Silk and Starvation Essays. Revised new edition

Power and resistance under dictatorship, truth and lies, sincerity and deception – these are the leitmotifs of Herta Müller’s writing.

»A single sentence from Herta Müller is as good as a whole novel.« Verena Auffermann’s words in the Süddeutsche Zeitung also hold true of the power and cogency of Müller’s essays. Heinrich von Kleist’s depiction of the inherent frailty of the world’s structures encapsulated the sense of fragility she experienced first-hand as a child in Rumania – a sense which remained with her long after her immigration to Berlin in 1987.

Hunger und Seide spans the years from 1990 to 1995, years that marked the downfall of communism and the genesis of new, short-lived utopias: »if such utopias were given breath and made to walk in human shoes; to laugh and eat and sleep even for a millisecond, they would perish at their moment of conception.«