The Hunger Angel
Author: Herta Müller
Recalling a memory is a personal experience. The sounds, smells, and images have only ever been experienced by you. Over time, repeated recall can alter the memory. Small changes happen based on what’s happening at the time and can wend their way into the next time. Whatever is thought of, at any rate, is a rational experience. You understand what happened, you don’t re-smell cut grass, the smell of cut grass triggers some memory. You don’t re-hear a birdsong, the birdsong reminds you of an early morning in a tent. We have the thought of a previous moment, and we move on with our lives.
Recalling a traumatic memory is very different. For years people have described traumatic events as though they are reliving them. They are visceral and the smallest details re-emerge. New research with fMRI shows that different parts of the brain are active when having a normal memory versus a traumatic one. In a typical memory we use parts of the brain linked to rational thought, but with trauma that part is inactive and only the fight or flight is issued. You actually re-smell that grass and conversely the smell of grass has the chance of sending you back to that moment of trauma.
The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller is about a man recalling his trauma of five years spent surviving in a Soviet work camp following World War II. Each chapter is a different memory, distinctly recalled, decades after the experience.
Leo is a 17 year old ethnically German Romanian (like Müller) at the tail end of World War II when he is taken by the Soviets to a work camp somewhere in Ukraine. The camp’s purpose is to process coal and the prisoners must work in order to be fed, one shovel load = one gram of bread. The work conditions are deadly, several mentions are made of prisoners falling to their deaths into some pit. The relationships with the Russian guards are deadly too, someone could be shot if they get caught walking to the bathroom after curfew and it gets put down as an attempted escape. Starvation permeates the books and defines the relationships of the prisoners. They exchange their shares of bread in the constant hope they will get a better deal, but it is all the same.
The first part of the book Leo is remembering the days when he shoveled for his life, stole and begged from local Russians who were nearly as bad off. Each chapter was a separate event and only loosely connected. His world wasn’t neatly tied together like some fantasy novel, it was choppy and disorienting. Even time wasn’t constant, it went forward and back jumping to the next unhinged memory.
A major change happened when he was working to break up glassy tar and after breathing in all the aerosolized glass shards became reactive to sunlight. He was sent to work in the slag pits and that was his primary task for the rest of his internment.
After five years the prisoners are sent back to Romania, he sees some of them in the real world and none of them want anything to do with one another. Finally he gets married but leaves for Vienna never to return.
Describing the plot of this book is hard because there isn’t one. It is a series of events but just like life there isn’t a story arc. Hunger dominates everything and even consumes the chance for a plot. It happens and that’s all.
Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953, in Nițchidorf, Romania to ethnically German parents as a minority in a totalitarian system. Growing up as part of the German minority in Romania, Müller had a front row seat to the oppression and persecution that would later become central themes in her writing. Her father was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, and her mother was deported to a Soviet labor camp similar to what we see in the Hunger Angel, though she had returned to Romania three years before Herta was born.
Her first book, “Nadirs” (Niederungen) was published in Romania when she was 29, 1982. It began her study of her local people and their suppression under Nicolae Ceaușescu, especially in the region of the Banat. After significant, and almost inevitable, pressure from the government she began to look for an exit and emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 where she proceeded to keep publishing against the oppression of her people and with more of a poetic tint.
In 2009 she was awarded the Nobel Prize being described as “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” The specific drive against an oppressive regime is notable and meritorious but it is the poetic nature of her writing which garnered the award.
Reading “The Hunger Angel” it is not hard to pick up on the poetic nature of her writing. While each chapter is short and mostly disconnected from the others, they hold all the meaning and purpose of an entire story. Just like a poem, the author’s purpose is crafted into words to convey feelings which could never be explicitly communicated. Though it sounds like this is any book of quality, the tactics change from chapter to chapter making each a singular experience making “The Hunger Angel” more a collection of poems than a traditional novel.
The biggest technical standout of the book is the lack of question marks. Even when quoting a question the punctuation is left as a period. When trying to figure it out I asked an AI and it said my copy might have been mis-printed. That’s not the case as the English translator Philip Boehm specifically states that he purposefully left them out of the translation to keep with the original text. I believe that the omitted question marks relate to memory. The narrator knows the answers to the questions as he is living several decades after the question, he knows either the factual answer or the deeper insight that comes with age. He is recalling a memory in the traumatic way and experiencing not actually interacting with anyone, so no question is really being posed. I’m not going to look to see what others have in mind as my foray into AI for answers was a little disappointing. Stick to your own interpretation of art people.
By the end of the novel it was clear that the story was likely based on real events, and Müller wrote in an afterward about working with Oskar Pastior. Pastior was also a German Romanian poet who, like Müller’s mother, was sent to a forced labor camp for five years. They had been talking about his experiences for years and planned on writing a book, but he died in 2006 before it could be written. She proceeded with the book and used his life as the basis for Leo.
I highly recommend “The Hunger Angel” as it was fresh for its plot never being pinned down and you as the reader are dragged into the fight to survive. If her other works are of similar quality Herta Müller definitely deserved the Nobel Prize and I would happily read another, especially one from before she left Romania when the memories are fresh, you should too.