In October 2009, three weeks after it was announced that she would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller faced questions from the writer Michael Lentz in Leipzig. In the conversation, she elaborates on central aesthetic and existential aspects of her work. She makes it clear that life and writing, in light of her experiences with the Romanian secret police, can no longer be thought of as independent from one another. The precision of her poetry has been and continues to be a form of self-protection for her. Against this backdrop, she developed her richly detailed art of memory and her cross-generational research into her origins and homeland, through which she probes the societal status quo.