In totalitarian regimes, death often occurs in silence—a form of mourning that provokes neither an outcry nor a public ceremony. This mourning is both individual and collective, and by suppressing it, the regime drives trauma deep into the human psyche. Herta Müller is a writer who experienced both the legacy of the Holocaust and the realities of communism, and whose work is deeply concerned with the traumas arising from these historical catastrophes. For Müller, the experience of trauma is inseparable from her personal history, and understanding it requires an exploration of her life and background.
“Everyone who dies leaves behind a sack full of words.” (2019)
This sentence from The Land of Green Plums refers to the silent losses of Ceaușescu’s Romania, where the deaths of a group of friends—Lola through her suicide, and Kurt and Georg through their suspicious falls—mark not the end of life but the beginning of a long and unfinished process of mourning. Lola’s body is found hanging in a dormitory closet, suspended by the narrator’s belt. Yet the regime labels her death a suicide and publicly expels her from the Party in an effort to erase her name and memory. This ceremony is not intended for grieving but for control and oblivion. The friends remain connected to Lola only through her notebook—that sack full of words—but this connection offers no healing. Instead, it keeps the wound open and the trauma alive. The words left unspoken, lingering in the mouths of the living, become a representation of the continuity between the living and the dead within a totalitarian system.
Similarly, the words Lola leaves behind in her diary remain in the narrator’s possession for only a few days before the notebook disappears following a search by the Securitate, the secret police of communist Romania. As a result, the narrator’s access to Lola’s testimony and autobiographical record is only temporary. Once the diary is gone, memory becomes the sole remaining means of understanding the mystery of Lola’s death and the inner life she concealed. After the diary vanishes—a clear attempt by the regime to eliminate the last traces of Lola’s mental and personal identity—the narrator undertakes the task of reconstructing what she had previously read. The rest is pieced together among the four friends—Kurt, Georg, Edgar, and the narrator herself—through fragments of information and speculation.
Kurt and Georg die in the course of this process, while the narrator and Edgar emigrate to Germany. Yet migration does not bring complete liberation. As the surviving members of the group, they carry with them the heavy burden of memories and unresolved losses left behind in Romania. They attempt to assemble countless images of violence, abuse, and the inhumanity of everyday life into a coherent body of evidence documenting the continuous violence of Ceaușescu’s regime. Thus, the narrative’s firm voice emerges from a fragile and fragmented foundation, functioning as a collective and empathetic chorus commemorating the dead.
Lola’s disappearance resonates with the concept of ambiguous loss. Bourguignon and colleagues (2021), in their study of state violence, demonstrate that the absence of official confirmation of death—or its outright denial—complicates and often renders mourning impossible, much as it did under the military dictatorships of Latin America. Lola’s death leaves behind a body, yet through public condemnation the regime deprives her friends of the possibility of genuine mourning and leaves them suspended in a state of uncertainty.
In totalitarian regimes, death often occurs in silence—a form of grief that inspires neither protest nor ceremony. Such mourning is both personal and collective, and through its suppression the regime embeds trauma deep within individuals. In Reason in the Age of Science (1981), Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that we continue to live with our dead both through the memory of their physical presence and through their ongoing presence in our consciousness. In post-dictatorship Argentina, the absence of actual graves disrupted collective mourning; nevertheless, families found ways to reconstruct remembrance through monuments such as the May Pyramid. In Müller’s novel, however, no such monument exists. Instead, everyday objects—the belt, a refrigerator filled with animal organs, cut hair—take the place of graves and present the body in fragmented form. This fragmentation is what Marven (2005) identifies as a hallmark of trauma under totalitarian rule.
In Eastern Europe, this form of mourning extends beyond the individual and becomes a historical trauma. Maercker (2023) argues that Stalinist and Ceaușescu-era repression transmitted fear and silence from one generation to the next, leading to learned helplessness and social distrust. In The Land of Green Plums, family silences, sick mothers, and the shared fear of the friends all illustrate this transmission. The grief experienced by the characters is not only for lost loved ones but also for the lives stolen from them by the regime.
Volkan (2005), in his work on massive collective traumas, argues that shared losses in totalitarian societies—such as Ceaușescu’s Romania—can become “chosen traumas” that shape collective identity and generate intergenerational resentment or hatred. In the novel, the deaths of the friends scatter the group, yet their memory becomes a force of resistance, echoing Volkan’s belief that collective healing depends upon acknowledgment and recognition.
Aniko and Baines (2025) introduce the concept of affective archives: in the absence of justice, families create living archives through bodies, places, and relationships in order to preserve mourning. In the novel, Lola’s diary, her poems, and her personal belongings function as precisely such archives, transforming grief from an individual experience into a collective act of remembrance and resistance.
Iztueta Goizueta (2019), writing specifically about The Land of Green Plums, demonstrates how “silenced dead” continue to exist through objects and dreams, performing important work for collective memory. These dead are not entirely absent or powerless; rather, they actively shape society, culture, and remembrance. In the novel, Lola’s death is deeply unsettling, yet through her death she remains present, drawing her friends toward solidarity and unity.
In authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, mourning, trauma, and loss are political phenomena before they are psychological ones. By prohibiting mourning rituals and denying death itself, the regime severs collective bonds. Yet through her language, Müller bears witness to the fact that the words of the dead, though silenced, remain in the ears of their friends and gradually become a cry that no regime can ever completely suppress—not even by denying the murder of those cherished lives.
“We all knew that Lola’s death was not a suicide but a murder, yet no one dared to say it.” (2019)
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