigmatic images. But, radically different from the European movements, Müller’s new reality is not derived from the unconscious dream-life and libidinous yearnings of her characters. There is no personal destiny to be found here or explored, no existentialism as we know it. The individual does not face the responsibility of free will and choice, nor is she flooded with unconscious matter that she must recognize as the real engineer of her fate. Quite the opposite is true. The external forces of the totalitarian guard have prevented any sense of “free choice” or “free will,” and characters’ unconscious cannot save them—it too suffers under the invader’s corruption and repression. What is unique to Romanian surrealism is its anti-totalitarianism, as well as its use of imagery and sensory stimuli (“the voluptuous over the strong scents of rural life,” as the literary historian Salomon Schulman has called it) to resist the bogus reality inflicted from the outside. If one adds to this new surrealism a new feminism and illumination of gender politics, one arrives at the very contemporary work of Herta Müller.

In Müller’s work we are thrown off-balance by images that tumble rather than fall into place, as if we are living inside a cement mixer. We are never quite sure how each image will blend into another, or how the confusing liquid mixture will spill to form solid blocks that can be traversed. Müller creates a severe, desolate world. Even the natural objects—poplar trees, animals, clouds, and rivers—cry out in despair and futility. Only women can sustain life, although they do this compromised and violated, suffering under conditions of personal degradation and impoverishment.

The external forces which twist and turn the world topsy-turvy are both embraced and resisted by Müller. To reflect the pseudo-reality inflicted on her, she expresses a contrary pseudo-reality. But, although it is equally filled with distorted and unreal images, Müller’s strange, self-created world does not seek to deceive. It sails an authentic fleet of human feelings and perceptions on these turbulent political and personal waters, even as it whirls the known world around into surreal word-pictures. The regime’s imagery—involving irrational and corrupt use of the imagination—is forced on the writer and becomes the writer, but she additionally colors and modifies it. Her own imagery is irrational, but not corrupt. It is painfully disorienting, reflecting the regime, but it specifically seeks to disorient the regime, to oppose it, turning its own tool against it. Müller seems to be asserting that though what has forcefully insinuated itself into her being has become a part of her, it can be paradoxically transformed into word-images of protest and resistance through her art.

Müller disorients us by setting all the natural objects of our known world awry just a tiny bit. The novel’s central vision is askew. There is no pupil to the guiding authorial eye, nor to the eye of the world Müller is revealing. Though the imagery is not exclusively opaque, it feels as though we are seeing only the whites of eyes concealing their “cold pupils” as they control the reality of those trapped within the dictatorship. Nothing around us is familiar or immediately recognizable. Concomitantly, we also become lost in the whites of the novelist’s eyes. We can’t decipher the world Müller subjectively expresses, though we strongly feel we can trust the writer’s perceptions and images in this surreality, and not those of the Other which circle as some other force “watching” us. Gradually, the reader is submerged in an ubiquitous, undifferentiated mist which conceals the real movements and motivations of all the characters. We struggle through a discombobulation of objects, landscape, and events. We do not see what is seeing us. And we do not understand what is happening inside the writer’s rendering of events.

In one section, an “apple tree eats its own apples” and “owls drink up all water in the ponds and wells.” Another passage tells us: “The neighbor’s spotted pigs . . . are a herd in the clouds.” A surreal pattern is also established using colors as repeated motifs. White is continually used to symbolize the myopic and limited sight of both the reader and the characters, as neither can visualize the whole picture of what is happening. The true face of the dictatorship is only seen from selected angles. Again, the reader sees “the whites” of its eye, not its murderous center, or “pupil.”

“Every morning [Windisch] cycles alone along the road to the mill,” Müller tells us in the beginning of the book, “Windisch counts the days. In front of the war memorial, he counts the years. By the first poplar tree beyond it, where he always hit the same pothole, he counts the days. And in the evening, when Windisch locks up the mill, he counts the years and the days again. . . . He can see the small white roses, the war memorial, and the poplar tree from far away. And when it is foggy, the white of the roses and the white of the stone is close in front of him and he rides until he’s there.”

Soon, Müller introduces another level of apprehension stirring under the text: gender. The female and her sexuality is a recurrent and persistent theme throughout the novel. The female is both whore and mother, and, like the nature that subsists and endures despite its impoverishment, she is the carrier of seed and sun, bringing regeneration and light to each family’s feelings of despair and discoloration. Müller pedals through the thickets with her own set of wheels, mobilizing and reasserting these themes of gender and the regime’s contempt for women.

“There are women everywhere, ” the night watchman says in the novel, “There are even women in the pond,” And later, he quips: “God knows what they’re for, women. . . . Not for us, not for you. I don’t know what they’re for. . . . And our daughters. . . . God knows, they become women too.” He tells Windisch about the Wachian Baptists in the town and their loose women: “They do it on the carpet in the prayers house. . . . The religion comes from America. . . . That’s across the water. . . . The devil crosses the water, too. They’ve got the devil in their bodies. . . . Yes, the Jews are the ruin of the world. Jews and women.”

The word-pictures Müller paints are often absurdist and surreal, but they reflect too, this genderized world. As the night watchman says:

I dreamt of the dry frog. I was dead tired. And I couldn’t get to sleep. The earth frog was lying in bed. I was talking to my wife. The earth frog looked with my wife’s eyes. It had my wife’s plait. It had her nightshirt on, which had ridden up to the stomach, I said, cover yourself your thighs are flabby. I said it to my wife.

The most dramatic image of the female’s enduring capacity to carry seeds for a generation’s future is illustrated in Müller’s presentation of the “white dahlia,” the flower which has miraculously survived a long, brutal drought.

The dahlia is a vision because it was so dry that summer . . . all the dahlia’s leaves were white and closed up. Its flower was larger than any dahlia can be. And because there was no wind that summer, it didn’t drop off. The dahlia had long breathed its last, yet it couldn’t wither.

The repetition of the color white is also used to express the seductiveness of female sexuality and its spell, despite strong proclamations from the men in the story that the female “deceives” and carries ruin for him. Windisch, as he has sex with his wife, is ensconced in white: “The sheet is white and the bedspread is white. . . . The joiner [Windisch] pulls her into bed by the wrist. He throws his trousers onto the chair. His underpants are stuffed into the trouser legs like a white rag. The woman opens her thighs and bends her knees. Her stomach is made of dough. Her legs are a white window frame on the sheet.”

In contrast, many objects that are withering and deadened are “black,” connoting the male’s impotence, and doom against the odds:

“Charred leaves whirled around, ” Müller writes of the sacristan as he walks in the fields. “There was no wind. The leaves were weightless. They rose to his knees. They fell before his steps. The leaves crumbled. They were soot. . . . He walked along a dusty path into the fields. He could hear the trees from far away. The maize had withered. Leaves broke wherever he went. He felt all the loneliness of his years. His life was transparent. Empty.”

Other colors—blue and green—are also used to connote the gross distortions of nature inflicted by the male dictatorship on the “white” or feminine objects of nature.

“It’s the blue onions,” he [the Soviet night watchman] says. “The Russians cut thin slices off the top of the onions. They sprinkle salt on them. The salt makes the onions open like roses. They give off water. Clear, bright water. They look like water lilies. The Russians hit them with their fists. I’ve seen Russians crush onions under their heels. The women lifted their skirts and knelt on the onions. They turned their knees. We soldiers held the Russian women at the hips and helped them turn.”

As Windisch repeats his habitual patterns, Müller carefully builds to the book’s final revelation. It will be not Windisch by Amalie, his virgin daughter, who will secure passports for her family. And she will achieve this by offering her young sex to the officials for their pleasure-taking. Like the white dahlia, she withers from the compromising of her ethics and soul, but she nonetheless carries the seeds of fertility towards a future, her “petals falling off”, but the source of her power remaining voluptuous.

Through the patterns, the surreal word-pictures, and the myriad roles each object plays in the text, Müller exposes the sexual favors Amalie is forced to provide for the officials in exchange for her family’s passports and freedom. Virtue is compromised, ethics are sullied, and the family only finds release from its existence through Amalie’s sexual yielding to the regime’s cruel will. As Müller herself was able to resist the sadistic reality of the regime by turning it into her writing, so, too, Amalie uses the same tool the regime forced on her—sexuality—to triumph against it.

For Windisch, the sacrifice of his daughter’s virgin self produces a more ambiguous feeling. Though he still believes all women and Amalie will bring sadness to everyone, he also is shown moving out of a greater evil, with his full vision restored.

Windisch puts the passports in his jacket pocket. The train travels slowly, because the rails criss-cross in confusion, because the town is beginning. Scrap heaps. Small houses stand in overgrown gardens. Windisch sees that many rails run into one another. He sees other trains on the confusion of rails. . . . Windisch’s wife stands up. Under her perm, inside her skull, Windisch’s wife had already furnished the new world, into which she is carrying her suitcase . . .

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech this year, Müller asked: “Can we say that it is precisely the smallest objects—be they trumpets, accordions, or handkerchiefs—which connect the most disparate things in life? That the objects are in orbit and that their deviations reveal a pattern of repetition—a vicious circle, or what we call in German a ‘devil’s circle’?” Her answer was that, “We can believe this, but not say it. Still, what can’t be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.”

In The Passport the real truths of the story are revealed only when the “devilish circling” of Müller’s word-pictures finally ceases, and the writer’s repetitive imagistic patterns are exposed, eventually leading the reader to a lucid, shocking perception of what has been happening all along inside the novel’s whirlwind of confusing collages. As we follow Windisch’s plight as he fights to obtain for his family a safe passage back into a recognizable life, we slowly come to understand Müller’s word-pictures and repeated color patterns. All seems to focus into meaning and sense.

Müller’s characters suffer levels of intensity that American writers might express with a language of resolution. A narrative arc, perhaps, in which characters either get what they need or don’t, whose free will is a given and whose acts are unambiguous. The journey Müller shows is not a familiar one to us in the West. The fatalisms of history have not impacted on our consciousness with this amount force, perhaps. Ambiguity is not a comfortable place for American readers. For these reasons, it makes perfect sense that Müller’s writing is virtually unknown here in the States. But I hope her books will be read, mending the great fissure that has divided West and East and has given us a very separate, incomplete vision of what literature can do.

Leora Skolkin-Smith’s first novel, Edges: O Israel, O Palestine, was selected by Grace Paley for Glad Day Books and was a 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee. Her literary criticism has appeared in various publications.

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