Travelling on One Leg by Herta Müller: A Journey Through Exile and Belonging

 

What does it mean to leave your country behind but still carry it with you? Is freedom simply the ability to cross a border, or does it require something deeper—the ability to feel at home in yourself?

Herta Müller’s Travelling on One Leg is a short but deeply unsettling novel that asks these questions through the story of Irene, a Romanian woman who moves to West Berlin. Originally published in German in 1989, the novel explores exile, loneliness, memory, identity and the difficult search for belonging. Müller, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, is well known for writing about political repression and its effects on individuals. This novel is also shaped by those concerns, but it approaches them through a very personal and fragmented story.

Irene has left Romania, hoping to begin a new life in Germany. On paper, this should be a story of escape and freedom. She has left behind an authoritarian system and entered a country where she is politically free. But Müller quickly complicates this idea. Irene discovers that leaving a country does not necessarily mean leaving its memories behind. The fear, suspicion and loneliness produced by her earlier life continue to shape the way she experiences her new surroundings.

Irene is physically in Germany, but emotionally she remains divided. She does not completely belong to her old home anymore, but neither does she feel at home in her new one. She becomes a person caught between two worlds. The title Travelling on One Leg captures this feeling beautifully. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Müller’s fragmented narrative style. This is not a novel driven by a conventional plot. Instead, the story develops through memories, observations, dreams, conversations and fleeting images. But this fragmentation seems deliberate. Irene's mind itself is unsettled, and the form of the novel reflects her state of mind. This makes the novel challenging, but also interesting. Instead of simply telling us that Irene is lonely or confused, Müller makes us experience some of that confusion through the writing itself.

Müller also gives great importance to ordinary objects and places. Photographs, windows, trains, rooms, streets and water repeatedly acquire symbolic meaning. A photograph, which normally confirms who we are, can instead remind Irene of how unfamiliar she has become to herself. These images make the novel feel almost dreamlike. At times, the writing is strange and difficult to interpret, but there is a beauty in this uncertainty. Müller does not explain everything to the reader. She leaves spaces that we have to fill ourselves.

Irene's relationships with other people also reveal her difficulty in connecting with her new world. Her encounters with Franz, Stefan and Thomas provide moments of intimacy, but none of these relationships gives her the emotional security she is looking for. Even when she is surrounded by people, she remains isolated.  Travelling on One Leg is not simply a political novel. It is also a deeply personal exploration of loneliness. Irene walks through the streets of West Berlin, observes strangers and looks at the world around her, but remains emotionally distant from it. Her problem is not merely that she is a foreigner. She struggles to feel connected to anything at all.

This is where I found the novel particularly moving. Migration is often discussed in terms of borders, citizenship, refugees and political rights. Müller reminds us that there is also an inner experience of migration that is much harder to see. A person can be physically safe and still feel displaced. A person can have freedom and still feel imprisoned by memory. That uncertainty is at the heart of Müller’s novel—and perhaps the reason it stays with the reader long after the book is finished.

Publisher: Aleph Books Company, 2026, pp 153, Rs 599.