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One of my earliest, strongest childhood memories is when my family picked up my uncle, who had been a political prisoner in East Germany, from the hospital where he had been placed after his release, like many others in his position, after his freedom had been bought by the West German government. Although I never personally experienced such treatment, I was inculcated at an early age with a deep, repellant understanding of the fact that there were people like my uncle who had been wrongly incarcerated because of their political beliefs, ethnicity, geographic location, or for just being in the wrong historical place at the wrong historical time.

So I was aware of what was happening in countless places behind the Iron Curtain. And during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China. And in Cambodia under Pol Pot. And in Uganda, the Congo, Rhodesia, South Africa. And in Chile and Argentina and Central America as people disappeared. And American prisons like Parchman and Angola, for that matter. These were just facts of life in the decades after World War II. Actually, throughout history. But as I read Atemschaukel, it struck me that many young people today have no memory or understanding of these episodes in history and how they were both distinctive and similar to the great socio-political fear of their age: terrorism.

For me, Herta Müller’s book is as much a cultural historical statement as it is a work of literature. This being the third book of hers that I’ve read, I'm warming up to her sparing prose, episodic chapters that almost become short stories in their own right, and inferences about the past and future. The nebulous opening of a young Romanian ethnic German, who has been designated to be a prisoner at a Russian labor camp as a form of collective, representational penance is chillingly cruel. His grandmother’s farewell, „ICH WEISS DU KOMMST WIEDER� (“I know you will come back�) sets him off into an ordeal that will take years, and even when it is over, it never loosens its grip on his subsequent life. The daily torments, tragedies, frustrations, interactions with the other characters, and the ever-present Hungerengel (Hunger Angel) are punctuated and revealed through Müller’s writing.

The title Atemschaukel is more difficult to translate than most German words (especially since the word doesn’t even exist in German). The translators changed it to Hunger Angel, which is a decision I completely understand and accept given the repeated references to it in the novel. But rather than the use the literal translation of “breath swing,� I think the sentiment behind Atemschaukel is closer to “on the edge.� In this case it is the central character being on the edge of so many things—his existence, his identity, his interactions with others, his ability to deal with every contemporary moment of his life. Müller’s story is about more than an account of a Russian labor camp prisoner. Atemschaukel is a microcosm of what millions of people experienced in the latter half of the 20th century—and what countless anonymous persons still do. It is a link joining that era to today's fear of terrorism and the atrocities it can breed.