In these works, her childhood is first reflected in the book Niederungen and later her student years in Timisoara, always returning to her childhood memories. Similar features between the works Niederungen and Herztier are quite remarkable, which should be described and explained and so the context of the surrounding text in Herztier should be considered.
Herta Muller is considered one of the most important authors of Romanian-German literature after 1945 and her work occupies a place in literature that arouses a lot of controversy and an occasion for increasing interest in the Germanic research of her books [1, p.1].
Herta Muller was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf in Romania as the only daughter of Katharina and Josef Muller and grew up in simple circumstances in Banat. Her father - a former SS soldier – worked as a truck driver, and her mother as a housewife. Herta Muller was permanently influenced by her family, which was severely affected by fate [2, p.26]. Her grandfather, who lived as a wealthy farmer and merchant with connections to Vienna, was expropriated in Romania as a result of the communist takeover.
Her mother, too, did not give way to life under oppression. In the 40s she was sent to the Russian camp and forced to do forced labor. Herta Muller attended primary school in her birthplace, where the children spoke only in German. Romanian was only a foreign language for children in Nitzkydorf. The village was described by Herta Muller as a closed unit, where patriarchal patterns and traditions are followed.
It can be seen that Herta Muller's childhood was complicated by the family situation in the farming village. She is not talking about homeland, but about "landscapes of homelessness". For this reason, she tried to reconstruct her childhood through speech. Language was a means of communication, which was often lacking in the countryside. As a child, Herta Muller experienced a coldness of kinship relations and a distance of the village people. "I didn't grow up, I was just brought up. You were not allowed to do anything, you had to do everything," adds Herta Muller [3, p.55].
Agriculture played an important role in Banat. The people were dependent exclusively on their own forces and had to provide their household with cattle breeding and plant cultivation. Due to this fact, the banat was called the "granary" [4, p.1].
However, this was not realized and the Germans in Romania were limited in their interests. In Banat, a certain belonging to the Romanian nation was absent, and a four-percent minority is being formed, which is taking care of its own interests [5, p.10]. The homeland is located somewhere in distant Germany and the villagers are looking for their own world, which they create themselves in Romania and which reminds them of their homeland.
Herta Muller describes life in the Banat minority above all in her book Niederungen and describes everyday life from a childlike perspective. It can be said that one can feel in the text the awareness of the physical limits, which can be felt by the everyday limitation of duties and activities, the homelessness of a linguistic minority, consequences of the high authorities and consequences of the dictatorship [6, p.1]. All this and even more is evident not only from the text of the work Niederungen, but from the history of the German minority in Romania.
The book Herztier (1994) was published by Herta Muller as her second novel in Germany in 1992 and dedicated to her two dead friends from her youth [7, p.60].
The book Herztier describes the everyday life of the writer Herta Muller from the first-person perspective while studying in Timisoara. Throughout the work, not only statements from the author's everyday life, but also memories of her childhood are presented in an associatively connected way. She tells about many friends she meets who transformed her life. At first, she lives in a student dormitory in a room with five other girls who are as poor as herself. Only the story of the girl Lola is described, even if there are other girls living in the room.
The book Herztier describes the everyday life of the writer Herta Muller from the first-person perspective while studying in Timisoara. Throughout the work, not only statements from the author's everyday life, but also memories of her childhood are presented in an associatively connected way. She tells about many friends she meets who transformed her life. At first, she lives in a student dormitory in a room with five other girls who are as poor as herself. Only the story of the girl Lola is described, even if there are other girls living in the room [8, p.61].
In 1982, Herta Muller's first work Niederungen was published in censored form by Kriterion Verlag Bukurest. The book was published in uncensored form in West Berlin two years later and had great success in German-speaking countries. Her talent to describe the village reality and personal memories with the help of pictorial representation from the perspective of a child, a member of the Banat Swabian minority, was highly appreciated abroad [9, p.9-10].
Already in 1984, Ms. Muller was awarded the Aspekte Literature Prize for the best German-language debut of the year, after which she was invited to Germany for the award ceremony and various readings. Herta Muller received two literary prizes for her debut book Niederungen: The Debut Prize of the Romanian Writers' Association and the Literature Prize of the Communist Youth League of Romania.
The first impulse of the need for writing appeared for Herta Muller at the time when she realized that her work in the factory lacks meaning, she can no longer keep silent and must bring the totalitarian reality into the language.
The prosaic work Niederungen comprises 16 stories. Before she offered her text for printing in written form, she had used the artistically well-known Adam-Muller-Gutenberg Literary Circle for her literary performances, where she had read her short story from Niederungen. After the publication of the work and the reading of the excerpt Schwäbisches Bad in 1981, a wave of protests rose from the side of the Banat Swabians. In the Neue Banater Zeitung, criticism of Herta Muller's prose text intensified very quickly, as evidenced by numerous letters to the editor. Herta Muller was described as a "nest polluter" and excluded from the German minority in Romania.
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