Herta Müller had already emigrated to (then West) Germany when the Ceauşescu regime came to a swift and shocking end in 1989, but her work has continued to draw material from her experiences in Romania. The densely poetic Herztier (literally ‘Heartbeast’, 1994, translated into English as The Land of Green Plums) encapsulates her thematic concern with that state, depicting both the ethnic German community in the rural Banat that features in her earliest works, and the repression within the dictatorship. It is one of three novels that Müller wrote and published during the 1990s which depict Romania under Ceauşescu; the others are Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then, 1992) and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; literally ‘I would rather not have encountered myself today’, translated into English as The Appointment). These texts represent increasingly directly the effects of fear and repression on individuals and relationships, reflecting these in literary and linguistic form as well as in the novels’ plots and themes. Herztier is probably Müller’s best-known work, both in Germany and internationally: in Michael Hofmann’s English translation, it won the 1998 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

Herztier focuses on a group of friends, minority ethnic Germans studying in an unnamed town in Romania – identified as TimiŞoara by references in the text to Trajanplatz (Trajan Plaza) – who are brought together by their suspicions about the death of their fellow student Lola, who hangs herself after falling pregnant by a party member. The friends are targeted by the Securitate (Romanian secret police), interrogated and harassed; some are forced to emigrate and others die in suspicious circumstances. Interspersed within this main narrative level are scenes from the narrator’s lonely and fearful childhood in a rural community. Finally, after the narrator loses her job as a translator, she leaves for Germany only to discover that her best friend Tereza is spying on her for the Securitate.