Deutsch-rumänische Sprachinterferenzen bei Herta Müller und Balthasar Waitz

Herta Müller’s leaning towards word for word transfer of Romanian set phrases in her texts can be explained by the environment in which she lived until her emigration to West Germany and this admittedly intensifies with the gradually increasing general interest in multi-lingualism. The fact that the authoress speaks of the German-Romanian transfer in her acceptance speech on the occasion of the Nobel Prize award proves the important role, which Hertha Müller ascribes to this procedure.

Also at the centre of the latest books by Balthasar Waitz stands the multicultural region of the Banat. The author seems to be gripped by the plurilingualism of the immediate surroundings of his homeland. Different forms of Romanian, from slang to everyday speech, but occasionally also Hungarian, Slovak and Serbian phrases find their way into the texts of the Banat author. In this manner just as with Hertha Müller, language images come into being, new light. Thus literary multilingualism in both writers enables one to have a novel access to the relation between literature and reality.