IMAGES AND PLACES OF MEMORY IN HERTA MÜLLER’S PROSE
IMAGES AND PLACES OF MEMORY IN HERTA MÜLLER’S PROSE

Summary/Abstract: Images and Places of Memory in Herta Müller’s Prose. The current paper applies the concept of transfer-images and seeks to determine the role they take on in a memory discourse. Transfer-images become, in the case of authors who transit several spaces and languages, mobile archives of individual and European memory (see Assmann, 2006). In short, transfer-images are narrative vehicles that contain and retain, metaphorically, the characters’ mental and physical relocation. Transfer-images transport the traumatic dimension of such an experience, by configuring the latter spatially and temporally. Transfer-images can signalize, on a textual level, other traumas as they are mechanisms that coagulate and display traumatic experiences. The way in which historical and political tensions (in this case Romanian communism) reflect on language and on the hybrid imaginary of authors that relocate, like Herta Müller, can only be traced by discussing a fundamental issue at hand: such authors write and construct places that do not exist in the language they write.

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