WOLFGANG HILBIG
The dream of the righteous
trans.: Alexandra Pavlova,
ed. river, P. 208

I let go and picked up The Dream of the Righteous in March – a difficult month for everyone – until, finally, a small piece of darkness remained in my hand. So I could describe this dark piece instead of criticizing it, following Hilbich’s way of describing things like ash pans or smoking buildings, but not knowing if that would get me anywhere.

Hilbich is not exactly a writer. It’s more like a camera. He rolls along a rusty rail, crosses East Germany, merging into a broken, completely dissolved landscape, to find himself in the apartment where there is a table in the middle of the kitchen, where he writes by the faint light of a lamp. Now that I think about it, Hilbich is a mouse that runs through the mud and gnaws at the places where he lived as if they were a stack of paper.

I don’t think his imagery deserves comparison with Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as noted on the back cover of the publication, or with the atmosphere in Tarr’s films, which are, after all, a long-awaited rip-off of Soviet cinema. Hilbich doesn’t need characters, dialogue, fiction. He doesn’t need anything.

Jumping from page to page, we meet our everyday life upside down, its negative…

For example, in the introduction to the short story of the same name, the German author stands in darkness and describes it from the inside out, as if stuck in a cuboidal tumor full of viruses, or like thick black grass that enters us and occupies the space around us. Just like his works: you constantly feel that you are stepping on something dirty, sticky, but at the same time you want to stay there as long as possible, out of respect and curiosity for the unlived life.

His style has the density and moisture of the grass, and Hilbich avoids spaces between words. He does not allow himself. One word drowns and drowns in the letters of the next, forcing the layer of his childhood that he does not want to forget to go away. After all, his adult life, presented in the second part of the collection, is its demonic continuation.

He was born in 1941, grew up in the city where a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp operated, and these years belong to him. His weapon. The denser his style, the more inaccessible to the enemy memory. Servant of Oblivion.

How does he manage to write an entire novella with a single theme of countless bottles heaped in heaps in the cellar like soldiers’ bones, with “desperate and pernicious love of freedom of empty bottles” and his emotional strength in full development? It seems incredible to me. I don’t know of any director who has made a film like this, and perhaps very few screenwriters have written the same.

Probably Bruno Schultz in The Cinnamon Shops – with a prose like a honey web – is no worse, and certainly Danilo Keys in Early Suffering, a series of stories from his childhood in Yugoslavia, which I would put next to Sleep. , without delay. World War II, at least, produced great literature.

What is hidden under the soil of the letter? Hilbich constantly returns to this issue, from the first to the seventh story, and wrestles with it. What is behind the words? Generations, harsh winters, trash, lost love, intelligence agencies, discomfort, anger, memories. The remnants of the war placed on the survivors. Without a polygon, words are not worth it.

“Is there still flesh behind scriptures?” Or just write and nothing else? Does this letter really exist now only for itself, or was there once something else behind it? asks the narrator’s double – a kind of chthonic reflection – in The Dark Man, the last and probably the most beautiful story in the collection, because there he ventures into a larger imaginary gesture, even if he sometimes falls into its traps, but without renouncing the root of the words of those who are indifferent to fiction in their souls.

Kransakhorkai puts it well in the preface to the book: for Hilbich, East Germany is the world. And because we are part of the world, we belong to its narratives, which negates what I have argued above. Jumping from page to page, we are faced with our daily life, turned upside down, its negative. Literature is a metronome. It measures the pulse of an unknown person, which we appropriate.

I read Hilbig’s stories as if someone wakes up and falls asleep with a piece of black bone in their hands. The dream of the righteous and the unrighteous. Let April come. “Someday I will move the cubic volume of the night, someday I must roll it over her body.”