The Passport

The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. In need of a passport, when his attempts to bribe the mayor with sacks of flour fail, he sends his daughter to visit the village officials...
Herta Müller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region. In The Passport's sparse language, she captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

'Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.'

This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey.

"Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to Ukrainian labour camps ... so opening the eyes of non-German readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Müller, is a noble as well as a Nobel function of literature"
- The Times