June 10, 2024
This radiant collection from Hilbig (1941–2007), originally published in 1982, combines fiction, journal entries, and travelogues to paint a picture of life in 1970s East Germany. In “Breaking Loose” and “Bungalows,” the unnamed narrator describes a walking tour through the countryside; the idyll of a rural lake in the first entry gives way to the “shabby” workers’ cabins in the second. Phantasmagoric imagery appears in “Thirst,” about the residents of a town who get ghoulishly drunk as a means of escaping the awful odor of a nearby detergent factory (“The thirst grows more pressing, more unstillable... it drips and runs from all the bodies”), and in the “The End of Night,” a gothic allegory about the ravages of time featuring a coachman with “snow white fingers skeletal hand.” “The Workers: An Essai” details factory workers’ and bosses’ mutual hatred of the stoker, a low-level employee who shovels coal to keep them all warm. Hilbig revisits that character in “The Stoker,” which finds the title character, who’s also a writer, demanding to be reassigned from the boiler room and fantasizing about finishing his novel. Not all the sketches hold the reader’s attention, but Hilbig’s bold lyricism stands out, as does his textured portrait of an artist’s disillusionment with East German communism. It’s a valuable time capsule.
June 15, 2024
Yearnings from East German writer Hilbig (1941-2007). Work and nature wrestle everywhere in these stories, first published in 1982 and newly translated from German. Hilbig's background as a millworker is present throughout the collection, often only by implication; the more peripheral his occupation is, the more interesting the stories are. "Idyll" begins like an Impressionist painting, indulging a na�ve scene of "enticing grass" and water that takes "the form of a noise suspended over the surroundings"--before a declension to labor and drudgery: "How dreary, how pathetic to work...how tiresome to know what country I live in." "Thirst" depicts, in similar detail, the ritual of getting drunk downwind of a soap factory. The narrator conjures "the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers"--the soap is composed of animal fat--and then says, "You must drink until all memory of that repulsive gas yields." When the story concludes, "He'd prefer the stench of a stable on the fields' edge," the daydreamed countryside is a foil for an absurd, industrial life. Later stories featuring a fugitive and a "pedo" prisoner offer new settings but similar vivid accounts of places that exist only in the characters' minds. The mechanical description of pedophilia--"a sexual predilection for immature things, botched techniques, devices rendered nearly unusable by their incomplete construction"--mirrors Hilbig's proposed explanation of factory work to a "visitor from Mars": "producing machines to manufacture machine parts for assembling machines to manufacture other machines," and so on. Each is a trap to escape. Hilbig wrote poetry as well as prose, and his tone is often conversational, his grammar loose with long or unfinished sentences. Sometimes, though, the simplest turns of phrase delight. Indulging a daydream, he writes, "I said it as though I were learning to talk." Evocative depictions of work, confinement, and the fantasy of escape.
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