At some point towards the end of the 1990s, writes Wolfgang Hilbig in an essay, he broke into one of the closed industrial plants where he had worked during the GDR. The huge production halls were empty, all equipment and workbenches were broken from the floor and removed. The scenery was reminiscent of a scree field. But at the same time something else seemed to have been preserved, traces of a second world that led deep into the imagination: “It was the evaporation of the walls, that perhaps only imaginary smoky, blackish smell of old machine oil that has been in the plastering of the walls since At times as it seemed to me. “
Memory and imagination were the two faculties that drove Wolfgang Hilbig’s literature. With their help, he distilled his textures, spheres full of metamorphoses and sensory remnants, which often resembled “dream landscapes in miniature”. In his novel “Ich”, for example, he transformed the basement of a Berlin apartment building into the center of a metaphorically charged world, a tunnel under the city that not only embodies the extensive network of the Stasi, but is also a large image for the consciousness, including its perception silt and the catacombs of the unconscious.
It was known that poems and prose would alternate loosely, but there were hardly any self-comments on his writing. You know the poet and the prose writer, but hardly the essayist Hilbig, said an interviewer in 1992. And Hilbig replied: “Yes, I am probably not very suitable.” But here he was wrong. His essays show Hilbig as an equally intelligent and stylistically versed writer who knew how to give even the most inconspicuous utterance a very unique linguistic shape.
His first book was a volume of poetry, but he started with prose
In this thick book with essays, speeches and conversations, which has now finally appeared after several postponements, as the conclusion of the seven-volume edition and just in time to commemorate Hilbig’s 80th birthday, you can see how much Hilbig was after he moved to the West 1985 was absorbed by the literature business. But also that he accepted this role, despite all the lamentations, and used it to comment critically on the company. And from now on to think more about his writing and to relativize overly planar readings.
The relationship between literature and so-called reality is a tricky matter for Hilbig. For him, writing always had an “autobiographical reason”; it was a matter of tapping into certain misunderstood periods of life, especially his life as a worker, as a toolmaker, fitter, stoker in the industrial companies around his native city of Meuselwitz. He has repeatedly emphasized this in interviews and essays. At the same time, he knew only too well about the inherent power of language. “I am a writer who starts out from language,” he told a conversation partner in 1984. Language creates a new reality, and one cannot escape this reality.
The attraction of Hilbig’s atmospheric realities is due not least to his compositional art, in the poems as well as in the stories and novels. His first published book was a volume of poetry, “absent”, published in 1979 in the West by S. Fischer. But he had started with prose. He also worked most intensively on narrative forms. His prose consists of long, branched sentences that intertwine thoughts, perceptions and images and sometimes resemble that “mixture of vegetable felt” that he once describes.
He accused literary criticism of being just an extension of the advertising industry
These far-reaching sentences can now also be discovered in the essays. At that time they take up common terms such as “consciousness industry”, apply them or store them in atmospheres, so that a very unique movement of thought arises. With this movement, Hilbig succeeds equally in creating an emphatic portrait of his great patron Franz Fühmann as well as illuminating the background of his own stories, telling of the division into industrial workers and writers and of the “Bitterfelder Weg” with his idea of a workers’ literature in the sense of the GDR. To delimit cultural policy.
In the synopsis of the essays and speeches, the crucial experiences of his life become clear once again. The early years as a key child, with the single mother and tough grandfather who worked in the opencast mine and was illiterate. Writing in the boiler house. The end of this double existence after Franz Fühmann had pushed through a publication in “Sinn und Form” and Hilbig received a tax number – a prerequisite for him to be able to live as a “freelance writer” from now on. The departure to the west. Acquaintance with the literary enterprise.
How exactly he dealt with everything connected with this company is shown in his interviews and poetics lectures. Here he dissects the concept of the public, the media, the book market and, above all, criticism. Hilbig considered criticism to be one of the great achievements of modernity; for him it was an essential part of thinking and writing. At the same time he accused the literary criticism of his presence of having no standards and of being just an extended arm of the advertising industry, a market in which the books “flit across the stage as smoothly and without resistance as a damp bar of soap (…) disappear again “.
As a defender of democracy, he examined terms such as “freedom” or “power”
The poet shows himself here as a close observer of his time and the history of the GDR and the FRG. Hilbig felt at least as strongly committed to the Enlightenment as to romanticism. He was a great defender of democracy, examined terms such as “freedom” or “power”, wrote early on about the destruction of landscapes, and stood up for homeless young people. He used his acceptance speech for the Peter Huchel Prize (2002), traditionally an opportunity to deal with Huchel’s poems, to state that Germany was generally “disaffected with democracy”.
This opinionated side of his writing life was admittedly not to be had without simplifications and pointings. For his “Kamenzer Rede” (1997), for example with its theses of the “rule of profit and its mechanisms” without alternatives, he encountered violent opposition, especially from the conservative side. The ironic coloring of some passages and Hilbig’s keen sense of future developments were often overlooked. Regardless of whether Berlin, Potsdam or Leipzig, he foresaw the transformation of districts into “a kind of pseudo-Schwabing”, with all the consequences of social repression, early on. He also suspected that the German-German division is by no means over in the minds, but that it “will take generations before the turnaround will no longer be experienced by the people”.
Wolfgang Hilbig: Essays – Speeches – Interviews. Edited by Jörg Bong, Jürgen Hosemann and Oliver Vogel. In collaboration with Volker Hanisch and with an afterword by Wilhelm Bartsch. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 768 pages, 34 euros.
Of course, the statements also meant that Hilbig had to regularly serve as a GDR expert. How tiring he found the continuous interviews, which culminated in the award of the Büchner Prize in 2002, can be seen from the increasingly similar answers to the same questions. For Hilbig, the path through the literary business was one of the most disillusioning ones. He gradually gave up his initial conviction of the dialogical character of literature; in his later years he thought of literature primarily as a monologue, and the many readings and prizes could not change that.
In all of this, he knew he was part of the business – and played the game. And he not only acted along, but also used speeches and interviews to write down a certain image of himself. Solitude, writing as a “battle of words”, fixation on the “legacy” of the past – ideas like these were used for self-staging. Hilbig, on the other hand, said little about his partnerships, about living together with Margret Franzlik and their daughter Constance, whom he both left in 1982, about Silvia Morawetz, Natascha Wodin or Christiane Rusch. Stories about the social at Hilbig can only be read elsewhere, Franzlik and Wodin have written about them.
Wolfgang Hilbig wrote for almost two decades without his texts reaching a wider public. Then began the rise to one of the most headstrong and celebrated authors of his time. The fame lasted even after death. In the meantime things have calmed down a little about this great poet. In one of his early essays he dreams of a dystopian Rome in which all archives and libraries are closed. This dazzling volume should encourage you not to let Hilbig disappear into the archive in the first place, but rather to read it.