What is it about?
Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet, who received many literary awards, including the Nobel Prize. Born in 1953 in the Romanian region of Banat, in the late 1980s she was forced to move to Germany by Securitate, the infamous Secret Police. To keep in touch with her friends, she sent them hand-made postcards composed of pictures and words cut out from newspapers and magazines. This chapter discusses Müller’s first poetry collection, "Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm" (1993), inspired by that correspondence. Written in the technique of collage, it was published on loose cards placed in a box. This unconventional form alludes to a suitcase, a word that was censored in the communist Romanian media. In this subtle way Müller’s poems speak about traumatic persecutions under the Ceaușescu regime, painful family memories, and the complex history of the German minority in Romania.
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Why is it important?
Müller’s poetry collection is an example of liberature, a type of literary work in which creative writers use words, typography, images, and the material shape of the book to communicate their message. Analysing how these elements interact helps us deepen our understanding of avant-gardist techniques and forms. Experimental or avant-garde works are important because they offer ways of articulating problematic, bizarre, or incomprehensible experiences. They can also be powerful tools of social and political critique.
Perspectives
As a literary scholar, but also an editor of the literary series “Liberature”, I am deeply aware how writers and poets nuance their expression when they use verbo-visual language and the shape of the book. Writing this article gave me a chance to explore Müller’s collage poetry in depth and taught me to be alert to tiniest details. The poet herself calls it “training in a foreign gaze”. I hope that readers can gain better understanding how to read and appreciate such complex experimental works.
Katarzyna Bazarnik
Jagiellonian University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Encased History: Herta Müller’s Experimentation with Language, Image and Book Form in Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm, January 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004730380_017.
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