The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller

• Born: August 17, 1953
• Birthplace: Nitzkydorf, Banat, Romania

First published:Atemschaukel, 2009 (English translation, 2012)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical

Time of plot: 1945–50; early twenty-first century

Locales: Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania; Novogorlovka, Soviet Union (now Gorlovka, Ukraine)

Principal Characters

Leopold "Leo" Auberg, the narrator; a seventeen-year-old ethnic German who performs forced labor in a Russian camp

Trudi Pelikan, a young blonde woman and a laborer

Paul Gast, a middle-aged German-Romanian lawyer

Heidrun Gast, Gast’s wife

Shishtvanyonov, a Russian commandant in the labor camp

Kobelian, a good-natured Russian truck driver with a crooked mouth

Fenya, a limping Russian woman who doles out the prisoners’ bread ration

Artur "Tur" Prikulitsch, a kapo (prisoner-supervisor) at the labor camp

Beatrice "Bea" Zakel, a prisoner and Tur’s mistress

Oswald Enyeter, a prisoner and the labor camp barber

Karli Halmen, a prisoner who loads and unloads trucks

Albert Gion, a prisoner who shovels slag

Anton Kowatsch, a prisoner who operates a lathe and plays drums in the camp band

Katharina "Kati" Seidel, a feebleminded prisoner

David "Zither" Lommer, a Jewish Moravian prisoner who plays the zither and interprets dreams

The Story

World War II is winding down in Europe. Romania, a former ally of Germany, surrenders in mid-1944 and afterward declares war upon the Nazis. The Red Army arrives in Romania in January 1945. The Soviets demand that ethnic Germans, living primarily in Transylvania, be put to work rebuilding what Hitler destroyed in Russia. Some 150,000 German-Romanian men and women—impressionable seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg among them—are subsequently rounded up. They are loaded aboard cattle cars, reminiscent of the way that the Nazis transported Jews for extermination, and are sent east into Russia to serve as forced laborers for five years at various facilities.

After two difficult weeks of travel, Leo and his fellow prisoners disembark at a bleak camp surrounding a factory where coke (a by-product of burned coal and an efficient fuel to create steel) is produced. Leo becomes laborer number 756, part of a five-hundred-person work battalion. He works from dawn to dusk at different tasks as ordered: He shovels sand or coal, removes wartime rubble, cleans up hot slag from the coke oven, and digs potatoes with his bare hands.

Conditions at the camp are soul shattering. Laborers daily suffer from a combination of guard maltreatment and indifference; a harsh climate that in a long-lasting winter claims fingers, toes, and ears to frostbite; and pervasive starvation, which is portrayed as a living presence—a "hunger angel" with the power to succor or release the oppressed. Because the entire experience, which is based on true events from the life of the author’s mother, is too overwhelming to contemplate as a whole, narrator Leo breaks the story down into digestible vignettes that are portraits of fellow humans and matter-of-fact descriptions of small incidents that typify what laborers endure or succumb to during their incarceration. Leo himself alternates between hope (clinging to his grandmother’s parting statement that she knows he will return and trading meager possessions for food) and utter despair. He is particularly troubled halfway through his sentence when he receives a postcard from his mother announcing the birth of her new son, Robert. Leo interprets the brusque message as his mother’s way of telling him that he has been replaced in her heart and that it no longer matters whether he survives to come back home.

Male and female prisoners—thanks to baggy clothing too thin to provide warmth in bone-chilling winters, close-cropped hair due to lice infestations, and a uniform gaunt appearance from common malnutrition—soon begin to look and smell alike. The character of many in the camp changes as a result of the working and living conditions there, and many of the laborers give up and give in to death. A woman prisoner assigned to load mortar, for example, dives into a pit in order to drown herself in liquid cement. A prisoner-mechanic poisons himself by drinking alcohol distilled from coal.

Those individuals who choose to fight for life does so in despicable ways: Paul Gast, who was once a respected attorney, notices his wife Heidrun has ceased to care whether she lives or dies. After he eats her soup to hasten her death, he uses Heidrun’s coat to bribe another woman for sexual favors. Karli Halmen, who works with Leo loading and unloading trucks, commits an unforgivable sin by stealing bread from another laborer. After an angry mob savagely beats and urinates on him, his crime is forgotten and life goes on as usual. Tur Prikulitsch, who treats fellow prisoners with subtle cruelty and uses his power to take advantage of others, pays for his actions: after his release he is found savagely murdered with an axe.

Finally, the five-year sentence is completed, and the prisoners return home. Leo is mentally and physically scarred and finds it impossible to adjust to normal routines. Over the next sixty years, he marries, divorces, and eventually prefers to live alone in order to write about his experiences and wait for the hunger angel to carry him away.

Bibliography

Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. New York: Anchor, 2013. Print.

Barnes, Steven A. Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.

Brandt, Bettina, and Valentina Glajar, eds. Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. Print.

Dallin, David J., and Boris I. Nicolaevsky. Forced Labor in Soviet Russia. 1947. New York: Octagon, 1974. Print.

Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Print.