'I'

Afterword by Isabel Fargo Cole

‘I’: Historical Background

The years following German reunification in 1990 were a wrenching time in the ‘new German states’. The East German dissidents and civil rights activists who had brought down the Berlin Wall were overwhelmed by the rapid reunification, unable to navigate the new political system and assert their visions and concerns. Meanwhile, the opening of the Stasi files brought a long series of painful disclosures about some of East Germany’s most respected political and cultural figures — most spectacularly in the literary scene.

When ‘I’ first appeared in 1993, it was praised as the first serious literary exploration of the East German surveillance state and its demise — and its portrait of an underground writer turned informer caused a stir. That January, the playwright Heiner Müller and the novelist Christa Wolf had been exposed as ‘Unofficial Collaborators’ (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, IMs) for the Stasi.1 The shock waves were immense: Müller and Wolf were internationally respected for their artistry and their critical stances.

Still, Müller and Wolf were establishment figures who identified with socialist ideals and chose to work within the system. More shocking were the revelations about the ‘underground scene’, long lionized as a hotbed of opposition. Its chief impresario was the charismatic poet Sascha Anderson (b. 1953) from Dresden. In the 1980s he dominated the Scene in Berlin — Prenzlauer Berg and beyond, organizing events and editing samizdat and officially sanctioned publications in East and West. He co-edited a landmark anthology of young, ‘unofficial’ literature Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung. Neue Literatur der DDR (Connection Is Just a Fringe Phenomenon: New GDR Literature) published in West Germany in 1985. In 1986, Anderson moved to West Berlin but played an active role in the literary scenes on both sides of the Wall. 2

In 1991, singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann accused Anderson (‘Sascha Arsehole’) of having worked for the Stasi. It emerged that Anderson had worked as an IM since 1975, sent to Berlin for the express purpose of gaining control of the Scene:

By 1984 he had reached his goal [. .] he pulled all the strings [. .]. His verdicts held sway in East and West alike [. .]. Anderson’s main task was to depoliticize the Prenzlauer Berg Scene. That meant that he committed the younger poets and painters in his circle to an aesthetic master plan and systematically marginalized and vilified the older, politically engaged or active authors. .3

Anderson was not the only writer to straddle the line between the ‘unofficial literary scene’ and ‘unofficial collaboration’, but his central role made his betrayal truly devastating. Among his peers, anger mingled with defensiveness, with some critics going so far as to call the entire Scene a ‘simulation’ of the Stasi.

Simulation, a favourite term of Jean Baudrillard, points to the sort of hip postmodern attitudes which Hilbig takes to task, and which Anderson embodied. Anderson propagated an experimental, ironically anti-political literature which many in the GDR found liberating. In a dogma-dominated society like that of the GDR, the eschewal of ideology could count as an ideological statement, the apolitical as political. Drawing upon Western poststructuralist thinkers, this literature focused on ‘language as such’: ‘a response to [. .] an increasingly mechanical public and official language of administration and declamation. This new tendency supersedes a more “content”-oriented literary culture created over the past decades by the generation of established [. .] GDR writers [. . such as] Christa Wolf.’4

Anderson gradually admitted his IM activities. His theoretical and psychological explanations for his behaviour were widely regarded as self-serving, even pathological obfuscation. ‘Betrayal is the right word,’ he told Stern magazine in 2001, ‘. . It was also a betrayal of my own “I”, an “I” that I still reject.’5 Still active in the Berlin literary scene, Anderson remains a figure of morbid fascination. In 2002, Anderson published a lyrical recollection (‘not an autobiography in the usual sense’): Sascha Anderson.

The story of Sascha Anderson, who was his own postmodern fictional creation, or the fictional creation of the Stasi, or the purveyor of fictions to the Stasi, or about the Stasi, or all of the above, clearly resonates with Hilbig’s novel. However, ‘I’ is not ‘Sascha Anderson’, nor indeed any other specific IM. Appearing at the height of the scandals, uncannily prescient about the Stasi’s modus operandi and the psychology of collaboration, ‘I’ was widely read as a roman-à-clef, but Hilbig felt misunderstood by this reading. He always emphasized that he had little knowledge of the inner workings of the Stasi (or, for that matter, of the Berlin Scene), and did not view his own Stasi files until after completing the manuscript.

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.

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]

Ibid., p. 47. [Back to Text]

Cited in ibid., p. 45. [Back to Text]

Ibid., p. 68. [Back to Text]

Ibid., p. 70. [Back to Text]

Franz Fühmann, Praxis und Dialekt der Abwesenheit (Practice and Dialect of Absence) in Franz Fühmann: Werke, vol. 6 (Rostock: Hinstorff, 1993), pp. 459–74. [Back to Text]

A year later, Fühmann collaborated with Anderson on an anthology of young writers which was ultimately unable to appear in the GDR. It served as the basis for the later Berührung. See Klaus Michael, ‘Eine verschollene Anthologie’ (A Lost Anthology) in Peter Böthig and Klaus Michael (eds), Machtspiele: Literatur und Staatssicherheit (Power Games: Literature and National Security) (Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig, 1993), pp. 202–16. [Back to Text]

Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig, p. 74. [Back to Text]

Ibid., p. 85. [Back to Text]

Hilbig: Eine Erinnerung (Hilbig: A Reminder), documentary film, directed by Siegfried Ressel (a + r Films, 2011). [Back to Text]

Dahlke, Wolfgang Hilbig, p. 71. [Back to Text]