Representações da violência totalitária na literatura contemporânea de língua alemã: o romance Herztier, de Herta Müller

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to analyze the representations of totalitarian violence in german-language contemporary literature, using as a corpus the novel Herztier (1994), written by Herta Müller. As a novel that has as its central theme the persecution faced by a group of young political dissidents in Romania during Nicolae Ceauescu's (1965-1989) communist dictatorship, Herztier presents in its narrative several instances in which the structural and systematic violence, which is characteristic of totalitarian States, is used against its main characters. The novel presents also the traumatic impact of that sort of violence on the individuals submitted to it and how these individuals try to form at least an internal kind of resistance against this violence. Müller also characterizes Herztier as an autofictional novel, but in the terms of her own concept of autofiction as erfundene Wahrnehmung, or invented perception, which the author defines as the literary re-creation of feelings and sensations evoked by a lived event. This re-creation of the perception has as its main objective approach not the truth of the facts in the way they really occurred but, especially when it comes to the experience of political persecution and totalitarian violence, the truth of the feelings of pain, impotence and fear caused by these experiences. Taking into account the close relationship between fiction and autobiography in our analytic corpus and the concept of autofiction as it is proposed by Müller, we also discuss the limits and the possibilities of artistic representation in face of the extreme violence of totalitarianism. We also present a specific analysis of the selected novel, Herztier and of its historical context, trying to define by which means, both at the formal and at the content level of its narrative, it seeks to represent the presence of totalitarian violence and also of attempts made by its characters to resist to it. We also seek to clarify to which extent Herztier possesses a testimonial tenor, even if it is an impure one.