Embodying the memory of the silenced dead in Herta müller’s Herztier and Atemschaukel

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of the silenced dead in Herta Müller’s Herztier and Atemschaukel. The starting point is the hypothesis that the figure of the dead serves Müller to claim the importance, according to Thomas W. Laqueur’s assumptions, of “the work of the dead”, for the collective memory of the German-Romanian community of Banat and Romania as a whole. In both novels three key elements of the representation of the memory of the dead in dictatorial and post-dictatorial Romania are analyzed: the precise way of dying, the corporeality of the dead and their relationship with objects, and, finally, the ghostly presence of the dead among the living either through objects or in the form of a dream. The presence of the dead amongst the living in Müller’s universe is not comforting, but difficult, ghostly, and disturbing.