Peering Through the Darkness

Regan Mies reviews Wolfgang Hilbig’s “Under the Neomoon” and “Territories of the Soul/On Intonation.”

By Regan MiesJuly 31, 2024

• Fiction

• Poetry

WHETHER A RESULT of our fraught present-day relationship with democracy or simply because clichés and prejudices have had 35 years to dissolve since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Anglophone readers have been increasingly drawn to East German narratives in recent years. Authors who wrote and published in or from the defunct nation are being rediscovered and newly translated into English: for example, Brigitte Reimann, with her pathbreaking feminist socialist realism. Katja Hoyer’s 2023 history of East Germany, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990, is the first of its kind to give due attention to the everyday lives of its subjects. Contemporary writers who grew up in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), too, are pulling readers back into the 1970s and ’80s: acclaimed novelist Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won this year’s International Booker Prize for Kairos, a 2021 novel about an allegorical love affair in the final years before the Mauerfall; Clemens Meyer’s Fitzcarraldo-published tomes follow the story of the GDR sex trade and the lives of East German teens during reunification; and three new translations of Lutz Seiler’s work—fiction, essays, and poetry—came out in the past year, inspired in part by the author’s memories of political upheaval in the East.

Both Meyer and Seiler have lauded Wolfgang Hilbig as an inspiration—a writer whose work, published from the 1980s into the early 2000s, stands out for the frustrated immediacy and intensity of his characters’ circumstances under Soviet rule. Hilbig’s world is one of industrial sludge, vapors, and shadows; of claustrophobic summers and perpetual winter; of coal mines and blazing boiler chambers. In his early work especially, there’s no ground for accusations of “ostalgie,” the disesteemed nostalgia of former East Germans for their collapsed communist state. Hilbig’s short fiction is nightmarish and anxiety-inducing, spanning tales of disorientation, surveillance, and divided identity.

Though he received numerous German literary prizes, including the esteemed Georg Büchner Prize for lifetime achievement in 2002, Hilbig was first introduced to an English-language audience in 2015 when translator Isabel Fargo Cole and Two Lines Press published his final short story collection, The Sleep of the Righteous. The collection of seven short works originally appeared in German in 2002, over a decade after reunification and just a few years before Hilbig’s death in 2007. In the nearly 10 years since Two Lines Press first published Hilbig in English, Fargo Cole has built a relationship with his work, having gone on to translate two of his novels and three novellas. This June saw the English-language release of Hilbig’s earliest work, also translated by Fargo Cole: Under the Neomoon, his debut collection of 12 stories, was originally published in 1982 while Hilbig was still living and working in the GDR.

Hilbig’s stories are part working-class memoir and part gothic fiction, lyrical and unsettling, verging at times on Lovecraftian pulp horror—a genre, alongside American Westerns, that he eagerly consumed in his youth. The stories in Under the Neomoon, which range from two-page flash pieces to a nearly novella-length work, showcase both ends of this genre spectrum. In “Thirst,” Hilbig evokes a picturesque, small-town summer twilight—only, when a gentle breeze picks up, “all the town’s streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers.” A nearby factory that processes animal corpses into detergent (perhaps an early iteration of the abattoir at the heart of his 1991 novella Old Rendering Plant) is the source of this stench, which Hilbig personifies with grotesque and monstrous characteristics: “[Y]ou think you hear it gnawing at the houses’ outer skins, you think you hear desiccation spreading inward through the wood of the doorframes.” The narrator hopes to drink away the smell at a bar, where even fellow locals turn against him, transforming into sea monsters who assault him with “foam-sucking cockles” and “crabby, stinging cnidarian tentacles.” ­­The noxious, oppressive atmosphere of Hilbig’s East Germany is inescapable, no matter where his narrator tries to run.

The unnerving intensity of Hilbig’s supernatural tales seeps into his quieter stories too, which often feature solitary narrators wandering amid natural landscapes: contemplative and disillusioned “Waldgängers” who would be at home in the classic works of German Romanticism. The opening paragraph of the collection’s first story, “Breaking Loose,” reads, “At the end of the path I reached an old dead canal arm that beckoned me onward, but maybe I never did reach it, because I was walking forever, all summer.” The sun beats down; the grass is “prodigious in its growth.” But the narrator’s forgetfulness grows “prodigiously” as well. He becomes fatigued, drenched, and confused. He urges himself to escape the oppression of the “green vapor of the hot dew.” He naps, reawakens, walks on, and wonders whether he has “forgotten something. […] Ah, here, all this summer, there are days I wake up thinking: now, this very morning, this day or never […] Until I decide it’s too soon, or too late.” His amnesia is fugue-like: it comes, goes, and reappears. He finds his wooden boat rotting at the dock, then wonders once more whether there’s something he has forgotten. Even in a story lacking overt monsters, Hilbig’s narrator longs for but is unable to effect an escape from eerie, unnameable misery.

Labyrinthine paths emerge as a recurring motif in nearly all the pieces in the collection; narrators seem to wander forever to nowhere and back—never quite completing a journey or even understanding its intended destination. They yearn for freedom in nature and outside of society—or outside of their society specifically, with its omnipresent surveillance. They probe the boundaries of the status quo—what would it mean to cross over? Is remaining within the confines of one’s circumstances consenting to their conditions? In the Kafkaesque tale “He,” Hilbig’s narrator is determined to walk along a specific road in a small town, despite the sporadic warnings of the locals: “Don’t take this road any farther, my good man”; “You’ll have to turn back, young man, as fast as you can.” He forges onward until he’s swept into a black sedan by a patronizing voice: “That’s enough now.” Resistance is pointless, and he receives no answers to his questions. The journey goes on “helplessly, swiftly, and maybe for a long, long time”: independence and direction overcome by authority and surveillance.

“Idyll” likewise features a male narrator walking. He observes that, in all his life, “malicious circumstances” had prevented him from ever once lying in cool, fresh grass. Around him, trees grow “snarled and unpruned,” fruits fall, wasps swarm, and everything is “suffused by the scent of old honey.” When he comes across a trace of civilization, an old mill waterlogged and rotting like the boat in “Breaking Loose,” it becomes a symbol of the impermanence of a toxic society positioned against the natural decadence of a freer world. And then—he begins forgetting and falling asleep, his thoughts a desperate refrain:

[W]hat am I supposed to do in town, hunkered in my rooms, paying rent, paying taxes, gobbling food, guzzling drink, living like other people, forgetting, spending all my time forgetting […] Am I supposed to work there, work, work, work. How dreary, how pathetic to work. […] [H]ow tiresome to know what country I live in, and know it without wrath, and have to hold this always and without wrath in my dreary consciousness.

The wandering narrators of Hilbig’s summer stories take up work in the Thüringian winters. As a young man, Hilbig began writing during his working hours as a stoker, shoveling coal to heat factories through the frigid months. The job was physically demanding but allowed for stretches of time alone; Hilbig, streaked with coal dust and sweat, could sit at a table in the factory basement and read and write. Aspects of memoir become apparent in stories that feature stokers as protagonists, such as “The Workers: An Essai” and the collection’s longest piece, “The Stoker,” both of which follow a factory laborer during payday. In the former, the narrator feels as though “an accident of language” has alienated his role from the socialist definition of a worker; he considers himself a contributor to the factory and navigates the allegiances and divisions between the workers and engineers operating above him. In the latter piece, the protagonist musters the courage—and the language—to demand recognition and better working conditions. The dissenting voices of both stokers are silenced, in the end, by money and dour reality, but they are able to see themselves clearly now as individuals who can be liberated through language.

Hilbig was a known troublemaker. “St. John’s Eve” tells of a man’s brief stint in jail, though he’s released when affidavits fail to incriminate him; Hilbig, similarly, was charged for alleged participation in the burning of a flag, then released due to lack of evidence not long before his government-facilitated move across state lines. In 1985, a visa and writing grant allowed Hilbig to emigrate to the West while Germany was still divided. The years Hilbig lived in the West found him caught in an unsettled limbo, inducing a guilt-ridden discomfort that, for Hilbig, ultimately extended beyond reunification. During this time, he published two chapbooks—in 1986 and 1990—which, also this June, Sublunary Editions released as an 80-page collection of selected prose and lyric poems titled Territories of the Soul/On Intonation, expertly translated by Matthew Spencer.

Returning to the supernatural in the collection’s “The Etiquette of Windows,” Hilbig evokes a dual identity via “daemons” with black eye sockets that inhabit the reflective windowpanes of his new home, mimicking his movements while he writes at his desk. Their accusatory gazes compel the speaker to imagine his mind as separate and distant from his being, a sense of dislocation that leads him to observe: “What is preserved of me here is the opposite of presence.” Hilbig describes his physical and mental divide between two Germanys more concretely in “Les Adieux,” whose speaker is a “selfish refugee, constantly fleeing the farewells of women and children in need of his love,” though his self-awareness does little to prevent him, after a brief visit to his homeland, from returning to the West. The speaker thinks back to when he first left home, how his small daughter encountered him on a twilit staircase landing and called out. Her smile died on her lips as he lifted his luggage and left. “Life since then has been one relentless pursuit in the same direction,” he says: “always forward.”

The paths Wolfgang Hilbig’s narrators wander in his debut collection aren’t the same ventures into memory or childhood that readers can expect to encounter in parts of his later Sleep of the Righteous, for example—or in the historic distance of the other aforementioned works of popular prose retroactively set within the GDR. Hilbig’s portrait of East Germany is unfalteringly bleak, and the stories and poems within Under the Neomoon and Territories of the Soul/On Intonation are searching confrontations with how one can attempt to understand and survive under conditions of confinement. And yet, as the narrator of “On Intonation,” another stoker like Hilbig, concludes, in an uncharacteristic moment of what could be gratitude or even hopefulness, it would be impossible to forget “the perception granted me in the darkness. In that three-month long night, when I barely saw an hour of daylight […] but where I may have managed to peer through the darkness.”

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Featured image: Franz Marc. Birth of the Wolves, 1913. Gift of Collection Société Anonyme. Yale University Art Gallery (1941.555). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed July 29, 2024. Image has been cropped.