Review: Wolfgang Hilbig's The Sleep of the Righteous

For too long English readers have not had access to the work of Wolfgang Hilbig, arguably the greatest writer of prose to emerge from the former GDR (East Germany). But suddenly we have an embarrassment of riches with two translations of his work: his second novel 'I' (The German List) - released last month by Seagull Books (original German title "Ich" - see my review), and now a collection his short stories - The Sleep of the Righteous (original German Der Schlaf der Gerechten (2003)) - to be released next month by Two Lines Press, who was kind enough to send me an advanced reader's copy. Both works have been expertly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole.

Hilbig got his start as a writer thanks to the efforts of the communist party (SED) to bridge the gap between artists and workers (proletariat) to encourage ordinary workers to write ("Greif zur Feder, Kumpel").  The movement became known as the Bittfelder Weg and the original impulse came from party boss Walter Ulbricht, who said in 1958:

„In Staat und Wirtschaft ist die Arbeiterklasse der DDR bereits Herr. Jetzt muss sie auch die Höhen der Kultur stürmen und von ihnen Besitz ergreifen.“ ("The worker class are already in control of the state and the economy. Now they also need to storm the the ramparts of culture and take ownership.")

Hilbig would seem have been the perfect candidate: a stoker toiling away in the boiler room of a factory who showed unusual talent for writing.  The only problem was this: Hilbig didn't write in accordance with the Socialist Realist dictates of the party; he didn't try to orient the consciousness of the workers towards the glorious socialist future.  Rather, Hilbig wrote about what he saw with his own eyes - the truth about the real existierender Sozialismus of the GDR. And it was not an inspiring picture. Hilbig became a thorn in the side of the communist cultural bureaucracy and in 1986 was allowed to leave the GDR and stay in West Germany.

In the case of Wolfgang Hilbig, it almost seems as if Franz Kafka had come back to life and been set down in the bleak mining town of Meuselwitz.  But while Kafka wrote prophetically about a fictional nightmarish world, which, after his death, did come to pass, Hilbig wrote honestly about his own nightmarish existence: his work is fundamentally autobiographical. Meuselwitz was the center of Hilbig's universe - even after he left to live in East Berlin, and, later, in West Germany.  Isabel Fargo Cole, Hilbig's translator, makes an interesting comparison to Faulkner in a recent interview: 

In a way, Hilbig’s GDR resembles the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner, whom he admired: as he revisits and revisits these moonscapes, they prove to be an entire universe without spatial or temporal boundaries. By contrast, the Western world seems shallow to him.

For the American reader, The Sleep of the Righteous offers an excellent introduction to Hilbig and his work.  These seven stories follow chronologically the arc of the writer's life from his childhood in Meuselwitz to his return to the town after die Wende - the collapse of the GDR.  The two best stories are the first and last ones - forming bookends to Hilbig's life.

In The Place of Storms, the first story, we see Meuselwitz through the eyes of the young boy, fatherless, like so many of his generation who lost fathers in the war, who roams the bleak moonscape of the strip mines, ash heaps and polluted pools where the boy and his friends swim. Something about the desolation of Meuselwitz captures the boy's imagination and compels him to write:

"Writing resembled swimming in this sense: once you'd gotten your head above water. once you started to swim, it was impossible to stop until at last you felt the sand of the far shore.  In similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over the surface of a mine pit smelling of coal and rot ...only that there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words ou had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words themselves went under. But swimming in the words was safe, you couldn't drown in them, you could start over with them the next day..."

In the final story - The Dark Man - the narrator is now a celebrated writer living in what is now the western part of a unified Germany.  To escape a loveless marriage, he is constantly traveling back to the former East German states to give readings and accept awards, using every opportunity to visit his mother in Mauselwitz.  The town is stuck in the past, the factory where he spent years in the boiler room shut down years ago and nothing has come to replace it. There is no work, and men spend their days and nights drinking, waiting for the capitalist prosperity which never seems to arrive.  A mysterious man appears - a former Stasi agent who had been assigned the file of the writer/narrator.  It turns out this former agent had been living a vicarious existence in spying on on the writer - even reading the correspondence with a woman in Leipzig - Marie, the writer's lover.  The former Stasi man - "the dark man" - knows every aspect of the writer's life; he knows the writer better than the writer knows himself. He knows that the writer missed his once chance of happiness by abandoning Marie.  In the end, the writer/narrator takes revenge for his own wasted life by killing his alter ego- "the dark man" - and leaving his body in the abandoned factory where he used to work. He knows no one will ever find the body, for the factory will forever be abandoned.

It is interesting to compare Hilbig with Christa Wolf, the "mother of GDR literature", whose work was also heavily autobiographical. Except that Christa Wolf conveniently leaves out large chunks of her life - like the period where she worked for the Stasi as an informant (an "IM"- Informelle Mitarbeiter). In Wolf's last book - Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (see my review) - she is confronted with evidence of her work with the Stasi and promptly has a nervous breakdown. She had erased that chapter of her life from her memory and had no recollection of her work as an IM.  Hilbig never forgot anything, no matter how much he drank (he suffered from alcoholism), and never left anything out of his writing.  No matter where he lived, Mauselwitz was always in his head, forcing him to confront the bitter truth through his dense prose. Hilbig is the more honest - and far greater - writer.

Comments

[André]

OT-Hinweis:
Albrecht Müller (NachDenkSeiten und weltnetz.tv) wird als Redner am 26.9.2015 an der Anti-Ramstein-Demonstration auftreten.
Zusammen mit Diether Dehm (Die Linke und weltnetz.tv), Prinz Chaos II. (beim weltnetz.tv-Mitbegründer Konstantin Wecker unter Vertrag) und anderen.
http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=27597

[Jody]

Just finished reading `The Sleep of the Righteous`.

Moody atmospherics permeate Hilbig`s 7 inter-twining tales.

Subtly disturbing.