The Hunger Angel

The novel tells the story of a youth from Sibiu in Transylvania, Leo Auberg, who is deported at the age of 17 to a Soviet forced labor concentration camp in Nowo-Gorlowka (Novogorlovka, Ukraine, now incorporated in Gorlovka) and spends five years of his life there.

It is inspired by the experiences of poet Oskar Pastior and other survivors, including the mother of the author.

The title comes from a compound word "Hungerengel" coined by Pastior to describe the pervasive hunger that dominated his prison experience in the Donets Basin as war reparations slave labor.

The German title, Atemschaukel, is another compound word that is more difficult to translate, meaning something like "BreathingSwing" or "BreathSwinging", to denote the mechanical and distanced aspects of self-awareness of breathing that the prison experience engendered.

According to Ruth Klueger this book offers a new direction in German literature, that of fiction by a second hand participant in the camps, whether Gulag or Internment or Concentration or Extermination.