The East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig reflected in his prose and his poems the tensions between all the worlds he inhabited. He was a manual worker born in an industrial landscape in East Germany who always wanted to be a writer. His literary efforts put him at odds with the communist authorities, so he moved to West Germany, where he never really felt at home. When Germany reunified in 1989 he was poised uneasily between West and East, old and new, as his writing challenged the easy assumptions and evasions heard on all sides in Germany. But while he was much admired in literary circles and won prestigious awards, his style, especially its more surreal elements, denied him wide popular appeal.
Hilbig was born in 1941 in Meusel-witz near Leipzig, and was brought up by his grandparents after his father was killed at Stalingrad. His grandfather was an illiterate miner who, Hilbig recalled, regarded reading as a “waste of time”. The surroundings were resolutely industrial, a brown-coal mining area in which the demands of economic production ruthlessly reshaped the landscape. And although Hilbig had begun to write enthusiastically at school, he had no desire for a career as a communist professional. In the late 1950s he saw many of his contemporaries escape to the West, before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 finally exposed the true nature of the East German state. “Every day,” he said later, “was a survival test.”
He settled in to work as a stoker and enjoyed that it allowed him to think relatively undisturbed. He wrote at night – sleep (or the lack of it) and the nocturnal imagination always fascinated him. And he worked too on a finely crafted style, modelled partly on the Romantics he loved such as E. T. A Hoffmann, creators of mysterious moods, even if their surroundings seemed so far from his world.
Hilbig was preoccupied by the consequences of what he called theRealit?ts-verlust, the loss or gap in reality between life as described by the powers that be and life as it was actually lived. Using imagery sometimes reminiscent of Kafka, he wrote about profound confusion in individual identity, phantasmagorical imaginings and a world very different from any “realist” portrayal, with hints also of the perplexity felt by those on the receiving end of recent German history. “Oh You my poor inner country with the name / from old songs here take my weeping love / and head to Hell / with me” ran a poem from the 1970s.
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In the late 1970s Hilbig managed to have some of his work – a poetry collection called Abwesenheit (Absence) – published in West Germany, which angered the East German authorities and led to interrogation by the secret police and fines.
In 1985 he was given a visa to live in West Germany and put under great pressure to emigrate – the authorities doubtless happy to be rid of someone so independent minded. But he never found settling in the West easy. Later, in 2000, he published a novel Das Provisorium (The Provisional) with strongly autobiographical elements about an author whose life is a provisional balance between East and West, work and alcoholism. While living in the West, Hilbig intensified his imaginative description of the dilemmas and delusions of life under a communist dictatorship in the East, and critics detected a stronger melancholic tone to his writing.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 gave Hilbig’s writing a more sharply contemporary edge. The revelations about the Stasi spy network and the number of collaborators and informers of various kinds led to furious debate in Germany as a whole. Hilbig took one celebrated case – where two members of a literary group based in a suburb of East Berlin had turned out to be informers – as the subject of his novel Ich, published in 1993.
The protagonist in Ich is a writer struggling to maintain his art amid official hostility and public indifference who ends up helping to spy on fellow writers and helping to write the thousands of files the Stasi secret police used to keep its grotesque bureaucratic network functioning. Hilbig described acutely the facile optimism of communist officialdom, and the particularly extreme version of Realit?ts-verlust represented by official rhetoric and documents.
But more subtly, by writing from the point of view of a Stasi informer, he portrays how individuals became embroiled in such a system’s web in order to fulfil its deeper purpose. “It becomes apparent,” wrote the British critic Paul Cooke, ofIch, “that the function of the Stasi is not to collect information at all, but rather to implicate the entire population within its structure, to have everyone acting as a spy and being spied upon.”
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Hilbig was angered by West German suggestions after 1989 that all East Germans were guilty of the crudest moral failing under communism. And he was critical of what he described as the “colonial” aspects of the West German takeover of East Germany and its incorporation into a reunified German state. The industrial landscapes of his youth now faced a new kind of desolation as East German industry collapsed with devastating social consequences.
At the same time he did not want to let his fellow East Germans off the hook, suggesting that the evils of East Germany should not all be laid at the door of the Stasi or communist leadership, just as many Germans in 1945 had tried to suggest that only Hitler and his immediate circle had been responsible for the evils of Nazism.
Hilbig’s work was a powerful literary contribution to the German exploration of how the past retained its power over individuals despite the outward progress towards “normality” in Germany after 1989. He was awarded the Georg B?chner literary prize in 2002, though he was reluctant to join the literary circuit and remained close in his manner and speech to his provincial Saxon roots, always keen to write about people and society “from below”. He wanted his writing to speak for him, a stoker’s starkly original insight into life and thought amid so much systematic untruth.
Wolfgang Hilbig, writer, was born on August 31, 1941. He died of cancer on June 2, 2007, aged 65