Author text
Herta Müller, born in 1953 in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf/Romania, studied German and Romanian philology in Timisoara from 1973 - 76. After her studies she worked as a translator in a machine factory. She was dismissed because she refused to work for the Romanian secret service "Securitate". Her first book "Niederungen" was then with the publisher for 4 years and was published in 1982 only censored. In 1984 it was published in the original version in Germany. Herta Müller was then no longer able to publish in Romania and was repeatedly subjected to interrogations, house searches and threats by the Securitate. 1987 Relocation to Germany. 1989 - 2001 Visiting professorships at universities in England, America, Switzerland and Germany Since 1995 member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Darmstadt. Herta Müller has been awarded numerous prizes. In 2006, for example, she received the Würth Prize for European Literature for her complete literary works, the Walther Hasenclever Prize as well as the Honorary Award of the Heine Society. In 2009 Herta Müller received the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Prize. In 2010 she was awarded the Hoffmann-von-Fallersleben Prize for contemporary critical literature, in 2012 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paderborn and in 2014 she was awarded the Hannelore-Greve Literature Prize. The author lives in Berlin.

Flap text
Romania 1945: The Second World War is over. The German population lives in fear. "It was 3:00 in the night of January 15, 1945, when the patrol came for me. The cold came on, it was -15º C." Thus a young man begins the report about his deportation to a camp in Russia. On the basis of his life Herta Müller tells of the fate of the German population in Transylvania. In conversations with the lyricist Oskar Pastior and other survivors she collected the material which she has now shaped into a great new novel. She succeeds in making the persecution of Romanian-Germans under Stalin visible in a deeply individual history.