Herta Müller was born in Nițchidorf, Romania and has lived in Berlin as a writer since 1987. Her debut work Nadirs was published in a censored version in Romania in 1982 and uncensored in Germany in 1986. Other novels by her include The Land of Green Plums (1996) and The Hunger Angel of 2012.
Sometimes words do what they want, and no one knows this better than Herta Müller. For decades the Nobel Laureate for Literature has explored the recalcitrance and permeability of language. In the coming edition of the talk series Dictionary of Now, together with the writer Marcel Beyer, she discusses when language becomes an expression of resistance and when an instrument of the exercise of power. On this occasion, we reproduce here a text from an anthology of the literary magazine Akzente. To article...
