Conference volumes: “Wolfgang Hilbig and the (whole) modern age”. Review. – Culture

Wolfgang Hilbig, who died in 2007 at the age of 65, was the last great loner in German literature. He seemed to protrude from other epochs, associated with the poets of Romanticism and all varieties of modernism on an equal footing, and yet unmistakably moved in the lignite mining areas of the GDR, in a glistening, apocalyptic present. He had nothing at all to do with the habitus that became compulsory for contemporary authors in the 1980s. He was not a man for microphones, interviews with him made cultural journalists face unexpected challenges – although he was by no means malicious, they could not elicit any immediately usable statements from him. Often he said nothing at all, and sometimes there were a few short sentences that were the exact opposite of his highly elaborate and magical written utterances. One could hardly bring the apparently down-to-earth, friendly Saxon intonation, very reserved man together with the eloquent, intoxicating texts that he had written.

This poet lived in writing. That is why he has remained, as Mayakovsky said of Khlebnikov in his day, a “poet for producers” who was almost ritually revered by insiders. Contemporary authors as diverse as Lutz Seiler, Ingo Schulze and Clemens Meyer all relate to him. Notions of secondary literature were just as alien to him as academic terminology. The two extensive conference volumes that are now being published on his work can therefore be viewed as quite a daring undertaking. If one approaches Hilbig’s texts from the outside with all too precisely pre-formed theoretical models, they are suddenly surrounded by a diffuse, sticky mass and rendered harmless. Because that was Hilbig’s specialty: incredibly intensive, synaesthetic descriptions of organic putrefaction, fermentation and putrefaction processes, allegorical black fairy tales full of decadence and the GDR.

He shoveled French poetry into himself like coal into a stove

In 2016 and 2017, three conferences on Hilbig’s work took place in Berlin and Paris. It is a long tradition that French German studies, of all things, is so committed to an author like Hilbig. The supposedly deep, dark German that transcends rationality has always radiated a special charm there because of its foreignness. In Hilbig’s case, there is also the fact that he was strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the French Décadence of the late 19th century. He often describes suggestively how he shovels the precious reading material into himself in a dreamlike manner in mostly yellowed copies, as in his work as a stoker in an industrial combine the coals into the ovens. A specifically French fascination can be seen in essays by Bénédicte Terrisse, Bernard Banoun and Sylvie Arlaud. Françoise Lartillot devotes two essays with differentiated detailed investigations of Hilbig’s relationship to Baudelaire, while the German Hilbig expert Stephan Pabst shows the importance of Rimbaud’s language imaginations for the author, who is stuck in his Thuringian-Saxon border town of Meuselwitz.

There are essays that try to approach this solitaire in a compelling or less compelling way: his relationship to Hofmannsthal, for example, to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, to Walter Benjamin and to Adorno’s famous dictum about poetry after Auschwitz – Hilbig falls in In contrast to most GDR authors, the fact that the German mass murder of the Jews is always present in his texts. Nadia Lapchine’s investigation of a “poetics of the abyss” in Hilbig’s volume of poems “Bilder vom Erziegen” is instructive. Stefan Matuschek is also pursuing an interesting idea. He investigates the different romantic adaptations in Hilbig (“Schaudern”) and Botho Strauss (“Mockery”) and works out characteristic east-west differences. It’s very inspiring. But whether his portrayal of Botho Strauss ‘intentions is ultimately entirely valid, that could be discussed – is Botho Strauss’ mockery perhaps not at all of Romanticism itself, but rather of his West German presence, which no longer wants to understand the fables of Romanticism?

Under the conditions of socialism something independent developed in the GDR

If the interpreters manage to understand Hilbig’s special penetration of art and life from within, amazing, enlightening moments are possible. Marie-Luise Bott explores surprising references and allusions in her two lectures. How Hilbig deals with the involuntarily early modern Swiss Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in two late poems and drives him into his own GDR situation is astonishing. Bott’s research into Hilbig’s previously unpublished text “Die Ewige Stadt”, which he read in an early living room reading in Prenzlauer Berg with Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, is a real gem. The capital of the GDR is connected here with ancient Rome, and at the same time many motifs from Alfred Kubin’s novel “The Other Side” from 1908 glimmer. Kubin’s concept of modernity, which was turned into a catastrophe, and his visions darkened in Eastern Europe are closely associated with Hilbig’s pictures. Maryse Jacobs’ parallel reading by Peter Huchel and Hilbig is similarly fruitful. What both have in common is the starting point of uncultivated fallow land with weeds, rubble and ashes as well as the cross-generational phenomenon of “East Modernism”.

Open detailed view

The title “Wolfgang Hilbig and (the whole) modern age”, which the editors gave to one of the two volumes, focuses on this conceptual field. With the emphasis on “complete” modernity, it is primarily meant that Hilbig should by no means be restricted to the reception of western modernism. Carola Hähnel-Mesnard, who investigates Chlebnikov’s traces with Hilbig, and Joanna Jabłkowska, who analyzes an Eastern European nightmare connection to the Polish author Tadeusz Konwicki, will prove it. The thrust of the concept of “complete modernity”, however, is primarily aimed at refuting the widespread thesis of a “made-up modernity” in the GDR. Under the conditions of Eastern European socialism, something quite independent emerged in the GDR, for which Hilbig’s word of a “second modernity” stands – subjects emerge who are questionable from the start and therefore come to themselves in a paradoxical way. Similarly, the preoccupation with Wolfgang Hilbig is only just beginning.