“Reden ist Silber, Schweigen ist Gold”: German as a Site of Fascist Nostalgia and Romanian as the Language of Dictatorship in the Work of Herta Müller

Summary

Throughout Her Oeuvre Herta Müller has returned to the question of language: its insufficiency, its power, its potential to surprise, its personal significance to her, and how as an author she makes use of it. She has also often discussed language in historical context, examining the use of language in the Ceauşescu regime and the abuse of language as a means of manipulation by political leaders more generally. Through her fiction and non-fiction writing a picture develops of Müller as someone who is deeply suspicious of language but at the same time uses it to great effect, and for whom language has provided a means of liberation. I will bring together Müller’s relationship with German and with Romanian against the backdrop of established discourses of postwar German Sprachkritik in order to draw conclusions about her attitude regarding language’s potential to be damaged by dictatorial regimes. With reference to both representations of language use within the Banat-Swabian community of Müller’s childhood and the author’s claims regarding her relationship with Romanian I will argue that, although interested in the idea of language tainting, Müller does not go so far as to suggest that the contamination of language by ideology inhibits free expression, instead demonstrating that the historical associations of language add to its impact and meaning-creating potential. Unlike members of Gruppe 47, who tried to escape from the connotations of the past through their use of language, Müller embraces the difficult relationship between language and memory as something fundamental to her creative approach.

The practice of analyzing language for its ideological content and identifying ways in which regimes manage their own linguistic activity and that of their citizens is well established within German literature and cultural criticism. Since the early postwar period writers and cultural theorists as well as linguists have tried to quantify the extent to which the German language was “tainted” by the National Socialist regime. Some authors, including members of Gruppe 47, tried to use language in a new way, resorting to absolute simplicity of expression in an attempt to escape the shades of associated meaning created by the Nazis’ abuse of German. Like many other more recent German writers Herta Müller displays a suspicion towards that which can be read as part of this postwar trend towards Sprachkritik. However, Müller grew up in a regime where another language, Romanian, was the language of a dictatorship.