Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, and was described by the Nobel Foundation, as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”
Every once in a while I challenge writing a memoir but it is so overwhelming on so many counts – I can’t even speak to what memory, identity and how to entwine the two really means. Which is why I am sometimes stunned and shocked by a writer like Herta Müller and her Nobel Prize winning The Hunger Angel. To complicate things further the book is a novel and not a memoir per se but it reads like a memoir and when you read of its making, you see why:
By the summer of 1944 the Red Army had advanced deep inside Romania; the Fascist dictatorship was overthrown, and its leader, Ion Antonescu, Was arrested and later executed. Romania surrendered and in a surprise move declared war on its former ally, Nazi Germany. In January 1945 the Soviet general Vinogradov presented a demand in Stalin’s name that all Germans living in Romania be mobilized for “rebuilding” the war-damaged Soviet Union. All men and women between seventeen and forty-five years of age were deported to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union.
My mother, too, spent five years in a labor camp.
The deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania’s Fascist past. Those who had been in the camp never spoke of their experiences except at home or with close acquaintances who had also been deported, and then only indirectly. My childhood was accompanied by such stealthy conversations; at the time I didn’t understand their content, but I did sense the fear.
In 2001, I began having conversations with former deportees from my village. I knew that the poet Oskar Pastior had been deported, and I told him I wanted to write a book on the subject. He offered to help me with his recollections. We began to meet regularly; he talked, and I wrote down what he said, We soon found ourselves wanting to write the book together.
When Oskar Pastior died so suddenly in 2006, I had four – notebooks of handwritten notes, in addition to drafts of several chapters. After his death I felt paralyzed. His close presence in the notes made the loss even greater.
A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone. But without Oskar Pastior’s details about everyday life in the camp I could not have done it.
So I thought to myself, maybe I can find a poet who lived many elements of my life and get him to write about it. It certainly was a success for Ms. Müller as you can see in the following as she follows her fictional character, 17 year old Leo Auberg and his struggles at a labor camp in the Soviet Union. There is this combination of poetic intensity and detachment as The Hunger Angel sharpens Leo’s senses into an acuity that is profound as it makes his soul’s journey. The prose is addictive. It drags you in and forces you to confront a reality that millions in the world’s gulags and labor camps live today.
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None of the underclothes they issued us had buttons. The undershirts and the long underpants each had two small ties. The pillowcases had two sets of ties. By night the pillowcase was a pillowcase. By day it was a canvas sack you carried with you for whatever might come your way, also for stealing and begging.
We stole before, during, and after work, though never while begging — which we referred to as going door-to-door — and never from a neighbor in the barrack. Nor was it stealing when on the way home after work we combed the rubble heaps, picking weeds until our pillow was full. As early as March the women from the country spotted the edible orach with the serrated leaves they called MELDE. Here it was called LOBODA. We also picked wild dill, a kind of grass with feathery leaves.
But none of it was any good unless you had salt. And you could only get salt by bartering at the market. The salt was gray and coarse like gravel, you had to break it up. Salt was worth a fortune. We had two recipes for orach: Salt the leaves and tear the wild dill into tiny bits and sprinkle on top and eat raw, like field greens. Or else boil the stems whole, in salt water. Fished out of the pot with a spoon, orach stems make a delightful mock spinach. The broth can also be drunk, either as a clear soup or a green tea.
Spring orach is tender, the whole plant finger-high and silver-green. By early summer it’s knee-high and the leaves are splayed. Each leaf can look like a different glove, always with the thumb pointing down. When silvery green like that, the orach is a cool plant, a food for spring. You have to watch out in summer, though, because it quickly grows tall and dense, with hard, woody stems. Then it tastes bitter, like loam. Eventually the plant forms a thick middle stalk that reaches up to your waist, and spreads out into a loose shrub. And by midsummer the leaves and stems start to take on color: first pink, then blood-red, later a reddish purple, and in the fall a deep indigo. Each stem develops clusters of flowers, just like stinging nettle. But the orach clusters don’t hang, they stick out, angled upward. They, too, turn from pink to indigo.
It’s strange: the orach isn’t really beautiful until it begins to change color, long after it ceases to be edible. Then the plant lingers along the wayside, protected by its beauty. The time for eating orach is over. But not the hunger, which is always greater than we are.
What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there’s a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you’re hungry. If you can’t think of anything else. Your mouth begins to expand, its roof rises to the top of your skull, all senses alert for food. 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. Your cheeks wither and get covered with pale fur.
I never knew whether the orach should be reproached for being inedible, for turning woody and refusing to cooperate. Did the plant know that it no longer served us and our hunger, but rather the hunger angel. The red flower clusters were jeweled ornaments around the neck of the hunger angel.
From the first frost in early autumn, the orach put on more and more jewelry, until it froze to death. Poisonously beautiful colors that stabbed our eyes. The clusters, countless rows of red necklaces along every wayside, adorned the hunger angel. He had his jewels. And we had our mouths, which had grown so high and hollow that our steps echoed inside. A bright void in the skull, as if we’d swallowed too much glaring light. A light that sweetly creeps up your throat and swells and rises to your brain.
Until you no longer have a brain inside your head, only the hunger echo. No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.
I looked at the orach that could no longer be eaten and tried to think about something else — about the last tired warmth of late summer, before the ice-winter came. But instead I thought about the potatoes we didn’t have. And about the women who lived on the kolkhoz who probably did have potatoes in their daily cabbage soup. Though apart from that, no one envied them. They lived in holes in the earth and had to work much longer every day than we did: from dawn to dusk.
Springtime in the camp was the season for cooking orach picked off the rubble heap. The German name MELDE sounded as if it meant more than it did. In fact, MELDE was for us a word without any overtone, a word that left us in peace. It wasn’t the MELDE DICH — present yourself — of roll call. This MELDE wasn’t a roll-call weed, but a wayside word. If anything, it was a word for after evening roll call, an after-roll-call weed. Because we couldn’t cook our orach until we had been counted, and that took forever because the numbers never came out right.
There were five work battalions, or ORBs — Otdyel niy Rabochiy Batal’on — in our camp, each consisting of between five hundred and eight hundred internees. I was assigned to battalion number 1009, and my work number was 756.
For the Appell, or roll call, we stood in rank and file — what an expression for those five miserable regiments of swollen eyes, large noses, hollow cheeks. Our stomachs and legs were distended from the brown bog water. In freezing cold or searing heat, we spent entire evenings standing at attention. Only the lice were allowed to move. During the endless counting they could drink their fill, parade across our miserable flesh, crawl over us from head to pubic hair for hours on end. And after they were sated and resting in the seams of our quilted work clothes, we’d still be standing at attention. And Shishtvanyonov, our camp commandant, would still be screaming. We didn’t know his first name. He was simply Tovarishch Shishtvanyonov. But that was long enough to make you stammer with fear whenever you said it. For me the sound always conjured the rumble of the deportation locomotive. And the white alcove in the church at home, HEAVEN SETS TIME IN MOTION. Perhaps we had to stand so long to stop the time in motion. Our bones became heavy as iron. When the flesh on your body disappears, your bones become a burden, and the ground pulls you downward.
I practiced forgetting myself during roll call, to the point where I couldn’t tell breathing out from breathing in. I practiced rolling my eyes up without lifting my head, to look for a corner of cloud where I might hang my bones. If I was able to forget myself, and found the heavenly hook, it held on to me. But often there was no cloud, only blue sky, like open water.
Often there was nothing but an unbroken cover of clouds, a uniform gray.
Often the clouds were running, and no hook could hold fast.
Often the rain burned my eyes and glued my clothes to my skin.
Often the frost bit into my entrails.
On days like that the sky lifted my eyes up, and the roll call pulled them down — then my bones just hung inside me, with nothing to hold on to.
The kapo, Tur Prikulitsch, strutted back and forth between us and Commandant Shishtvanyonov, his lists slipping out of his hands, dog-eared from constant leafing. Every time he called out a number, his chest wobbled like a rooster’s. His hands were still a child’s. My hands grew in the camp: square, hard, and flat, like two boards.
If someone screwed up his courage after roll call and asked one of the nachal’niks, or even Commandant Shishtvanyonov, when we would be going home, they would say curtly: SKORO — soon.
This Russian SOON robbed us of the longest time in the world.
Tur Prikulitsch had Oswald Enyeter, the barber, trim his nose hairs and fingernails. The two men came from the same region, near Rachiv in the Carpatho-Ukraine, where three lands meet. I asked if it was customary in that part of the world for barbers to trim the nails of their better clients. The barber said: No, it’s not. That comes from Tur, not from home. What’s from home is five coming after nine. What do you mean, I asked. That things are a little balamuc. What’s that, I asked. All mixed up, like a madhouse.
Tur Prikulitsch spoke Russian as well as German. He wasn’t Russian like Shishtvanyonov, nonetheless he belonged to the Russians, not to us. He was interned along with us, but he was the adjutant of the camp administration. He translated the Russian commands and added his own in German. He divided us into work battalions on a sheet of paper, assigning each name and work number to a specific battalion. That way he had an overview of everything. Each of us had to know his number day and night and never forget that we were not private individuals but numbered laborers.
In the columns next to our names Tur Prikulitsch wrote: kolkhoz, factory, rubble removal, sand transport, rail segment, construction, coal transport, garage, coke battery, slag cellar. Everything depended on what he wrote in that column. Whether we would end up tired, dog tired, or dead tired. Whether we would have time and energy to go door-to-door after work. Whether we’d be able to rummage around in the kitchen waste behind the mess hall unnoticed.
Tur Prikulitsch himself never went to work, never had to report to any battalion or brigade or shift. He ruled and was therefore alert and disparaging. When he smiled it was a trap. When you returned his smile — and everyone had to — you• felt you were his fool. Tur Prikulitsch smiles because he’s entered something in the column next to your name, some new and worse assignment. Between the barracks, along the main street of the camp, I avoid him, preferring to keep enough distance to make speaking impossible. He lifts his legs high when he walks and carefully places his shiny shoes on the ground like two patent-leather purses, as if the empty time were dropping out of him, right through his soles. He notices everything. People say that even what he forgets becomes an order.
At the barber’s I’m no match for Tur Prikulitsch. He says whatever he wants, there’s no risk. It’s in his interest to insult us. He knows he has to keep us in our place, so things stay the• way they are. He stretches out his neck and always talks down to us. He has the whole day to admire himself.
I admire him as well: he’s athletically built, with brass-colored eyes and an oily gaze, small ears that lie flat like two brooches a porcelain chin, nostrils pink like tobacco flowers, a neck like candle wax. He’s fortunate that he never has to get dirty. And this good fortune makes him more attractive than he deserves to be. He doesn’t know the hunger angel, so he can give commands at roll call, strut around the camp, smile cunningly in the barber room. But he can’t take part in our conversation. I know more about Tur Prikulitsch than he would like, because I know Bea Zakel well. She is his mistress.
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can’t understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat — coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that’s caught a cold.
While everyone else was suffering at attention during the evening roll call, the shift workers who didn’t have to be counted tended their orach or other delicacies over little fires — built with coal between two bricks — in the corner of the camp behind the well. Beets, potatoes, even millet, if a clever barter had paid off — ten beets for a jacket, three measures of millet For a sweater, half a measure of sugar or salt for a pair of woolen socks.
For a special meal the pot needed to be covered, but there weren’t any lids. At best a piece of tin, and even that might exist more in the mind than anywhere else. But however they did it, people always managed to create a lid out of something. And even though it was never really a lid except in words, they kept repeating: That pot needs a lid. Perhaps memory has put a lid on itself when you can no longer say what the lid was made of, and when there was never but always a lid, no matter where it came from.
In any case, as evening fell, some fifteen to twenty little fires flickered in the corner of the camp behind the well. The rest of us had no food except what was served in the mess hall, nothing to cook on our own. The coal smoked, and the cooks watched their pots, spoon in hand. The pots came from the mess hall, pitiful mess kits of local manufacture. Gray-brown enameled tin dishes full of pockmarks and dents. On the fire in the yard they were pots, and on the tables in the mess hall they were bowls. As soon as one person finished cooking his meal, other people with pots were waiting to take over the fire.
When I had nothing to cook, the smoke snaked through my mouth. I drew in my tongue and chewed on nothing. I swallowed my spit with the evening smoke and thought about bratwurst. When I had nothing to cook, I walked close to the pots and pretended I was on my way to brush my teeth at the well before going to bed. But by the time I put the toothbrush in my mouth I’d already eaten twice.
First I ate the yellow fire with the hunger of my eyes and then the smoke with the hunger of my mouth. As I ate, everything around me went still, all I could hear was the rumble of the coke ovens from the factory yard. The faster I tried to leave the well, the slower I went. I had to tear myself away from the little fires. In the rumble of the coke ovens I heard my stomach growling, the whole scene was filled with hunger. The sky sank black onto the earth, and I staggered back to the yellow light of the barrack.
You didn’t need toothpaste to brush your teeth. The toothpaste from home was quickly gone. And salt was far too valuable, no one would have spit that out, it was worth a fortune. I can remember the salt, and how much it was worth. But I can’t remember my toothbrush at all. I had one in my toilet kit. But that couldn’t have lasted four years. And I wouldn’t have been able to buy a new one until the fifth and last year, when we were given some money, cash for our work. In any case, I can’t remember a new toothbrush, if there was one. Perhaps I preferred to spend my money on new clothes instead of a new toothbrush. I’m sure that the first toothpaste, the one I took from home, was called CHLORODONT. The name wants to be remembered. But I’ve forgotten the brushes — the one I must have taken from home and the one that probably replaced that one. The same with my comb. I’m sure I had one. I can remember the word BAKELITE. At the end of the war, all the combs we had at home were made of Bakelite.
Can it be that I forgot the things I brought from home sooner than I forgot the things I acquired in the camp. And if so, is that because they traveled with me. Is it because they were my own and therefore I didn’t give them any more thought, just went on using them until they were used up, and even longer. As though with them I was at home and not somewhere else. Can it be that I remember the objects that belonged to others better because I had to borrow them.
I definitely remember the aluminum combs. They came during the time of lice. The lathe operators and metalworkers made them in the factory and gave them to the women. They had jagged teeth and felt moist in your hand and on your scalp, because they were cold to the touch. When you worked with them they quickly took on your body warmth, and they smelled bitter, like radish. Their smell clung to your hand long after you’d put down the comb. The aluminum combs made nests in your hair, you had to tug and pull. They caught more hair in their teeth than lice.
But for lice there were also square horn combs with teeth on both sides. The village girls had brought them from home. On one side thick teeth for parting the hair, on the other fine teeth for nits. The horn combs were solid and heavy in the hand. Your hair didn’t catch in the teeth, it came out sleek and smooth. You could borrow the horn combs from the village girls.
For sixty years now, at night I try to recall the objects from the camp: the things I carry in my night-suitcase. Ever since I came back, the sleepless night is a suitcase made of black leather. And the suitcase is lodged in my forehead. For sixty years now I don’t know if I can’t sleep because I’m trying to recall the objects, or whether I struggle to recall them because I can’t sleep. One way or the other, the night always packs its black suitcase against my will. And it’s against my will that I have to remember. And even if I didn’t have to, but wanted to, I’d rather not have to want to.
Occasionally the objects from the camp attack me, not one at a time, but in a pack. Then I know they’re not—or not only—after my memory, but that they want to torment me. Scarcely do I remember that I had brought along some sewing things in my toilet kit than a towel barges in, a towel whose appearance I no longer remember.
And then comes a nail brush I’m not sure I had. A pocket mirror that was either there or not. And a watch I may have taken with me, but I can’t remember what became of it. I’m pursued by objects that may have had nothing to do with me. They want to deport me during the night, fetch me home to the camp. Because they come in a pack, there isn’t room enough in my head. I feel pressure in my stomach rising to the roof of my mouth. My breath teeters over, I have to pant. A toothcombneedlescissormirrorbrush is a monster, just as hunger is a monster. And these objects would not gang up on me if hunger were not one of them.
When the objects gang up on me at night, choking me, I fling open the window and hold my head out in the fresh air. A moon is in the sky like a glass of cold milk, it rinses my eyes. My breath again finds its rhythm. I swallow the cold air until I’m no longer in the camp. Then I close the window and lie back down. The bedding knows nothing and warms me. The air in the room looks at me and smells of warm flour.
Eros and Agape – Roger Scruton
May 4, 2012Roger Scruton
In a once widely read book, Eros and Agape, the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren made a radical distinction between erotic love, which is motivated by its object, and the Christian love commended by St Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, which is motivated by God. Greek distinguishes the two as eros and agape, we as romantic love and neighbor-love. And a great change came over the world, in Nygren’s view, when agape replaced Eros, as the raw material for the love of God.
In Plato eros arises in a god-like way — that is to say, as an external and invading force, which overwhelms the psyche. But it ascends like a fire, and carries the subject heavenward, to the realm of the forms which is the kingdom of God. St Paul, by contrast, emphasizes agape, which comes to us from God, rather than raising us to him. The downward turning love of the almighty fills us with gratitude, and we reciprocate by spreading it outwards to our neighbors here on earth.
It would certainly be a mistake to confound eros and agape. Sexual love is not in itself a benefit conferred on the target: it may well be an affliction. Sexual love desires to possess, and usually to possess exclusively — or at least with an alert distrust of rivals. Sexual love can be cruel and full of anger; it has an ambivalent relation to moral virtue, and in certain forms — such as that described by Jean Genet in Le Journal du voleur and Notre Dame des fleurs – is inspired and excited by vice. It makes massive and unfair discriminations between the beautiful and the ugly, the strong and the weak, the young and the old. It is jealous, and cannot rejoice in the good things given by a rival.
A person can murder the object of erotic love as Othello did, and when people fall in love they are aware that they are embarking on a path that is as much a threat to the social order as a natural fruit of it. Hence lovers are furtive; they conceal their feelings, knowing that the world is as likely to be angered as pleased by the sight of their attachment. [Schopenhauer makes much of this point in the essay on sexual love, in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2.]
None of those things is true of agape (charity), and no society could be founded on erotic love as a society might be founded on the love of neighbor. Hence eros is a danger: it is a force that undermines trust as much as it builds trust, and the greatest danger is that it might become detached entirely from inter-personal relations and returned to its animal origins. This is what Plato feared, and why he developed his theory of what we now know as Platonic love — maybe the most influential psychological theory in history. For Plato the physical urge must be overcome, so that the desire directed to the beautiful boy can be redirected to its proper object, which is the form of the beautiful itself.
Plato’s mistake was to think that normal sexual desire is directed towards the beautiful body, rather than towards the embodied subject. The solution to the problem of desire is not to overcome it, but to ensure that it retains its personal focus. A society based on agape alone is all very well, but it will not reproduce itself: nor will it produce the crucial relation — that between parent and child — which is the basis on which we can begin to understand our relation to God.
Hence the redemption of the erotic lies at the heart of every viable social order — a fact well understood by traditional religions, all of which see sexual union as a `rite of passage’ in which society as a whole is involved, and which brings about an existential change in those whom it joins. This existential change requires a blessing, so as to be lifted from the realm of mutual appetite and remade as a spiritual union.
For this very reason, however, the smile on the angel’s face makes us uncomfortable. It is not the tender smile, the smile of the flesh, that one lover confers on another or that a mother confers on her child. It has a willed and abstract quality. This smile has not been `called forth’ onto the angel’s face by the particular person who is its object, for agape makes no distinctions, and may have no particular person in mind. Hence the smile has a double aspect: now it seems deliberate and therefore false, now involuntary and therefore replete with unearthly benevolence.
There is a truth in Aquinas’s view of love, that it involves willing the other’s good. But only some kinds of love are like that. Erotic love may desire the non-being of its object just as much as the being — something that we surely did not need Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde to show us. If I feel erotic love for another, I endorse her being for my sake as much as for hers. And the circumstances might arise in which my endorsement is withdrawn: like Othello, I might, in a passion of jealousy, seek her destruction.
If I feel neighbor love for her, then my endorsement is entirely for her sake. It is unconditional in a way that erotic love can never be. Yet more unconditional, of course,
is the love than shines in the old face of Rembrandt’s mother, who quietly and unassumingly makes a gift of herself to her son. The angel is not making a gift of himself: he is relaying the love of God. And although Christians believe that God also made a gift of himself, through Christ, this is a peculiarity of the Christian religion that is not reflected in the account of God’s love that we are given in the other Abrahamic faiths.
On one Christian understanding marriage is a sacrament — which means a union forged in the presence of God. And the purpose of the sacrament is to incorporate eros into the world of agape — to ensure that the face of the lover can still be turned to the world of others.
Human societies differ in the way that they manage this, and some don’t even attempt it. But the purpose, where it exists, is everywhere the same: to ensure that the private face of the lover can at a moment become the public face of the citizen, or the outgoing face of the friend. Hence where marriage is not regarded as a sacrament, but merely as a contract between the husband and the parents of the bride, the face of the wife often remains hidden after marriage: marriage does nothing to lift her from the private to the public forms of love. That is the deep explanation of the burqa: it is a way of underlining the exclusion of women from the public sphere. They can appear there as a bundle of clothing, but never as a face: to be fully a person the woman must retreat into the private sphere, where eros, rather than agape, is sovereign.
The Thomistic idea of love, as willing the being and the flourishing of another, assumes a kind of existential separation between the lover and the beloved. I will your being by willing you to be other than me. In erotic love, however, there is an existential tie: the partners are bound up in each other (as we say `involved’), and this is an impediment to the attitude described by St Thomas. I do not will my lover to be wholly other than me, and I am not `happy for him’, as I am happy for others when they obtain something that they desire.
And this is a partial explanation of the fact noted earlier, that lovers do not look at each other, but look into each other, and search the eyes and face of the beloved for the thing to which they seek to be united (and with which they can never really be united, since it is not a thing but a perspective, defined for all eternity as other than mine). C. S. Lewis puts the point nicely with his remark that friends are side by side, while lovers are face to face. [The Four Loves, London, Harvest Books, 1960]
Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining why it is that the great mystics and religious poets, when they endeavor to describe the love that the soul has for God, almost always follow Plato’s example, and take erotic love as their analogical base. This is true of St John of the Cross, of St Teresa of Avila, of Rumi and Hafiz. For the love of God is also an acknowledgement of total existential dependence, of the nothingness of my being until completed by him.
In conclusion, it is appropriate to say something about the destiny of the face, in the world that we have entered – a world in which eros is being rapidly detached from inter-personal commitments and redesigned as a commodity. The first victim of this process is the face, which has to be subdued to the rule of the body, to be shown as overcome, wiped out or spat upon. The underlying tendency of erotic images in our time is to present the body as the focus and meaning of desire, the place where it all occurs, in the momentary spasm of sensual pleasure of which the soul is at best a spectator, and no part of the game.
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