'I'

About ‘I’ (Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel proposal as submitted to Fischer Verlag)

The prose piece entitled ‘I ’ (I envision a novel-length work of 150–200 pages) is the attempt to find a literary form for the ‘inner biography’ of a so-called IM (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter). An IM — the abbreviation has become almost universally familiar, at least since the collapse of the GDR — that is, an Unofficial Collaborator of the State Security Service of the GDR, reflecting on his existence as such in the first person, is the protagonist of the first part of the story. — Am I playing a role? the author asks himself.

As the public debates, mainly journalistic, on the subject of the ‘Stasi’ seem to have brought to light little of substance about such figures, who must have existed by the hundreds of thousands, it seems possible to me that what best suits the subject is a literary form — that is, a form that eschews the attempt to ‘clarify’. Indeed, so far we have had little illumination regarding the nature of IMs: this seems to be explained by the very so-called conspirative element surrounding such figures, who, after all, conduct their ‘clarification’ in the dark. — Reflecting on the conceptualization of such a protagonist, I asked myself a rather disturbing question: To what extent can the work of an informer be compared with the literary work of a writer? Immediately I told myself that the results are different. . but that posed the question of the extent to which a secret service, too, is dealing ‘only’ with a fiction of reality; and is this not in fact its intent? — I asked myself to what degree reality, in an IM’s reports for his superior, must be a fiction approaching a literary fiction. Isn’t an IM report also supposed to contain the greatest possible authenticity? How does an informer cope with this demand for authenticity when, in the dark of his underground work, he must forget his subjective interpretations in order to maintain his credibility? Or are the IM’s superiors — as a rule these superiors are able to psychologically assess the IM — not even interested in authenticity any more, only in reacting to their own image of reality? Couldn’t a clever informer hit upon the notion of reaching a consensus with his case officer on a fiction of reality. . on a reading of reality?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when several writers were exposed as Unofficial Collaborators of the Stasi, I was surprised only for a moment; immediately I asked myself whether a writer, in particular, must not be especially well equipped to report for a secret service. And perhaps, I said to myself, the loss of the ‘I’ experienced by a collaborator, who works in secret on an image of reality, can be compared with that experienced by a writer, who in the course of his work is confronted more than once with the question: Who or what does the thinking within me? — I am aware that I am posing the question of ‘vocation’ here in a very provocative fashion. But probably, literature can be expected to ‘clarify’ only by continually posing questions.

The second part of the story is a fictitious treatment of the IM’s background; he finds himself no longer able to precisely reconstruct the circumstances that led to his collaboration with the secret service. Here the text shifts entirely to a retrospective narrative, and the protagonist describes himself in the third person; his life story seems to have taken on a completely fictional character. And yet it is not an unusual life; it is one of the many fatherless lives of the post-war generation. Growing up in impoverished circumstances, confronted with adults who seemed to lack an ‘I’, the young man was forced to invent the parameters of his life, apparently helped by his introspective tendencies. Early on he occupied himself with writing attempts, and the only people who seemed to take these attempts seriously were members of the secret service.

In the third part of the story, the narrative shifts back to the first person. The hero as subject seems to have reorganized himself. But from this moment on, the author finds it necessary to use the quotation marks that belong to the title of the narrative of ‘I’.

Wolfgang Hilbig

Edenkoben, 12 August 1992