byHERTA MULLER & GABRIEL LIICEANU
Gabriel Liiceanu: Can I suggest we start with the text you have read, Atemschaukel?[1] You say at one point: “but hunger stayed like a dog in front of a bowl and gorged itself”. Being a writer means seeing a relationship between things that nobody else does, capturing a nuance in things that nobody else does, establishing a relationship between them and words in a way nobody else does. To my mind, a writer is a privileged being who manages to name relationships between things in a way nobody else has done before. This is why I am tempted to say that a writer opens up a relationship with the world that did not exist before. He or she is a Vorläufer, a trailblazer. And yet, I get the impression that, on more than one occasion, you have refused to concede that a writer has this exceptional role to play.
Herta Müller: I believe that every person is a unique individual in the world and has a unique relationship with that world. Each and every person. And everything each one of us does we do differently, because we have no other option. You can test that with writers because their job is to write things down – and this is something you can see for yourself and discuss. In the case of other people, things and ideas do not get expressed on the outside so we can’t see them. That’s the difference. I have met so many sensitive people in all walks of life, doing all sorts of jobs, and I have never thought that I am capable of seeing something which these people who do not write cannot. Language, if it is capable of expressing life, is the language of those who do not write, and I have to use their language. If I write their language in a certain way, then I produce what we call literature, poetry, poetic atmosphere.
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