Three splendid essays by the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the bravest and most brilliant European literary figures of the last fifty years.

In the three conferences that make up this book, Herta Müller reflects the existential conditions of writing. Using the examples of the expressionist Theodor Kramer, exiled during Nazism, of Ruth Klüger, survivor of the Holocaust, and of the poet Inge Müller, who took her own life in the mid-1960s in the former GDR, the author shows the indissoluble ties between the text and the authors' lives. Furthermore, the texts present what we experienced in the first person as a unique condition of existence itself. Undoubtedly, this shocking argument from literature that arises from experience and that finds its justification in the existential must also be read as the poetics of Herta Müller herself.