The Village on the Edge of the World

Writing and Surviving Ceausescu's Romania

Herta Müller

A Nobel laureate presents a brilliant, discomfiting reflection on literary life defined by the brutality of Ceausescu’s Romania.

From her childhood in Romania, in a village “as small as a thimble on the edge of the world,” through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory, and trauma, and on what it was to live and write under Ceausescu's regime. She revisits the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century—and how they remain with us in the twenty-first. This is a powerful and evocative reflection on life behind the Iron Curtain.

Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

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