German literature has always had an interesting plethora of writers of very diverse genres, with a preponderance of existentialist narrators, with their natural contextualizations in romantic, realistic, symbolic currents or whatever is appropriate in each historical period.
The Germanic seems to be linked in any genre of fiction or non-fiction with that epistemological point towards the very conception of being.
It may sound deep, and it is. But the virtue of a good writer lies in leaving that residue whatever the narrative field to which it is circumscribed. From Goethe and Schopenhauer, going through Nietzsche and reaching up Hermann Hesse, Günter Grass, or why not Patrick Süskind o Michael Ende.
So analyze the best of Herta Muller It supposes entering into that deep heritage as a wound of the creative from the heart of a Europe subjected to many ups and downs. An inheritance by which writers were compelled to act as chroniclers.
And essentially Herta Müller is a chronicler of intrahistories focused almost always on Romania, with its dark times, its reconciliations and always through the testimony of the people who advance amid so many historical vicissitudes.
Top 3 recommended books by Herta Müller
In lowlands
The discovery of the transcendental writer as a chronicler of a time and a country like Romania and that can finally be extrapolated to any place subjected to authoritarianism.
Nothing better than the vision of a girl to enter a cruel world that at times is sublimated in the overflowing and hopeful imagination of childhood. The worst thing about a dictatorship is the isolation it establishes through fear. It is clear that the diffusion of this work in 1982 was harsh criticism when not directly censured in his country.
The richness of the composition of stories around the experiences of the girl protagonist and the inhabitants of a small Romanian town, silent and loaded with that medium that only children can express, such as the one who saw the naked king, and under whose protection adults become cruel, capable of anything.
The beast of the heart
A highly visual metaphor of fear that transcends emotions and even becomes visceral. The turning point of this story is marked by the death of Lola, who finally succumbs to the miserable oppressive feeling of the dictatorship.
Only that his suicide ends up serving as an incentive for his friends to conspire not to succumb to the beast, without allowing them to nest in them with the same final despair.
From the perspective of young people, all the institutionalized corruption of the Ceaușescu regime is known, with its arbitrariness and its lack of respect for all human rights. Only they, young people can escape the trap of a suffocating status quo.
Fox fur
Everything bad ends at some point. The Ceausescu dictatorship left his country a social, moral and economic wasteland. In this novel we focus on his last days, on the last moments of a dictatorship that was coming to an end. But in the proximity of freedom we find no relief from liberation.
In a continuous sprinkling of scenarios we are presented with the power of the long tentacles of institutionalized fear, made almost a religion.
Some because they glimpse its decline in the shadow and benefit of the regime and others because they do not know what can be done with a life freed from chains. In short, what happened in those days before the end of the political tragedy, nothing seems to point to good feelings, looking more like the slow approach to the abyss of alienated beings.
