Herta Müller's novel Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) is a fictionalised account of the deportation of thousands of Romanian-Germans to Soviet labour camps after the Second World War. Appearing in the same year that Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2009, it aptly illustrates the Nobel citation of her as a writer, 'who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed'. Brigid Haines from the Centre for Contemporary German Culture at Swansea University reads the novel as 'soft memory', an intervention into multiple contested memory sites surrounding the Gulag, Germans as victims, and Romanian history and politics.