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Herta Müller with the two other medalists, Christopher Clark (left) and Peter Schäfer
Photo: Jörg Carstensen / dpa
At a ceremony in Berlin, Herta Müller was inducted into the order Pour le mérite for science and art.
In addition, the British historian Christopher Clark, who had already been elected in 2019, and the Judaist Peter Schäfer were recognized as new members of the order.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also attended the event in the Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt.
The order is awarded for services (»Pour le mérite«) to science and art.
According to the announcement by Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, it has 36 German and 37 foreign members, including 14 Nobel Prize winners.
The award has a long tradition: the order was founded in 1842 by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
In 1952 it was revived by the then Federal President Theodor Heuss.
Herta Müller, who grew up in what was then communist Romania and left for Germany in 1987, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
At the time, the writer was honored, among other things, for her novel Breathing Swing and her realistic depictions of life under communist leadership in Romania.
In the 2009 eulogy, she said she had the courage to resist "the provincial oppression and political terror" without compromise.
She deserves the Nobel Prize for the »artistic content of this resistance«.
Müller was born in Nitchidorf in the German-speaking region of Romania in 1953. In 1987 she went into exile in Germany.
Autobiographical experiences flowed into her works again and again.
This is how she came to terms with the fate of her mother, who, like many Germans from Romania, had been deported to the Soviet Union in 1945.
Because of her critical attitude towards the Ceausescu regime, Müller was banned from publishing in her home country.
svs/dpa