Hilbig’s position in the GDR became increasingly untenable. At last, in 1985, he was allowed to travel to the West to take advantage of the increasing offers of literary prizes, fellowships and readings. But he was a stranger in the West, alienated by consumer society and cut off from his roots; his ever-present drinking problems assumed alarming proportions. He travelled back and forth, torn between East and West, a period of his life reflected in his last novel, Das Provisorium (2000).26 In 1988, he settled in the town of Edenkoben with the writer Natascha Wodin; they were married from 1994 to 2002. Like all his intimate relationships, it was a difficult one. ‘He didn’t want to live, he only wanted to write. Life was a nuisance for him,’ Wodin recalled.27 For Hilbig, writing was a compulsion, always fraught with feelings of guilt: in writing, he abandoned others, especially his social peers — the ‘workers’—and his friends and family. The inability to cope with intimacy was a recurring theme in his life; he had a distant relationship with his only child, Constanze, born during a 1979–82 Berlin sojourn with journalist Margret Franzlik.28
In 1994, he and Wodin moved to reunited Berlin, settling in still-bohemian Prenzlauer Berg. Here too, Hilbig never felt truly at home. While his work continued to explore the dark landscape of the GDR, his public statements on Western media society and the shortcomings of reunification were scathing. Hilbig commanded too much respect, however, to be written off as a mere provocateur. He addressed the conflicts of his East — Western existence with an integrity and intensity which made him one of Germany’s most important writers. In 2002, Hilbig was awarded the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award, for his life’s work. But his powers were already ebbing; his last major work, the story collection Der Schlaf der Gerechten (The Sleep of the Righteous) appeared that same year. He died after a long struggle with cancer in 2007. Since his death, the radical outsider has become canonized, with Fischer Verlag releasing a definitive edition of his works, and his papers archived at the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
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I met Hilbig several times at readings in Berlin. He was a visibly awkward reader. Once he played the provocateur at a podium discussion, interrupting a highly theoretical discussion with the passionately stammered interjection: ‘But the main thing is imagination!’ He had a warm, avuncular aura, a kindly smile on his battered face, no trace of standoffishness — and yet was infinitely unapproachable. Later I met some of his old friends; each said, at some point, exactly what I had felt as his tongue-tied translator, trying to chat with him at the bar: No one could really know Hilbig.
Note on the Translation
‘I’, like all Hilbig’s prose, is characterized by swirling, labyrinthine, often stuttering syntax. Here it echoes the labyrinths wandered by the narrator — up above and down below — and the increasing dissolution of his ‘I’. More than any of his other works, ‘I’ mixes disparate language registers: the formal and the vernacular, the dark lyricism of the descriptive passages, the postmodern verbiage of the Scene, the soulless banalities of Stasi jargon and syntax, Feuerbach’s slightly skewed attempts at colloquialism. I have done my best to preserve its complexities and strangeness, rendering it readably without smoothing away rough edges. Above all, I have tried to convey the rhythms that carry the reader through even the most difficult passages. Lutz Kornel-Nitsche described to me Hilbig’s own attempts at translating the lyrics of ‘Maggie’s Farm’ by Bob Dylan. Hilbig spoke no English, but he would listen over and over again to the recordings to capture the sound of the original. For him, translating was ‘listening behind the wall’—an image strikingly echoed in ‘I’—a wall he would also describe as a curtain of rain, a rushing; white noise.
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Notes
Christa Wolf was listed as an IM for the years 1959–61. The Stasi complained of her lack of cooperation, and she was dropped from the rolls and subjected to nearly three decades of surveillance herself. Heiner Müller, who had suffered official reprisals due to his critical work in the 1960s, was accused of a decade-long Stasi connection beginning in the 1970s. See ‘Die ängstliche Margarethe’, Der Spiegel 4, 25 January 1993 (available at: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/-print/d-13680284.html [last accessed on 1 April 2015]); ‘Krieg der Köpfe’, Die Zeit 4, 22 January 1993 (available at: http://www.zeit.-de/1993/04/krieg-der-koepfe [last accessed on 1 April 2015]). [Back to Text]
Joachim Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur. Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Security Sector Literature: Writers and State Security in the GDR) (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1996), p. 640. [Back to Text]
Ibid., pp. 640–1. [Back to Text]
Elke Erb and Sascha Anderson, Preface to Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung. Neue Literatur der DDR (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1986) (available at: http://www.planetlyrik.de/sascha-anderson-elke-erb-hrsg-beruhrung-ist-nur-eine-randerscheinung-/2010/06/ [last accessed on 4 September 2014]). [Back to Text]
Sascha Anderson, interview in Stern (15 June 2001). [Back to Text]
Wolfgang Hilbig, quoted in Birgit Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig (Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2011), p. 101. [Back to Text]
Lutz Kornel-Nitsche, email to translator, 20 November 2013. [Back to Text]
See Karim Saab’s interview with Hilbig in Uwe Wittstock (ed.), Wolfgang Hilbig: Materialien zu Leben und Werk, (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag), p. 222–8: ‘They tried to recruit me, but I was not vulnerable to threats. In the boiler room, I could hardly sink any lower in the social hierarchy. [. .] Emotionally, I fled to my colleagues and said: The Stasi is here and is trying to recruit me! The workers [. .] gave me the security I needed’ (p. 223). Once he had thus ‘deconspired’, the Stasi ceased its recruitment attempts. [Back to Text]
Ibid., p. 224. [Back to Text]
Kornel-Nitsche, email to translator, 3 December 2012. [Back to Text]
Bärbel Heising, ‘Briefe voller Zitate aus dem Vergessen’: Intertextualität im Werk Wolfgang Hilbigs (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 188–91. [Back to Text]
Kornel-Nitsche, email to translator, 20 November 2012. [Back to Text]
Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig, pp. 21–2. [Back to Text]
Ibid., pp. 32–5; Kornel-Nitsche, personal conversations with translator. [Back to Text]
Ibid., p. 35. [Back to Text]
‘Ich komme aus dem Wald’, interview with Hilbig, Berliner Zeitung, 26 October 2002. [Back to Text]
Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig, pp. 43–4. [Back to Text]
Cited in Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig, p. 51. For many East German intellectuals, the venerable Leipzig Book Fair was a rare chance to get their hands on Western literature, reading, copying or even filching books at the stands. [Back to Text]