Testimony and trauma in Herta Muller's 'Herztier'

This article attempts to distinguish between testimony (an account of one's personal, limited knowledge of a crime or an atrocity) and trauma (a recon structed life-story intended to overcome a troubling, recurring memory by l ocating that memory within its larger, historical context). It is the autho rs' contention that Herta Muller's novel Herztier is a skillful blending of testimony and trauma narrative that illuminates the terrors of the Ceauses cu dictatorship and their lasting impact on its survivors. The testimonial aspects of the novel reveal one's inability to achieve complete knowledge o f another's trauma, while the trauma narrative, through skillful incorporat ion of recurring, 'transfinite' images into the text, links the personal st ories of the narrator and her friends by subsuming them and making them par t of the history of a larger, national trauma. As Muller's novel makes clea r, neither testimony nor trauma narrative is able to heal or bring closure to the victims of the Romanian state terror.