The Stoker

A poet appears at the family doorstep. He has been gone for years, living in another country where he can write according to his own principles rather than those dictated by the state. His career took off after he emigrated, but here at home there’s unfinished business. There are belongings to collect and goodbyes to say. The poet had to wade through reams of paperwork and official correspondence to make this journey back. The border is a perpetually militarized zone, interlaced with razor wire and gun emplacements. But reaching his destination only compounds the grief. In his hometown, the poet is assailed by painful memories of forced labor and mass graves. What he cannot remember haunts him. His father vanished decades ago, swallowed up by war when the poet was still an infant. The poet’s own long absence has made him a stranger to his young daughter, whom he left behind. But lingering too long means running the risk of imprisonment. Informants will make sure that any provocative statement he makes gets repeated to the authorities. The homecoming must be brief. “The darkness of the shadow I cast was impenetrable, without a word I went up to the apartment that afternoon to collect my pitiful belongings. I loaded my chattels onto geriatric shoulders and left.”

Wolfgang Hilbig relates this episode in his short story “Les Adieux,” which details his expatriation from East Germany and the consequences of that decision for his family. During the late 1970s and early ’80s, he swiftly rose to prominence for his unsparing portraits of working-class life under communism, but from the jump this critical position coexisted with, and was mutually dependent on, a pitiless drive toward self-examination and self-condemnation. “Les Adieux” is not a straightforward account of a dissident forced to make a cruel choice. Instead, it’s a portrait of a man at once finding his calling and fleeing his responsibilities. Two recent collections, Under the Neomoon (Two Lines Press, 2024), translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, and Territories of the Soul/On Intonation (Sublunary Editions, 2024), which I translated, document this intense transitional period.

The pieces collected in these books don’t map neatly onto any particular genre. They reside in, or perhaps subside into, the unsteady ground between essay, memoir, gothic fiction, and lyric poetry. The subjects are likewise elusive, encompassing history, industry, geology, and autobiography in equal measure. The transformational project of poetry as articulated by Rilke—“You must change your life”—is restated and recentered here. To change a life means to examine how life has been changed; in Hilbig’s case, changed by war, heavy industry, and the security state, among other forces. In his rise from anonymous industrial laborer to celebrated writer, Hilbig abandoned those who needed his love the most. He felt bad about it but made the choice anyway. It provided more material for him to mine, that word being key, since the coalfields of Hilbig’s native Thuringia furnished him with objects of ekphrastic contemplation, even as he later left that landscape and its people behind.

Hilbig was born in 1941 in the town of Meuselwitz, located less than an hour outside of Leipzig. He lost his father before he had a chance to remember him. A tailor by training, Max Hilbig was conscripted a few weeks after his son was born. Initially, Max received a comfortable posting as a locksmith in occupied France, where he could mail photographs and care packages back to his family. The situation changed drastically in late 1942, when he was sent to the Eastern Front. A few months later, Russian troops encircled his unit outside Stalingrad. His family never heard from him again. The loss was devastating but by no means unique, with more than one million killed at Stalingrad alone. The family had to live on like so many other families, German and Russian alike. Hilbig’s mother, Marianne, made a concerted effort to integrate herself into what became the German Democratic Republic. She worked as a salesperson, then later as a payroll clerk, and became a committed member of the SED, the ruling communist party of the nascent state. Nevertheless, she held out hope that her husband had survived, perhaps interned like millions of other German soldiers in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps.

As the years passed and the chances of him resurfacing diminished, Marianne idealized her husband, setting him up as an example that her son could never emulate. Both mother and maternal grandfather raised Hilbig along strict lines, beating him severely for minor infractions. This mixture of absence and terrifying physicality set the tone for Hilbig’s early life. From the loss of his father on, he was “a child posthumous of all origins,” as he later wrote in the story “On Intonation,” but a child who had to share cramped living space with his surviving family. For lack of suitable room, mother and son shared a bed well into Hilbig’s adolescence. His private writings and recollections identify this as a deep source of shame and revulsion, aspects of which likely fed into his troubled relationships with women. By contrast, the world of adult men and fathers seemed to be a foreign country, a vast open landscape, mysterious, at once enticing and threatening, much like Russia itself had seemed to the soldiers who invaded it:

once more I heard me
             a child again
wrestling words, terror at the morning gray
last of the houses swam the cold wind
from sight the steppeland drifted away
and who had carried us remained unsaid
 
— (from “for n.”)

This interplay between intolerable confinement and deadly freedom animates much of Hilbig’s work. His writing is populated with petrified men, living statues, who, unable to advance, are driven along by a landscape more fluid than they are. Bombs and borders might move, but human beings? Not so much.

The war inflicted more damage than just the loss of a father. As a mining and industrial center, Meuselwitz was a site of forced labor during the Holocaust. A satellite unit of Buchenwald concentration camp was established in the town, and from his house Hilbig could see inmates, predominantly women, marched down the street. During icy conditions, their wooden clogs slipped on the pavement. Death from overwork was common among the prisoners. Because of its strategic importance, Meuselwitz was also twice subjected to aerial bombardment. Residents took shelter deep in the coal mines, which formed a system of tunnels beneath the city, waiting out the assault in complete darkness, then reemerging to find their homes reduced to ash. These events formed the deepest substrate of Hilbig’s memory. While his father was merely a good name, a lost ideal his family measured the young Hilbig against, mass death was concrete. For decades after, memories of the Holocaust and the Allied bombing campaigns imbued the workaday infrastructure of his home with terrifying afterimages.

Your gaze stays fixed on the ground,— and suddenly a vision, the cobblestones resemble a seamless expanse of skullcaps arranged one after another after another. Skulls, polished smooth by the soles of those who, for their part, are saved from sinking into the earth—, saved by the edifice of dead pressed head-to-head, back-to-breast, shoulder-to-shoulder within the bedrock.

This is not the elegant style of Hilbig’s compatriot W.G. Sebald, in which atrocities are intimated by a stroll through a civilized countryside. This is the recrossing of hostile territory, territory that was, not so long ago, filled with imminent danger, not merely from a conceptual burden of history but from real hazards, high explosives and burning rubble that killed with indifference, both the free and the interned, perpetrator and victim.

Efforts to rebuild brought another kind of devastation. In Hilbig’s work, the damage from war and the damage from industry are often indistinguishable. Much of this ambiguity stems from the intensive nature of coal mining in Germany. The country largely lacks domestic energy sources, except for a variety of brown or lignite coal, which is found abundantly in Hilbig’s home region. Due to its low carbon content, lignite requires a tremendous amount of processing to make it a viable energy source. Its mining often necessitates huge open excavations. In “On Intonation,” a night watchman reflects on the intense rhythmic quality of the weather as it rushes through the ruined landscape:

Perhaps the storm, if it comes, might blow the rain away, but it doesn’t come, it exhausts itself with a few sobs, following a sort of aerial phonetic vacuum, and falls wearily into the huge craters of the open-pit mines, which surround the municipal works for a radius of kilometers.

Isolated in his cabin, the watchman pictures himself simultaneously above and below the ground, flying in an airplane above the storm and swallowed by the accumulated muck and rotten vegetation strewn about the polluted landscape. The constant hum of aircraft turbines high overhead is a bridge between past and present, similar to the aforementioned skull-like cobblestones. Temporal continuity inheres in the omnipresent mechanical clatter of elements beating against aging infrastructure. Even in the nocturnal isolation of his cabin, the watchman is bombarded by noise. It forms the basis of a patchwork metaphysics, set down, or rather dropped, by a creator as indifferent and mechanistic as his creation.

Hilbig was never promised a career, in literature or anything else. A career wasn’t something that boys from Meuselwitz had. Hilbig was expected to finish compulsory education requirements and then work in the local mines and factories. He did this, completed his formal schooling by eighth grade, and then apprenticed as a machinist in a toolmaking factory. But he was also a voracious autodidact. Pulp literature was his first love, especially westerns and adventure novels. These were difficult to acquire, not just because of the austere circumstances of Germany’s immediate postwar period but because educational authorities often banned such books under the category of “Schund und Schumtzliteratur”: trashy and indecent literature. Whether the books were confiscated or simply unavailable, Hilbig wrote to continue the narratives he loved, forming a kind of adolescent pulp samizdat with a friend. Even as he matured into a professional writer with a reputation for moral seriousness, Hilbig often returned to his roots in “Schumtzliteratur,” reading science fiction novels and watching horror movies in preparation for his nightly writing sessions.

He also studied the classics which, because they were printed before the war, were widely available. In his own self-directed way he became an intensely erudite writer. German Romantics such as Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffmann, along with Symbolists like Rimbaud, were formative influences. Their visionary or grotesque qualities, masked by their inclusion in the canon, cut against the routine of factory work and stood as a counterforce against the staid conventions of realism, socialist or otherwise. With their haunted landscapes, filled with ruins and phantasmagoria, these antique and outmoded schools better depicted Hilbig’s environment than any mode of realism, as indicated by his poem “voices voices”:

but rimbaud (guttered from my mouth)
where are we now say who
drowned what we sing
 
the wood has gone sour
sapped and soundless
 
in courtyards bottles mounded
smashed the half of them
sawdust moldering wet ash
rotten boards bricks
broken – a din
         a deadened clatter

Hilbig’s poems further distill the intoxicated atmosphere of Romanticism and Symbolism. Punctuation is reduced or nonexistent, with sentences running against each other, jumbled by abrupt line breaks. Neologisms and technical terminology run parallel with antique allusions, not only from Novalis or Hoffmann but also Luther’s translation of the Bible. The feeding of a furnace and the feeding a sacrament become one.

Hilbig’s narrators search for truths concealed in their surroundings, and, to their horror, often find them, in a sort of proletarian gothicism that continually pushes against but never quite violates the principles of a naturalistic universe. Factories shelter a menagerie of creatures, constructs, and specters. Mirrors serve a dual purpose, ensnaring the narrators in phantasmagoria but also reflecting harsh light on their diminished circumstances. In “The Etiquette of Windows” an expatriate writer is disturbed by the images, perhaps more than the reflections, he sees in his dirty apartment windows: “The daemons sit within the windowpanes . . . and darkness, where only a desk lamp burns. The doubled panes—blue sometimes from their substance, blue sometimes from their semblance, which should be beautiful—both show their jaundiced physiognomies, which turn and face me every time I look over.” These fantastical passages are not escapist flight from maturity, but Hilbig’s attempt to work out his own method for facing life as he experienced it, both grim and strange, where other techniques of literature had failed or were simply unavailable.

From the mid-’60s until around 1980, when he declared himself an “independent writer” on his tax forms, Hilbig worked primarily as a stoker, feeding boilers with the lignite coal mined in the region. This job (it was decidedly not a profession) was rich with literary associations. Later, once Hilbig had achieved some notoriety as a poet, critics identified him with the Stoker, the titular character from the first chapter of Franz Kafka’s uncompleted novel Amerika, who guides the protagonist, Karl Rossman, through a labyrinthine steamship anchored in New York Harbor. But such journeys, for Hilbig as well as for his narrators, were indefinitely curtailed as the borders of East Germany closed in 1961. Working as a stoker was a practical decision. The job involved periods of intense physical labor, shoveling heavy loads of coal into the furnaces, but also long stretches of idleness, when his duties were reduced to that of a custodian or night watchman. These lulls allowed Hilbig to read and write, there being few opportunities to do so otherwise. But the irregular hours and isolation took their toll, as the narrator of “On Intonation” confides: “Heating for winter has begun; if work gets out of hand, I’ll have to go all-in; on the other hand, having the night-watch, continuously now for almost three months, has brought me close to physical annihilation.”

This was a necessary job, but due to its irregular, unskilled nature, not a job that was particularly valued, even in a workers’ republic such as East Germany. Hilbig took contrarian satisfaction in the fact that stokers were classified as “laborers” according to Marxist theory, for their lack of revolutionary potential. The shovel and furnace, tools of the trade, did not fit with the rye, hammer, and compass of national heraldry. Marianne Hilbig was particularly disappointed in her son, whose choice of work, whether literary or industrial, represented a fall in social status for the family. The drive to steal time away, and the identification of writing with nonconformity, motivated Hilbig beyond any desire for critical acclaim or financial success. He could be immensely productive under adverse circumstances. But that drive to write no matter what tainted other claims on his attention, whether from a factory administrator or a wife, and it poisoned those relationships when that immense, but not inexhaustible, productivity failed him.

West Germany (FRG) maintained a lively interest in the culture of its communist neighbor. Relations between the two states were normalized in 1969, which allowed writers from East Germany (GDR) to publish in the West and occasionally visit for cultural functions. For both sides, this was more than just a program of soft power. The widespread perception was that division would last a long time. East and West would have to make their way separately in the world. The prospect of a wider readership and state support from the FRG enticed many writers. Hilbig was no exception, and he maintained correspondence with editors and publishers there. In the mid-’70s, a series of successful radio broadcasts of his work led to interest from S. Fischer Verlag, based in Berlin, which became Hilbig’s primary publisher throughout his career. But to publish abroad, Hilbig needed authorization from the GDR government. This was a difficult process that involved obtaining permissions from cultural and tax authorities—not easy for a known troublemaker like Hilbig to acquire. In May 1978, a GDR flag was taken from the city hall in Meuselwitz and burned. Though his involvement in the incident is murky (official documents are vague on this point), Hilbig was arrested and jailed for two months while the authorities mulled over possible charges. During his incarceration, Hilbig read American science fiction and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a characteristic mix for him. The Ministry of Security, the Stasi, attempted to recruit Hilbig as an informant. He was facing a stiff penalty for desecrating the flag, up to five years in prison, but in the end he was never formally charged with any crime. Nevertheless, he was convinced that not only did he need to be published in the West but he also needed to immigrate. He would land himself in too much trouble otherwise.

In 1979, S. Fischer Verlag published Hilbig’s first full-length collection of poetry, absence (1979). The book won acclaim, and awards and invitations to speak began to filter over the border. During Hilbig’s negotiations for travel, cultural authorities in the GDR worried that the critical praise was politically motivated, and that awards and speaking engagements were merely a ruse for the West to propagandize against communism. Hilbig’s career was at stake, and so he was conciliatory and promised to represent the East German state in a positive light. He was allowed travel to the FRG for the first time in 1983, to collect the Brothers Grimm Prize, the first of many awards he received during his lifetime. With the exception of his novel ‘I’ (1993), Hilbig was not a commercially popular author, and professional recognition from the various official quarters of the FRG, both before and after reunification, provided a necessary supplement to his income. Early on, this arrangement was jeopardized when an informant reported that Hilbig was comparing the GDR to an open-air prison. Further negotiations were necessary, but the open-air prison allowed him to travel again, in 1985, for a yearlong paid fellowship courtesy of the German Literary Fund. The permit was extended multiple times and Hilbig lived in the West for the duration, short as it was, of the East German state.

These years should have been a triumph for Hilbig. He had, in the most literal sense, toiled in obscurity, but chaos in his personal life threatened to overwhelm the career that he took so long to cultivate. As he dramatized in “Les Adieux,” he was not just expatriating to pursue his writing career but to escape the demands of family. He had become “a selfish refugee . . . fleeing the farewells of women and children in need of [my] love.” In the late ’60s he began a relationship with Margret Franzlik, a radio journalist with whom he had a daughter, Constance, in 1980. The family initially lived in Berlin, but due to the freezing temperatures in their apartment divided their time between the city and his mother’s house in Meuselwitz. Hilbig was getting around in other ways as well. By 1982 the couple had separated and Hilbig lived in Leipzig with the translator Silvia Morawetz. In 1986 after his residence in West Germany became permanent, he met Natascha Wodin, a writer of Ukrainian background and a translator of Russian literature. Wodin lived with another man at the time, and the failed menage brought on a bout of drinking that nearly killed Hilbig, an episode portrayed in his novel The Interim (2001).

Given the disorder he left in his wake, how could Hilbig claim that he was upholding artistic or political principles? The answer is that he never claimed anything of the kind—or, at least he never asserted that his motives were unmixed, making plain the sordid circumstances behind his entrée into West Germany’s literary community:

How unmistakably sudden does love become just a thing I rob from another, become a thing I can only feel by denying to another. And it will be robbed from me, too, when I arrive at the place my eye rushes toward. In this city, treading the bodies of the departed, a quite wicked God, faced with the choice, tramples over his children with every step.

Hilbig ameliorated his guilt with alcohol, but when that proved unviable, he quit drinking with the help of Wodin. As a substitute, he threw himself into another addiction: writing. The late ’80s and early ’90s was a productive period, bringing about career-defining works such as ‘I’, Hilbig’s vision of the life of a Stasi informant, and Old Rendering Plant (1991), a gothic novella about a boy obsessed with an abattoir and the mysterious disappearances tied to it.

Having already said his goodbyes to the GDR, reunification was a muted affair for Hilbig. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he watched television broadcasts from his new home at Edenkoben in the former Rhineland. Despite what life in the West afforded him, he felt out of place in the new political and economic order. He turned his critical eye toward consumer society, identifying department stores with “shopaholic, shopaphillic horde[s]” as sites of particular evil. A move back to the unified Berlin exacerbated his pessimism. Interest in the culture of the GDR waned as those in the former FRG looked on their new compatriots as backward and financially dependent. Hilbig had always been uncomfortable in official circles, despite the accolades and financial support given to him, and as the communist era faded, this discomfort became increasingly mutual. In speeches and interviews, Hilbig warned against neglecting those who had grown up in the GDR, who were his people despite everything. For these sympathetic remarks, he was criticized for his apparent “Ostalgie,” or nostalgia for the communist era, a frivolous charge to make against someone who had been imprisoned, though not charged, for burning the flag. An unofficial policy of silence around the era, or at least a policy of disregard, was forming. It was better to shut up and move on, but this was a skill that Hilbig lacked under any system of government.

Hilbig’s productivity declined in the late 1990s. Diminished income and a disordered living situation put increasing strain on his relationships. The marriage to Natascha Wodin, begun in 1994, resulted in separation four years later and divorce in 2002. Disturbed by the September 11th attacks in the US and by the dissolution of his marriage, Hilbig began to drink again. In late 2006, friends brought him to another emergency clinic for his alcoholism, having had to pry open his apartment door with an ax to rescue him. A few months later, in February 2007, Hilbig broke his leg after falling in his kitchen and didn’t receive help for two days. An X-ray (of the wrong leg) revealed metastatic cancer. Chemotherapy was attempted twice before Hilbig suspended treatment. He died in 2007 at age 65 and was buried in Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin, alongside eminent poets and thinkers, including Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Marcuse. Hilbig had long observed, with no small amount of delighted irony, that the partisans of the Marxist tradition were always easier to buy, or at least borrow from a library, in the West.

More than three decades after the dissolution of the GDR, it’s fair to ask about Hilbig’s relevance in the contemporary world. The walls were pulled down, the barbed wire scrapped, but Hilbig did not see reunification as the end of authoritarianism in Germany. Despite the country’s public image for environmentalism, massive strip mining still occurs in the former FRG. As recently as January 2023, police drove protesters out of Lützerath, North Rhine-Westphalia, the entire village having been evicted to make way for expanded coal mining operations. But Hilbig saw his work as more than an allegory for German society at large. Using the base materials of industrial life, he created alien landscapes that were hostile but full of wonder. Though he was born in landlocked Thuringia, the sea was a crucial image that he returned to again and again. It was a space of infinite transformation, confirmed by the fact—which Hilbig loved to repeat—that during prehistory his home region had once been underwater. During the last month of his life, Hilbig visited the Baltic coast, recalling a trip he had made decades earlier, in the late ’60s, when he was finding his voice as a writer but had yet to be recognized by any authority but himself. It is this sort of coastal landscape in which Hilbig sets his 1985 poem, “rest in flight”:

            awaiting—
                        oh once more to rest an evening
            before the endlessness of night
            that drives us to lie with all cattle
            and is by castoff shoes collecting
 
            inert
                        an hour more atop the wall
            we face a flood now soon at hand
            our skulls silent, feet in the sand
            and see the breath gone from our chest
                        see wrath
            the gold still apparent in our eyes
            when exhausted we come to rest
            an hour more in darkness deepening
 
            and think on this day that lately warmed us
            an evening immense that bravely sunned us
            while the distant copper rang reddening
            the horizon’s great gong already deadening

After reunification, the poem was interpreted as a prophetic statement, and perhaps it is, although not one of narrow political import. Though Hilbig never lived near the sea, it was a comforting image for him. It could petrify and redissolve itself, disclosing a million secrets. But these properties did not extend to the poem’s speaker nor to the poet himself, one and the same, who had to remain atop the seawall, watching the sun set.