The Land of Green Plums

Müller's Romania is the Banat under Ceaușescu, where four young ethnic-German friends leave a German-speaking farming village for the city to study, and the Securitate follows them into lecture halls, the student hostel, the factories they are posted to and the interrogation rooms. The map runs from the village on the Timiș plain to Timișoara's centre and university, then reaches east to the capital and out of the country to exile.

The narrator

The village in the Banat

The village

The friends come from a tight German-speaking farming community in the Banat, a world of orchards, funerals and quiet conformity that the narrator remembers with unease. The village where Müller herself was born, Nițchidorf, sits on the Timiș plain southeast of the city and stands in for this closed rural setting.

Opening chapters

inferred The novel keeps the home village unnamed, but its German-speaking Swabian community on the Banat plain matches the world Müller grew up in; this marks Nițchidorf, her birthplace, as a representative point.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗