Triplă marginalizare și identitate transnațională: Herta Müller și exportul traumei de la Est la Vest

Abstract

Based on Snejana Ung’s statement that „some of the writers included in this category [of ethnic minorities] are also in exile, among them Herta Müller, which points to an even more complicated form of transnationalism, generated by the overlap between the two groups”, I will analyze Herta Müller’s writing from the perspective of World Literature, taking into account the practice of writing about (semi-)peripherality in a language of world circulation. This paper, therefore, seeks to analyze the export of „communist trauma” from the Romanian (semi-)periphery to the center, namely Germany, and its reception in the West. As a case study, I will address the novel Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel, 2009), focusing in particular on the transnational phenomenon that achieved through the denationalization of the protagonist. This paper is structured in three parts: in the first, part I will discuss Müller’s collaboration with the poet Oskar Pastior for the above-mentioned novel, as well as its post-Nobel reception. In the second part, I propose a contextualization of the concept of Heimat as the central topos in Müllerian writing, whereas in the third part I analyze how the novel’s protagonist, Leo Auberg, is an example of triple marginality due to deportation, disjunction with local ethnocentrism, and non-alignment with the heteronormative ideal.