Only in the final phase of my work on the novel ‘I did I have to look up several so-called technical terms of Stasi language. The annotations in reference books on the Stasi sufficed for that. For me, the Stasi is an apparatus of diffusion; its practice was secret, indistinct, and to a large extent fictional (for the collaborators of the agency as well) [. .] and that was exactly the climate I wished to dwell in while writing the work. It would have been virtually a hindrance for me to know very much.6
Judging by my research for this translation, however, Hilbig’s vision of the Stasi’s workings is remarkably accurate, and his riffs on Stasi language show a preoccupation with its specific culture. In fact, Hilbig’s author’s note indicates that he interviewed IMs as part of his research. According to his friend Lutz Nitzsche-Kornel, he also examined friends’ Stasi files; he had explored Nazi language usage too (see Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii) and spoke of the need to similarly analyse GDR-jargon. And he had first-hand knowledge of the language of the Stasi — from interrogations he underwent during two months in prison.7
Hilbig was himself one of the ‘unofficial writers’ who were spied on by the Stasi and its informers such as Anderson. In prison, he was subjected to recruitment attempts, which he withstood. Yet he was drawn to describe the experience of the perpetrator, not the victim. He declined to pass moral judgement on the IMs, often implying that in different circumstances he might have broken down and collaborated.8
The fact that Hilbig did have significant knowledge of the Stasi makes it all the clearer that his emphasis on imagination and intuition is an artistic statement, and a courageous one. By claiming the ability to imagine, from within his own psyche, the ‘inner biography’ of a Stasi informer, and indeed the Stasi system, he implicates himself. More explicitly, he implicates himself as a writer by comparing writing and informing. ‘Not equating, comparing. [. .] Both, the informer and the writer, create a fiction of reality and a fiction of characters whom they ponder, sound out, observe.’9
For Hilbig, the ‘writer as informer’ is not a paradox or a postmodern peculiarity of Prenzlauer Berg, but an intrinsic human problem. Hilbig transcends a specific historical irony in part by seeking its roots in the individual psyche, in part by setting it seamlessly in a broader literary tradition. Kornel-Nitsche named Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’ as the primary inspiration for ‘I’ in its rhythm, syntax and narrative logic.10 The unreliable narrator of Poe’s novella, spiralling further and further away from reality, also seems echoed here. In Hilbig’s two epigraphs, the modish experimentalism of the Scene is set against Ludwig Tieck’s Romantic fairy story ‘Der Runenberg’, in which a hunter is lured into an underground realm. Other Romantic motifs, such as the doppelgänger, pervade the book as well. ‘Feuerbach’ harks back not only to the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who influenced Karl Marx, but also to his father Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, benefactor of the foundling Kaspar Hauser, another figure who haunts these pages.11 Though the novel is most clearly marked by the tension between Romanticism and postmodernism, there is an abundance of other literary references, as to Samuel Beckett (a strong influence on Hilbig) and Bertolt Brecht (‘you see best from the dark into the light’ plays on the final verse of ‘Mack the Knife’). Most telling, perhaps, is the implicit allusion to Hilbig’s idol, Arthur Rimbaud: ‘I is another.’12
With its richness and scope, since its first publication, Hilbig’s ‘I’ has only gained resonance as a universal parable of state power and paranoia, the structures of surveillance and secrecy in the individual psyche and society as a whole.
Wolfang Hilbig: Biography
Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in Meuselwitz near Leipzig. The town’s tunnel-ridden forest, open-cast mines and decrepit factories would haunt his work. His father was lost in the Battle of Stalingrad; he was raised by his mother and grandparents. As a young man (nicknamed ‘Kaschi’ after his Polish-born grandfather Kaszimier, a key father figure),13 Hilbig was known mainly as a boxer and gymnast. But early on, he began reading his way through the well-stocked town library, fascinated by Poe and the German Romantics, writing and sharing stories at a young age.14 This made him ‘an outsider in his own family’, especially for his illiterate grandfather. He invested his first pay cheque, as an apprentice lathe operator, in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann. During his military service, his scathing letters home first attracted the attention of the Stasi.15
Back in Meuselwitz, Hilbig worked in the factories, notably as a stoker. Superficially, he exemplified the type of the ‘worker-writer’ which the GDR sought to foster. In 1964, his factory delegated him to the local Railroad Workers’ Literary Working Group satirized in ‘I’, but his work was rejected as too negative and wilfully obscure and he was ultimately expelled. Besides, as he later claimed, he was the only real writer and real worker in the group.16 He had better luck in Leipzig’s budding alternative scene, where he met like-minded young writers such as Siegmar Faust and Gert Neumann.17 Faust was astounded by Hilbig’s knowledge of Western literature; ‘the riddle was solved when Hilbig took work leave to attend the next Leipzig Book Fair, spending days hanging around the West German stands and copying poems out of books.’18 Western music, such as Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, was another shared enthusiasm.19
For years, Hilbig travelled between Leipzig and his job in Meuselwitz. In the boiler room, he had the time and seclusion to write, producing poems and short prose pieces. The figure of the isolated stoker and the tension between the ‘worker’ and the ‘writer’ would pervade his work, which at that time remained unpublishable. In 1968, he placed an audacious ‘personal ad’ in the GDR’s main literary journal, Neue Deutsche Literatur: ‘Which German-language publisher would like to publish my poems? Serious offers only. .’20
The answer came nearly 10 years later. In 1976, Faust moved to West Germany, and, at first without Hilbig’s knowledge, had several of his poems published, drawing the attention of the prestigious S. Fischer Verlag. Fischer published Hilbig’s first poetry collection, abwesenheit, in 1979, followed by further collections and novels. Hilbig’s Western publications led to increased Stasi harassment. In 1978, he spent two months in prison on false charges of having burnt the GDR flag from the Meuselwitz town hall. There he was pressured to collaborate with the Stasi and provide information on his contacts; he refused.21 In 1979, he was fined 2,000 DM for a ‘currency offence’ in connection with the West German publication of abwesenheit.22
In a bold speech from 1980, the eminent East German writer Franz Fühmann (1922–84) lauded Hilbig as an example of a whole generation of ‘absent’ writers silenced in their homeland.23 Like Christa Wolf, Fühmann strove to criticize and reform the system from within, and he championed young nonconformists.24 In Hilbig, Fühmann saw a kindred spirit: an heir to the Romantics and Rimbaud, a truth-teller, a rebel against socialist realism. Hilbig continued to rebel; in 1981, he wrote an open letter to the deputy minister of culture: ‘I belong to a generation that will no longer let itself be censored.’25 Under Fühmann’s patronage, Hilbig published his first and only poetry collection in the GDR, stimme stimme, in 1983.