Niederungen by Herta Müller: a critical approach to the scars of an unbreathable childhood

Abstract

Through the look and narrative voice of a Romanian girl, the writer Herta Müller brings us closer with her first work – Niederungen (En tierras bajas) - to the still living scars of her own childhood in a small village in the region of Timisoara at the time of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. This article attempts a critical approach to the recurring theme focused on the complaint of the country left behind by the author after her own experience of exile to West Germany in 1987. A critical analysis of this first work written by Müller in the German language brings us closer to her intercultural literature. The high quality of the literary production of this German-Romanian migrant writer was finally awarded in 2009 with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Keywords

• literatura migrante
• exilio
• interculturalidad
• dictadura
• memoria
• Herta Müller.