Herta Müller: The Vicious Circle of Words

The exhibition takes the visitor through the life of the writer, from her rural childhood in a Swabian Banat village through to her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, showing family documents and photographs together with interviews in which Müller speaks of her life in Romania, exile and her writing. Also included are declarations of some of her fellow members of the Banat Action Group and extracts from security documents which reveal the nature of the severe, misanthropic system that drove her into exile. There are also collages by Herta Müller dating from the late 1980s, offering a little-known facet of her creative activity.

The exhibition is a reduced version of  “Der kalte Schmuck des Lebens” (The Cold Jewellery of Life). Conceived by the Literaturhaus Berlin, this show will travel to the different locations of the Goethe Institute around the world in the coming months.