He is best known for “I,” a grim novel about the Stasi and East Berlin’s literary underground, and a short story collection called The Sleep of the Righteous largely set around Hilbig’s home town of Meuselwitz. Thanks largely to his translator and tireless advocate, Isabel Fargo Cole, Hilbig has earned a committed English-language readership since 2015, when his work started appearing in translation. Reading such authors as border-crossing thinkers, rather than as presumptive allies in a Cold War long won, seems to be a persistent challenge for Western critics. He was prone to immense anxiety before readings and had problems with alcohol until his early death from cancer in 2007. Even after reunification, when he became an unlikely star of the post-Wall German cultural scene, Hilbig felt deeply out of place on account of his proletarian origins and his strong regional accent Western critics regularly mentioned his Boxernase, or boxer’s nose. He left for West Germany in 1985, but there, too, he felt alienated from the genteel world of letters. Absolutely stubborn and completely self-taught-between shifts, he used to borrow Edgar Allan Poe and German Romantics from the Meuselwitz library-Hilbig found no place in the GDR’s conformist literary establishment. Born into the East German coal-mining town of Meuselwitz in 1941, Hilbig worked as a stoker for many years before he was able to move to East Berlin and make a living from his writing. But it is not so out of the ordinary for Hilbig, a genuinely maverick author whose distinctive literary style is marked by visions of oozing, secreting, spilling, and sweating-and by the mud, smog, and ash of (post)industrial landscapes. It is a hell of an image: dark, irreverent, and deeply perverse. So he mops up his spew with these timeless (and surprisingly absorbent) reminders of Germany’s unmasterable past, a past that this particular German simply can’t, or won’t, digest. When, in the middle of a bender, he wakes up and vomits everywhere, the box of books labeled “Holocaust & Gulag” are thankfully at hand.
In his temporary apartment, boxes of books that he has obsessively accumulated in the West-books on the atrocities of fascism and Soviet Communism-sit tauntingly beside his mattress. This novel’s protagonist, C., is an alcoholic author from post-Communist East Germany (GDR) as he shuttles back and forth across the 1980s Iron Curtain, torn between two women and two tired German states, he loses the ability to write and drinks himself towards oblivion. Of all the many literary images for Germany’s long, difficult process of coming to terms with its past-Heinrich Böll’s sad Socratic clown Günter Grass’s anti-triumphalist “crabwalk” Charles Maier’s radioactive “half-life” of guilt-there is none quite so unforgettable as one that comes late on in Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim, recently published in English by Two Lines Press. The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole.
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