Writers 1-2: Hertha Mueller: Freedom and Poverty

A wisp of cloud. Hertha could not remember the second line. She was unsure why she forgot. Was it the presence of the only two friends she could trust that could not be her friends. Was it the admission of their false friendship that she could not bear. She felt tears wanted to flow out of her, but her eyes remained dry. Tears of what, she couldn't decide. The soot mascara. The belt-less dress. The patent stocking. The Swabian smile of an SS man. The wind was dry like her eyes. Her lips did not move, perhaps out of fear of admission. Three men smoked a cigarette on the corner of the street. Hertha did not know if constant fear was terrifying. Words. Her tongue could not even move on the sound of words any more, yet the words existed. Hertha recited the poem to herself in silence. Perhaps it was the poverty that depressed her. The lack of meat. A belt. A belt to hang her self in the closet, like Lola. But all she had were words. Words like a wisp of cloud. Lola had had men like words, but men were like friends you could not have. She turned the corner, entered a court yard. Windows without eyes, only curtains like souls. Hertha sat down on a bench under the plum tree. She looked up at the square of sky above her. It was Spring, but Hertha was cold without a coat, like windows without eyes. She clasped a key in her hand, a key without a home. She missed a home, a home with a plume tree, a closet with dresses, a belt like Lola.

Writers 1-1: Hertha Mueller: Ego, Base and Superstructure

Hertha Mueller leafed through the German language manual of a rotary offset printing press. She had never seen the actual model press with her own eyes but only had an impression of the machine from the drawings in the manual. The director of the factory in accordance with a directive from the regional Securitate commissioner had assigned her to translate machine manuals for printing presses. Hertha loathed her work in the factory, even if she was placed in the offices, where she shared a room with two secretaries, one of whom was a snitch for the Securitate. Hertha instinctively felt misplaced around the smell of lubrication grease and human sweat, the boisterous rattle of machinery and the raised voices of holler and commands, all penetrating the office through the cracks, between the frames and the broken glass in the windows. She often thought of her years studying German and Romanian literature. Quietly, she sat tucked away for hours at the end of an isle between two bookshelves, in the university library. Above her the sparse light entered through a tiny broken basement window. She thought of Gretchen's release in Faust, as Mephistopheles shouts 'she is now doomed,' and as she waited for the echoes from heaven, it remained silent but for the hammering and pounding of machinery.