Herta Müller: “Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern”

Herta Müller's new book ‘Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern’ (My Fatherland was an Apple Seed) emerged from a long conversation with the Austrian editor Angelika Klammer, to whom she recounted her unusual life: her childhood in Romania, growing up and her awakening political awareness, her early encounters with literature, her conflicts with the dictatorship of communism and her own path to writing. Her account of arriving in a new country also takes an unusual look at Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and the society in which we live today.