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Romania at the end of the war. The German population lives in fear. In the freezing night of 15 January 1945, a young man is taken off to a Russian assembly camp. "I KNOW YOU'LL COME BACK". These words, called after him by his grandmother on the wooden landing, keep him alive. Herta Müller tells of the fate of the German population of Transylvania and of the life of one young man in Russia's camps. In so doing, her intensely individual narrative succeeds in revealing a still virtually unknown chapter in European history.


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Herta Müller was born in Romania in 1953. From 1973 to 1976, she studied German and Romanian philology there and then worked as a translator for an engineering works. She was sacked for refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, Securitate, who repeatedly interrogated and threatened her. In 1987, she was able to move to Germany and she now lives in Berlin. She has been a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature since 1995.