The Hunger Angel

Five Years in the Camp

Leo Auberg is seventeen years old, gay, the son of a German-speaking family in Romania, and in January 1945 he is loaded onto a cattle car with hundreds of other Romanian Germans and deported to a Soviet labor camp in Ukraine. The deportation is collective punishment: all German speakers of working age are to be sent to rebuild the Soviet Union that the German military destroyed. Leo’s individual circumstances are irrelevant; his ethnicity is sufficient. The camp he arrives at is built around a coal mine, and for five years his life is organized by two things: the daily shoveling quota, and hunger.

Müller renders Leo’s experience through an accumulation of precise, fragmentary observations rather than narrative progression. The chapters are short—sometimes a single page—and each is built around a specific object or substance: coal dust, cement, the lard that is occasionally distributed, the shovel that is Leo’s primary relationship with the world. The hunger angel of the title appears early: a figure that Leo begins to perceive as starvation intensifies, simultaneously a hallucination and an instinct, the part of him that is entirely focused on getting enough calories to survive the next day. The hunger angel is not redemptive; it is simply the survival drive, stripped of everything else.

What distinguishes Müller’s treatment from more conventional gulag narratives is her refusal to provide the reader with the perspective of a witness who understands what is happening. Leo does not understand; he endures. The political and historical context that a retrospective narrator might provide is absent. The effect is to place the reader inside the experience of a person for whom the historical forces at work are entirely opaque—who knows only the quotas, the rations, the cold, and the constant calculation of how to stay alive one more day.

Oscar Pastior and the Collaboration

Müller’s access to this material was personal and specific. Oscar Pastior was a Romanian German poet, a close friend and sometime collaborator of Müller’s, who was deported to a Soviet labor camp as a seventeen-year-old in 1945—the same age, the same circumstances as Leo Auberg. Pastior survived five years in the camp and returned to Romania, eventually emigrating to West Germany, where he became a significant figure in experimental German-language poetry. He and Müller worked together on this project for years; he gave her testimony in extraordinary detail about daily camp life, the specific textures of survival, the objects and substances and routines. He died in 2006, before the novel was finished.

Müller has been explicit that the novel is built on Pastior’s testimony—that Leo Auberg is Pastior in the sense that the experience is his, even though the prose style and the imaginative transformation are entirely Müller’s. The collaboration raises questions about the ethics of literary appropriation that the novel itself takes seriously. Müller is not pretending to a direct experience she did not have; she is translating testimony into a prose style that can carry it, and the specific style she brings—fractured, imagistic, attentive to the life of objects—turns out to be precisely right for the material. The hunger angel is Pastior’s metaphor; the novel is what Müller did with it.

After Pastior’s death, it was revealed that he had been an informant for the Romanian Securitate—the Communist secret police—during a period of his life in Germany. This revelation complicated the posthumous portrait of a man Müller had loved and honored. The novel does not address this; it was published before the revelation became fully public. But it is part of the context in which the book now exists, another layer of the historical damage that Eastern European German life in the twentieth century inflicted on individuals.

Müller’s Place in the Gulag Canon

The literature of the Soviet labor camps has a canonical Western face—Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales—and a canonical Western European Jewish face, particularly Primo Levi’s accounts of the Nazi camps that have become the standard against which all subsequent testimony is measured. What is largely missing from this canon, at least in translation and in Western reading, is the Eastern European German perspective: the experience of the Volksdeutsche, the ethnic Germans of Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia who were deported as collective punishment for German wartime atrocities they did not personally commit.

Müller’s novel fills this gap not with documentary prose but with the kind of fractured lyrical attention that she developed across her entire career—a style that emerged from her own experience of writing under Romanian surveillance, in which every sentence was potentially dangerous and obliqueness was a form of survival. This style, applied to labor camp testimony, produces something that reads differently from Levi or Shalamov: stranger, more image-driven, less reflective in the conventional sense. Whether it achieves the emotional depth of Levi’s writing is a question reasonable readers will answer differently; what it achieves that they do not is a specific kind of sensory intensity that makes the camp feel freshly rendered rather than historically established.

The Nobel Prize, awarded in 2009, came between the publication of The Land of Green Plums (1994) and this novel (published in German in 2009, in English translation in 2012). The Swedish Academy cited “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose” in Müller’s work—language that fits The Hunger Angel exactly. For reading order: The Land of Green Plums is the essential earlier work, shorter and more immediate; The Hunger Angel is the more ambitious undertaking, and the right book to read second.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Müller’s most ambitious novel brings her fractured, image-dense prose style to the subject of the Soviet labor camps, with the result that this experience—less documented than the Nazi camps in Western literature—is rendered with a freshness and specificity that conventional prose could not have achieved.