Book Review : Everything I Possess I Carry With Me : By Herta Muller

Everything I Possess I Carry With Me is a story of the persecution of ethnic Germans in Romania by the Soviet Union regime and details how their deportation of Romanian Germans to Gulag camps during and after 1945. The novel tells the story of a youth, Leo Auberg, who is deported at the age of 17 to a Soviet forced labor concentration camp in Ukraine, and spends five years of his life there. The grandmother of seventeen-year-old Leopold Auberg says to him the night he is collected by Russian soldiers for deportation, ‘I know you’ll come back’. The young narrator and his family are helping him pack his few belongings together into an old gramophone case, trying to overcome their fear and helplessness at his departure. He is herded onto a cattle train with other camp internees and undergoes the grueling and exhausting journey to the Gulag. Once in the camp, the stereotypical issues the reader may expect to be confronted with are barely mentioned, here the focus is on the smaller – and at first glance insignificant – details which threaten the internees’ dignity and emphasise the control they have lost over their lives. The unrelenting hunger consumes Leopold but it is what keeps him alive, acting as his connection with the world. When they are released from the camp he is not very excited, but instead frightened: despite its harsh and bleak conditions the camp has become their world, its walls their safety, its oppressions their routines. The language of Muller’s book is poetic and masterful, but also joyous in its simplicity. A young woman in the camp who had been discovered through the footprints outside her hideaway back home claims that she will never forgive the snow. Every other substance would have swallowed the evidence of her existence water, sand, dirt but the freshly fallen snow can never be a silent accomplice. Müller’s book shines a light on a fascinating but still neglected aspect of German history. It is inspired by the experiences of poet Oskar Pastior and other survivors, including the Muller’s mother. The book originally written in German has a German title, Atemschaukel, a compound word coined by the author, invokes the back and forth of breathing, while the English title represents the opening sentence of the book, which is the translation of the Latin phrase Omnia mea mecum porto. Ends

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Book Review : Everything I Possess I Carry With Me : By Herta Muller