“Do you have a handkerchief?” was the question Herta Müller’s mother asked her every day before she left the house. Hardened by five years in a Soviet labor camp, her mother rarely showed affection. “Love disguised itself as a question. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work,” Müller said in her speech after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009.
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceauşescu’s Romania, Herta Müller, trans. Kate McNaughton, Pegasus Books, 256 pp., $29.95, May 2026
For Müller, a novelist who lived under Romania’s brutal communist dictatorship, a handkerchief is never just a handkerchief. When a man drops dead in a city street, a handkerchief is the “wordless condolence” of passersby used to cover up his face. A handkerchief is a “piece of private property” she places on the office stairs to mark her new workstation after being forced out of her desk for political reasons. It is a flickering symbol of dignity and care amid decades of darkness.
In her moving new memoir, The Village at the End of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceaușescu’s Romania, translated from the German by Kate McNaughton, Müller addresses many of the same themes that surface throughout her novels: authoritarianism, censorship, deprivation, and persecution. But where Müller’s fiction lyrically reflects on discrete moments in her or her family’s history, the memoir provides a visceral and more complete depiction of life under tyranny, and shows how art can serve as a means of both survival and commemoration.
Müller’s elementary school diploma is shown in Nitzkydorf, Romania, on Oct. 8, 2009. Adrian Paclisan/AFP via Getty Images
Müller was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a village in western Romania populated by Banat Swabians, an ethnic German minority that had migrated to the area in the 18th century. “It stood there as it always had, over the course of its dreary three hundred years,” Müller writes of the village. “[B]ut in reality it had long been pulled off its hinges by the catastrophes of history.”
Those catastrophes had taken the form of war and dictatorship. Müller’s grandfather served in World War I, while her father fought for the Nazi SS in World War II. Romania, run by a fascist dictatorship, was an ally of Nazi Germany until August 1944, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews in its own territory. But the Communist Party that took power after the war denied Romania’s role in the Holocaust and placed much of the blame for fascist crimes on the country’s small German minority.
The communists confiscated the Müller family’s property, and Müller’s father returned home an unrepentant Nazi, singing SS songs with his buddies in the village when they’d had too much to drink. Her mother, then aged 17, was sent to a Soviet labor camp at the end of the war, as were many other ethnic German civilians. “I often thought that my mother had to go to the Russian labour camp because of my parents’ collective guilt,” she writes. “[H]ow absurdly is the great sweep of history reflected as guilt and punishment in a single married couple.”
Müller’s mother rarely spoke of the camps, which Müller depicts in her 2009 novel The Hunger Angel. But the experience imprinted itself on her mother. Her teeth were destroyed by malnutrition and so she wore dentures from a young age. She was a woman in motion, never capable of stopping work lest she be confronted with what she had endured. “Drudgery was a means of retaining order, of keeping a hold on life,” Müller writes.
Müller left the village in her teens to study in a nearby city. After university, she fell in with a group of German-language writers and artists known as the Aktionsgruppe Banat, which brought her to the attention of the Romanian secret police, known as the Securitate. An estimated 700,000 people—out of a population of just 22 million—were informants to this sprawling surveillance apparatus, spying on their friends and colleagues for the regime. The secret police approached Müller at the tractor and wire mesh factory where she worked, asking her to do their bidding.
A horse pulls a cart along the road in Nitzkydorf, Müller’s hometown, on Oct. 8, 2009. AP
With the simple phrase, “It’s not in my nature,” Müller refused the assignment, and her life changed forever. Within days, her colleagues at the factory turned on her, ousting her from the office where she worked as a translator. Hoping she would leave of her own accord, they refused to fire her, and for weeks she did her work while sitting on the office stairs.
Eventually she was forced out of the factory. Penniless, she drifted between part-time jobs, each one lasting just a few months before the secret police caught up with her, forcing her employers to drop her. Without her mother bringing her food from the village, she says, she would have starved. She spent her days being tailed by agents and subjected to prolonged, humiliating interrogations by the secret police, who accused her of everything from parasitism and prostitution to bootlegging.
Müller started writing fiction at this time. Through imagery and metaphor, she attempted to create a firmer reality than the one she was living in. During interrogations, she took note of every detail of her persecutor, from fingernails like “pumpkin seeds” to the soft, hairless slice of calf visible above his trouser leg. While walking around the city, sleep-deprived by stress, she watched others with obsessive vigilance so that she could write down images later: birth marks became pebbles, walking sticks became vanilla pods. “[T]he best distraction is precise observation,” Müller writes. “The details grow so big that the whole disappears into them.”
Müller’s fiction reflects this process. The Land of Green Plums, which is set in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, redounds with shimmering imagery that emerges from the narrator’s childhood fantasies or village adages. Trams rattle by “like a box of matches.” Instead of standing still, the wind “lie[s] down in the trees” at night. Factories spew out useless goods: “tin sheep” and “wooden melons.” In The Hunger Angel, the deprivation of the camps is given powerful physical form: “When you can no longer bear the hunger, your whole head is racked with pain, as though the pelt from a freshly skinned hare were being stretched out to dry inside.”
Müller does not romanticize the repression that gave rise to her art: Her memories are unclouded by nostalgia and clear-eyed about the horrors of the communist regime. While her friends, bound together by common artistic and political goals, were a sanctuary, she also watched many of them break under pressure, driven to alcoholism or suicide. She was relieved to learn later that most of her friends had not been informants, but writes movingly about being betrayed by her closest female friend, who was suffering from terminal cancer at the time.
Still, Müller makes a powerful case for art as a means of survival. “I desperately needed the beauty of these sentences because I was writing in order to find something to hold on to in the face of misery, not because I wanted to create ‘literature,’” she writes.
-
A man in a dark suit with medals pinned to his jacket, standing at a podium with microphones. He is holding his hand up near his forehead while speaking. - Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu puts his hand to his forehead as he speaks in Bucharest on Nov. 20, 1989. Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty Images
-
A crowd of people outdoors. In the center, a man in a blue sweater and a brown leather hat is looking forward with a tearful expression while raising both of his hands in V signs. - A man stabs the air with victory signs and shouts “Ceausescu dictator!” in the street in Bucharest during the revolution of December 1989. Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
Although Müller fled Romania for West Germany in 1987, it’s clear that for her, art continues to serve as a way of grappling with the horrors of the past, collectively forgotten by both her ethnic German compatriots and many Romanians.
Throughout her memoir, Müller condemns modern-day Romania for failing to reconcile with its history. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were summarily executed by a military court in December 1989. But in that same month, more than 1,000 protesters were killed in the lead-up to the execution, making Romania an outlier among the largely peaceful democratic transitions in the region. Other former Soviet bloc countries took steps—sometimes controversial—to expunge their pasts: In the Czech Republic and Poland, “lustration” facilitated the removal of former communist officials from public life; in Germany, the Stasi archives were famously opened to the public to allow for a historical reckoning.
Romania chose a different path. The state has largely swept its repressive history, under both communism and the fascist regime before it, under the rug. Security service dossiers were only made widely accessible to the public after 2001. Even then, as Müller describes with regard to her own file, much of the information in them has been lost or expunged, including the names of informants or security agents, providing little hope of holding to account those who propped up the regime.
Top bureaucrats from the former Communist Party and the Securitate continue to play an outsized role in Romanian politics. Ion Iliescu, Romania’s first post-communist president, was a high-ranking official under Ceausescu; after three terms in office, he was belatedly indicted for his alleged role in the deaths of protesters during the December 1989 revolt, but the trial didn’t get off the ground before his death in 2025. In 2019, a Romanian court found that another president, who was in power from 2004 to 2014, had been an informant for the Securitate during communist times.
The Romanian Security Service (SRI), the successor to the Securitate, maintains significant influence in the country and at times has run widespread wiretapping and surveillance operations domestically. Attempts to hold former Securitate agents responsible for past abuses, including for serious violations such as death from torture, have resulted in acquittals. As Müller alleges, many of the Securitate were absorbed into the SRI after communism’s collapse; others have gone on to become influential businessmen. As far as Müller is aware, her Securitate handler returned to his native province “in the guise of an innocent old-age pensioner,” never to face judgment.
Collective forgetting also plagues Romania’s treatment of the Holocaust. In 2024, a right-wing populist named Calin Georgescu unexpectedly topped the ballot in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. Georgescu has called the fascist leaders of Romania, who were responsible for the murder of Jews in World War II, “martyrs” who carried out “good deeds.” The election was abruptly canceled by Romania’s Constitutional Court on the grounds that Georgescu received significant financial and social media support from an outside actor, presumed to be Russia. He was banned from running in the rescheduled vote in May 2025.
Müller poses outside a Paris bookstore where a poster announces the launch of her first novel in 1988. Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
While Müller has not lived in Romania for decades—along with tens of thousands of other ethnic Germans who fled the country during communism’s collapse—her memoir reminds us of the perils of collective forgetting, whether it be the crimes of her Nazi father or of her Romanian persecutors. Müller’s art helped her endure the darkest parts of Romania’s history while ensuring they aren’t forgotten by others.
For Müller, the past is not a foreign country. “After all, I don’t say to myself: I’m going to have a think about the past now,” she writes. “The present is laced with the past, so that the past is part of our present time.”
