Reisende auf einem Bein (1989) [Travelling on One Leg] is the first volume of prose to appear in the wake of Herta Müller’s migration from Romania to Berlin. The text is the author’s literary attempt to come to terms with this upheaval. The work focuses on the character of Irene, the self-professed “foreigner in a foreign country”, who has left her native Romania for political reasons to start a new life in West Berlin. The concept of “travelling on one leg”, as if one’s first leg had remained at the place of departure while the other had reached its new destination, is a guiding theme throughout.

Is one of these legs still on its travels or perhaps even completely lost? What does it mean to have to leave your homeland as a victim of political persecution? What forms of alienation exist in the new city? Irene observes proceedings as a person treading a border, in an intermediate state of being where neither the process of departure nor that of arrival is complete. Her perceptive eye serves either to scrutinize what she sees in minute detail or to assemble things anew in collage form. The text affords seemingly innocuous details great attention: the crack in a coffee cup, a clerk’s thumb in a German administrative office, the hole in a stocking or a cloud looming between East and West Berlin. As such, the author casts an alien and poetic perspective on that which is familiar and thus poses a number of questions: what constitutes identity? What does “home” mean? Is it really possible for one to “settle”?