Eke:Irrläufe

Irrläufe, as understood by Herta Müller, are whirlwinds of images and concepts, rotations, currents in the vicious circle of words. Language games of ambiguous metaphorizations and metonymizations set the tone with which Müller tunes her texts from the early stories of "Niederungen" to her more recent collage works, resonating with the inner orchestra of the readers. Uniquely skewed or strangely inverted images disrupt the flow of reading and impart a kind of enchanted logic to the real, creating space for irritations, for overhangs and transitions that Herta Müller has introduced as a poetic principle of semiotic excess and simultaneously as an errant path in the mind. The volume traces the trail of this principle of errancy from Herta Müller’s poetics through the narrative structures of her texts to the ethical-moral core of her literally beautiful allegories of desolation: the salvage of humanity as a utopian marker of a still outstanding state of universal humanity.