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Our activities for December

German Film Evening showing “Wer früher stirbt ist länger Tot”
Introduced by Frau Sirka Vella-Facklam
Friday, 11^th December at 7.00p.m.
Director: Marcus Hausham Rosenmüller (2006)
Plot: You can never be too young to be a murderer, thinks 11-year-old Sebastian, who's convinced that he killed his mother at the age of 0. The proof is on her tombstone: she died the day he was born! Though his father Lorenz tries to calm him, Sebastian is terrified by the thought of spending years in purgatory. Hoping to knock off a few years by doing good deeds, he sets out to find a wife for his dad. The heavens must be listening, since Lorenz and Sebastian's teacher Veronika both fall madly in love with each other. The only problem is: Veronika is married. But since Sebastian already killed his mother, surely it'll be easy to kill a stranger...

Entrance is free. 
Members of the German-Maltese Circle and their friends are welcome!
 

Notices

  Attention all Members!!  -  Ex
The last day of this term will be Friday, 18^th December 2009.  Students are informed that lessons will then recommence after the Christmas  and New Year holidays on Monday, 4^th January 2010.  The office and Library will be open only in the mornings during the period 21st till the 31st December.  The Circle’s Bar & Coffee Shop will remain open for lunches and snacks.

RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP for 2009 NOW.  For €12.00 for one whole year! Mail  a cheque (payable German-Maltese Circle) or come personally to the office!  You will continue receiving the Newsletter, join our activities,  use the Library services, and much more!  Those who are attending our courses have had their membership renewed already.cit
ing Events for May at Messina Palace

Father John Sammut decorated with the Bundesverdienstkreuz

End of October 2009, Father John Sammut was decorated with the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande, which was awarded to him for his continuous efforts to further Maltese-German friendship and understanding. The German Ambassador to the Republic of Malta, Mr. Bernd Braun, had the honour to carry out this ceremony on behalf of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Prof. Horst Köhler, at the Residence in Lija. 

After having studied the German Language at the German-Maltese Circle in Valletta, as well as at the Goethe Institute in Munich, he taught German in Malta at the German-Maltese Circle, at the University of Malta and at the Maltese Institute of Tourism Studies. Father John Sammut dedicated the greater part of his life to assist bilateral relationships between German and Maltese youth, as well as supporting adults in their search for information and friendship within our two countries. His efforts to help youth groups with exchange programs, to show tourists in numbers or individuals the beauty of the Maltese Islands are well known, whereby he not only fulfilled his duties as Parish Priest but also and at all times co-operated whole-heartedly with the German Lutheran Parish “Andreasgemeinde”.  

Our heartfelt congratulations, Dun Gwann!

Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to German author Herta Müller
Written for our Newsletter by Albert Friggieri

This year’s Literature Nobel Prize was awarded to the German author Herta Müller. The Nobel Committee stated in its citation that Herta Müller, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”.  

Herta Müller’s latest novel, ATEMSCHAUKEL (literal translation: “Swinging Breath”), begins as follows: 

Alles, was ich habe, trage ich bei mir.
Oder: Alles Meinige trage ich mit mir.
Getragen habe ich alles, was ich hatte. Das Meinige war es nicht. Es war entweder zweckentfremdet oder von jemand anderem. Der Schweinslederkoffer war ein Grammophonkistchen. Der Staubmantel war vom Vater. Der städtische Mantel mit dem Samtbündchen am Hals vom Großvater. Die Pumphose von meinem Onkel Edwin. Die ledernen Wickelgamaschen vom Nachbarn, dem Herrn Carp. Die grünen Wollhandschuhe von meiner Fini-Tante. Nur der weinrote Seidenscha lund das Necessaire waren das Meinige, Geschenke von den letzten Weihnachten.
Es war noch Krieg im Januar 1945. Im Schrecken, dass ich mitten im Winter wer weiss wohin zu den Russen muss, wollte mir jeder etwas geben, das vielleicht etwas nützt, wenn es schon nichts hilft. Weil nichts auf der Welt etwas half. Weil ich unabänderlich auf der Liste der Russen stand, hat mir jeder etwas gegeben und sich sein Teil dabei gedacht. Und ich habe es genommen und mir gedacht mit meinen siebzehn Jahren, dass dieses Wegfahren zur rechten Zeit kommt.    

Everything I have I carry with me.
Or: everything that’s mine I carry on me.
I carried everything I had. Actually, it wasn’t mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or it belonged to someone else. The pigskin suitcase was originally a gramophone box. The dust coat was my father’s. The town coat with the velvet neckband belonged to my grandfather. The baggy trousers were from Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees were from our neighbour, Herr Carp. The green woollen gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret-coloured scarf and the toilet bag were mine, presents from recent Christmases.
In January 1945, the war was still going on. Everyone around me was shocked that, in the depths of winter, I was to be taken who-knows-where by the Russians. Everyone wanted to give me something that might be useful, even if it didn’t help. But nothing on earth could help. As I was on the list of the Russians, and nothing could change that, everyone gave me something, and they drew their own conclusions. I took the things and drew my own conclusion – that at the age of seventeen, the timing was right for going away.   

This is how a young man starts telling the story of his deportation from Romania to a labour camp in Russia at the end of the Second World War. Leopold Auberg was 17 years old at the time. He had not been a soldier. He was not arrested for committing a crime, nor did he appear before any court. But he belonged to the German minority in Romania, and because those people were of German descent, irrespective of whether they had supported the Nazis or not, they were considered guilty. Towards the end of the war, 100.000 of them were forced to leave their homes and families in Romania to work in Russian gulags to help rebuild the Soviet Union after the war. Many of them died at the camps or during the train transports in railway carriages normally used to transport cattle – mostly due to malnutrition, extreme cold, incessant hard work and illnesses or because they were murdered by their overseers. 

Leopold Auberg, the protagonist of Herta Müller’s latest novel, spends five years at the Ukranian camp of Novo-Gorlovka. He survives the brutality of the camp, but when he is a free man again, still a young man aged twenty-two, he is a completely different person. Those like him who returned home from the camps could not or did not want to tell anyone what they had been through; even if they managed to overcome their shyness and decided to describe the years of humiliation and torture, nobody wanted to listen. In the war, Romania had been on the side of the Nazis, and after Russian troops had marched into the country, nobody was interested in the past. Leopold becomes a “Nichtrührer”, someone who will not say or move anything. At the end of Müller’s novel, he thinks to himself, what a “great internal fiasco” (“das große innere Fiasko”) it was, that as a free man, he was now “unabänderlich allein und für mich selbst ein falscher Zeuge” (alone and for myself, irrevocably, the false witness). It is the self-judgement of someone alienated from the world to which he belonged – and from himself – “dispossessed” of everything.  

Herta Müller is 56 years old and did not have first hand experience of the period that she describes in her novel. Her mother, however, was one of the ethnic Germans who for several years were forced to labour in Soviet camps. Painstakingly, Müller recorded and researched all the information that ex-deportees could give her. Most of the details in ATEMSCHAUKEL she owes to the Romanian-born German poet Oskar Pastor, who was himself deported and who managed to survive. He died in 2006.   

In a telephone interview given immediately after the announcement of the Nobel Prize award to Herta Müller, the author admitted that, had it not been for the crimes committed by the Nazis (including members of the German minority in Romania), there would have been no deportations: “Das muss man natürlich immer mitdenken. Das kam nicht aus heiterem Himmel. Sondern das war eine Folge der Verbrechen, an denen die Minderheit natürlich auch beteiligt war.”  On the other hand, she rightly emphasises the unfairness of the notion of “Kollektivschuld”, the idea of collective responsibility – that all Germans were responsible for the war and the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis: “Kollektivschuild ist immer ungerecht, weil die Leute, die deportiert wurden, die waren ja damals nicht im Krieg.”  

In ATEMSCHAUKEL she describes – objectively and meticulously – the injustice and the inhuman treatment that many, including youngsters like the 17-year old Leopold Auberg, had to endure because of the outrageous idea that anyone German had to be punished, and the devastating effect that this had on the rest of the lives of these totally innocent victims. 

Besides the persecution of the German minority at the end of the war at the hands of the Stalinist occupying forces and the communist regime in Romania installed by the Soviet Union, Müller’s main themes in her novels, poems and essays concern the harsh conditions of life under the repressive regime of Ceaucescu, including the problems that authors faced due to censorship. After studying German and Romanian literature at university, she worked as a translator at a Romanian engineering factory but she was dismissed for not cooperating with the secret police who continued to harass her for years. She was active in a group of dissident writers who fought for freedom of speech and expression. In Romania, her works were at first censored, but then she was not allowed to publish anything. In 1987, she was allowed to emigrate to West Germany and she settled in Berlin where she still lives.    

In an article published in the Frankfurter Rundschau (12.10.09), shortly after it was announced that Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the leading Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu underlined, on the one hand, Müller’s “inner sword” and on the other the “pure poetry” of her literary style.  

 “Her answers to the beauty and horror of this world,” he goes on to say, “are either yes, yes, or no, no, like the parable in the Gospel.” According to Cartarescu, “the writings of Herta Müller are indeed the product of an intense obsession, a unique, paranoid terror of being followed, held in suspicion, persecuted, of having to fight a pervasive and incomprehensible enemy that is bent on misrepresenting and misinterpreting her.”   

Commenting about Müller’s relationship with Romania, Cartarescu wrote: “Herta speaks Romanian like myself, she is saturated with the Romanian language, culture and literature. She has always been obsessed with Romanian poetic expressions in the common language that she uses and develops in so many of her novels. Everything she has written is set in Romania, a country she loves and hates, a country which, even if it has damaged her (it has certainly left deep scars on her brain), is part of her living memory. It is part of her at least as much as Germany. […] Today her face was everywhere in Berlin, in all the newspapers and on all the screens in the underground. It was like being in a dream. For it was the Herta I know, the small, intense woman, dressed in black, who was so kind and gentle to me each time we met, while I felt guilty and shy. The German woman whom we thought was so Romanian, which she actually never was.”   

Herta Müller, for her part, said in the above-mentioned interview of 8 October 2009: “In Deutschland war ich immer die Rumänin, und in Rumänien war ich immer die Deutsche. Also, irgendwie ist man immer das andere…” (In Germany I was always the Romanian woman, and in Romania I was always the German woman. Somehow, one is always the other…)   

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