The hunger angel

"A cattle-train wagon blues, a kilometre song of time set in motion."

It's an interesting choice of words Müller has her protagonist make to describe the long train ride at the end of World War II, packed in like sardines, the long cold way to the camp in the East. After all, the blues arose from a culture where the people had been deliberately robbed of their own languages and had them replaced with a rudimentary one, with the idea that they wouldn't be able to say - and by extension think - much besides "Yes sir, whatever you say" and "Praise God." The blues, on its surface, is a simple, repetitive language that always follows the same pattern, the same 12 bars to describe the trauma that makes up your life: I woke up this morning, all I had was gone, I woke up this morning, all I had was gone, any day now I shall be released.

Of course, the characters of Atemschaukel (the English title will supposedly be the somewhat awkward Everything I Possess I Carry With Me) aren't slaves, at least not officially, and the camp they're off to isn't one of those camps. This is a few months later, January 1945, and the ones in the cars aren't Jews and Roma but Germans - well, sort of, it's a matter of language. As the Red Army conquered/liberated eastern Europe, one of their orders was that since the Germans were responsible for the destruction of their country, the Germans were expected to pay for its reconstruction. And hey, eastern Europe was full of ethnic Germans since the middle ages. Leo is 17, Romanian, homosexual, and German. As such, he's one of many who are given a couple of hours to pack what they need before they're shipped off to 5 years of hard labour deep in the Soviet Union.

Everything I possess I carry with me.
Or: Everything I own I carry on me.
I carried everything that I had. It wasn't mine. It was either intended for another purpose or belonged to someone else.

Atemschaukel ("breath swing" - the thing in your throat that may pass back and forth but can never be spat out or swallowed, chokes you up and keeps you alive, constantly on the threshold) is, on its surface, a harrowing Solzhenitsyan tale of everyday life in a forced labour camp; the cold, the hunger, the work, the guards, the inspections, the paranoia, the lice, the false cameraderie, the mistrust, the despair, the homesickness... and as such, it's a very strong work. But there's more to it.

It's a matter of language. Everyone but the guards and the people in the surrounding villages (where are they going to run to?) still speaks German, but in this new context the words have become poisoned, they lose their old meaning, all abstract ideas eventually starve and die. Leo can't read the books he brought along; he rips them up and sells Goethe and Nietzsche as cigarette or toilet paper. The commandant is called "Comrade". Love and marriage go together like a horse and a whip, one way of getting a little more to eat. Homesickness is hollowed out bit by bit until it means being sick for the place where you had food, but you don't get food unless you work, and so eventually "home" becomes the bowl and the shovel. And once language stops being reliable, stops working, there's nothing to hold everything together. Leo is set to carry cement, but the paper sacks are too heavy and too thin, and no matter how he tries the paper rips and the cement runs out into the mud or blows away on the wind or sticks to his skin and seals him up.

Without a language, without a binding element, you won't survive. You'll freeze, you'll starve, you'll have an accident and drown in concrete. So he has to create a new language to describe the new world - auf Deutsch, of course, the German language is famous for its ability to make new words simply by sticking two old ones together; grammar makes no moral judgement. Year by year, he transforms himself into someone who can survive, with a new world of ideas, and new words.

Hunger angel: The closest to a god or an ideal here, always hovers over you, controls your every thought, keeps you alive, stops you living.
Own bread: What's left of the bread you had for breakfast at the end of the day. Always smaller than the others'.
Bread court: The spontaneous court that judges and punishes whoever eats what belongs to someone else.
Heart shovel: Your dance partner, hundreds of shovels per day, until your entire biorhythm is controlled by work and hunger.

The great thing about novels is their ability to create or recreate something, whether factually true or false, and make the reader see the truth in it. In Atemschaukel, Müller does exactly that, with a lot of help from poet Oskar Pastior who (like Müller's mother) was in one of the camps and is the "real" Leo. But it does more than that. It's not just about a Soviet labour camp. For all the routine in its day-to-day chores, it's a tremendously inventive, sneaky and deathly serious piece of metafiction (meta reality?) where it's a matter of language. How the world forms the way we see the world, attaches certain meanings to certain words, and how it can fundamentally change us. "I know you'll come back", Leo's grandmother tells him before he leaves, and those words become a mantra that keeps him alive. But who's the man who comes back? They didn't even know who he was when he left, he would have been tossed in jail for who he was, or ended up in a different kind of camp. The man who comes back has had his entire concept of the world changed, his words no longer mean what their words mean. But he's free now, right? Bread just means bread again, a spade is just a spade.

The camp let me leave only to create the distance needed for it to take up more space in my head. Since I came home, my keepsakes don't say HERE I AM anymore, but they don't say I WAS THERE either. My keepsakes say: I'LL NEVER GET OUT OF THERE.

150 years ago, slavery was abolished. 65 years ago, fascism died. 20 years ago, the Wall came down. Democracy means democracy again. Freedom means freedom again. Fascism means fascism again. Worker means worker again. Hunger just means hunger again. Why are you still using those words to mean what they meant to you for a generation or ten? Here, look at the dictionary: bread is just flour, water and yeast, that's all. Get your act together. You're free now.

Blow yer harmonica, son.