What do you think?
Rate this book
Under the Neomoon
An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of humanity’s violent folly and the importance of storytelling from down below, from the wage worker’s hovel.
An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams.
An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams.
172 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
11 people are currently reading
287 people want to read
About the author
Wolfgang Hilbig
36 books51 followersWolfgang Hilbig was born on 31 August 1941 in the small town of Meuselwitz in Saxony, Germany, about 40 kilometers south of Leipzig. Hilbig’s childhood in Meuselwitz, a target for Allied bombings during World War II and later the site for a thriving brown coal industry (much to the detriment of the environment) during the East German era, has had an influence on much of the writer’s work. Hilbig grew up with his mother and her parents in Meuselwitz, never having known his father, who was reported missing in 1942 during the Battle of Stalingrad.
At first Hilbig favoured poetry, but his works
remained unpublished in the GDR. He received attention from the West however, as a result of his poems in the Anthology 'Cries For Help From The Other Side' (1978). His first volume of poetry, Absence (1979) was published by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. For this, Hilbig was fined.
At the end of the 1970s, Hilbig gave up his day job and began to work exclusively as a writer. With the support of Franz Fühmann, a few of his poems were printed in a GDR newspaper for the first time. His prose anthology, Unterm Neomond (1982) was published by S. Fischer, followed by Stimme Stimme (1983), a prose and poetry anthology published by Reclam in Leipzig
In 1985 Hilbig gained a visa for West Germany valid until 1990. During this time he published not only further poetry and prose, but also his first novel, Eine Uebertragung (1989), which was received well by literary critics.
Even after reunification, the main themes of his work remained the dual-existence of working and writing in the GDR and the search for individuality. His further works include: his second novel, Ich (1993); his collections of short stories, such as Die Arbeit an den Oefen (1994) and Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1996); and his third novel Das Provisorium (2000). Autobiographical themes are often prevalent.
Awards
1983 Hanau Brothers-Grimm-Prize
1989 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
1993 Brandenburg Literature Prize
1997 Fontane Prize (the Berlin Academy of Arts)
2002 Georg Büchner Prize
At first Hilbig favoured poetry, but his works
remained unpublished in the GDR. He received attention from the West however, as a result of his poems in the Anthology 'Cries For Help From The Other Side' (1978). His first volume of poetry, Absence (1979) was published by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. For this, Hilbig was fined.
At the end of the 1970s, Hilbig gave up his day job and began to work exclusively as a writer. With the support of Franz Fühmann, a few of his poems were printed in a GDR newspaper for the first time. His prose anthology, Unterm Neomond (1982) was published by S. Fischer, followed by Stimme Stimme (1983), a prose and poetry anthology published by Reclam in Leipzig
In 1985 Hilbig gained a visa for West Germany valid until 1990. During this time he published not only further poetry and prose, but also his first novel, Eine Uebertragung (1989), which was received well by literary critics.
Even after reunification, the main themes of his work remained the dual-existence of working and writing in the GDR and the search for individuality. His further works include: his second novel, Ich (1993); his collections of short stories, such as Die Arbeit an den Oefen (1994) and Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1996); and his third novel Das Provisorium (2000). Autobiographical themes are often prevalent.
Awards
1983 Hanau Brothers-Grimm-Prize
1989 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
1993 Brandenburg Literature Prize
1997 Fontane Prize (the Berlin Academy of Arts)
2002 Georg Büchner Prize
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 25, 2025
Stunning, singular — highest recommendation. An authorial voice without ready points of comparison. Surreal stories of working life, daily life — paranoia, drudgery, jail time. As soon as I finished it I reached for another Hilbig book; the connection was for me immediate.
June 12, 2024
Reading the Century 1982 —by coincidence the last two books I finished were both published by Two Lines and both first published in their original languages in 1982.
I am always excited when Two Lines puts out a new translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s work. This book of related stories is very good, although a little over the top at times, stretching some sentences and the angst a little too far. But as always Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation is admirable. She immerses you in Hilbig’s East German factory complex miasma, and the character’s convoluted, diverging author/ prisoner/ stoker mind, perfectly.
From Wikipedia, this appears to be almost the earliest book Hillbig published. It was written before the Wall came down. The character here seems more actively frustrated and rebellious than the narrators of his later work. There, the tone is disillusioned and resigned as he considers a reunited Germany that falls short of the hopes and mores of many East Germans, from what I’ve read. . He also directly confronts the state apparatus in the book, as the narrator of one story is imprisoned and then later, the same or a different narrator finds his planned one-man insurrection blunted by the co-optive snares of an administration far more adept at power games than he is.
I particularly recommend the story The Workers an Essai.
Many of the blurbs refer to Hilbig’s status as one of the major German authors of the 20th century. He should be read more widely.
I am always excited when Two Lines puts out a new translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s work. This book of related stories is very good, although a little over the top at times, stretching some sentences and the angst a little too far. But as always Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation is admirable. She immerses you in Hilbig’s East German factory complex miasma, and the character’s convoluted, diverging author/ prisoner/ stoker mind, perfectly.
From Wikipedia, this appears to be almost the earliest book Hillbig published. It was written before the Wall came down. The character here seems more actively frustrated and rebellious than the narrators of his later work. There, the tone is disillusioned and resigned as he considers a reunited Germany that falls short of the hopes and mores of many East Germans, from what I’ve read. . He also directly confronts the state apparatus in the book, as the narrator of one story is imprisoned and then later, the same or a different narrator finds his planned one-man insurrection blunted by the co-optive snares of an administration far more adept at power games than he is.
I particularly recommend the story The Workers an Essai.
Many of the blurbs refer to Hilbig’s status as one of the major German authors of the 20th century. He should be read more widely.
July 14, 2024
Hilbig's first published work. A cerebral and poetic book of short stories on life and work in East Germany in the late 1970's.
August 4, 2024
Artificial primordiality, cicada weather, thought up by the moon brain, under the pallor of the mental firmament where they breaks over rapid far-from-human sentence fragments describing the collapse of the town, under the neo moon, half
seen and off again,
the beginning is open
Under the Neomoon is Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of the 1982 collection Unterm Neomond by Wolfgang Hilbig. His writing, as rendered into English by Fargo Cole, has been one of the highlights of my reading in the last decade, and I would include him in my personal Panthéon of favourite all-time authors.
Tony of Tony's Reading List reviewed the original German version on his blog in 2022, concluding 'Unterm Neomond is another wonderful little collection, but if you want to try it in English, you’ll have to take the matter up with Fargo Cole', so I was delighted to see that she has indeed now translated the work for those of us who abandoned German more than forty years ago when it came to make GCSE choices.
Under the Neomoon contains 12 pieces over 150 pages. Most are relatively short - a few pages - with the last piece The Stoker 44 pages.
The highlight for me of the shorter stories was Thirst, a Dantean portrayal of a pub in a town which seals itself off from the smell of the local rendering plant.
The Stoker was another highlight. The story is narrated by a man who works alone as a stoker on the night-shift in a factory, keeping the building warm for the workers the next morning, and who use (as did, I believe, Hilbig) his spare time during the shift, and his solitude, to work on his literary second career. The story itself has him taking a bus ride to another plant to pick up his annual bonus, but the journey takes on a nightmarish quality.
Overall, not the strongest of Hiblig's work in translation - there's a reason why other pieces were translated first and I'd start with the novella the Old Rendering Plant, or, for stories, the collection The Sleep of the Righteous. And my rating here is relative to these other works. But still a delight for Hilbig fans - and let's hope the remaining works are also translated in due course.
Extract from Thirst
Abends, in der sommerlichen Dämmerung, bei leichtem Südwestwind, füllen sich alle Straßen und Plätze dieser Stadt mit einem süßlichem, kaum zu ertragenden Leichengeruch.
In the evenings, in the summer twilight, with a southwest breeze blowing, all the town's streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers.
Everywhere windows are slammed shut, the few lone pedestrians withdraw into the crowded, hermetically shut pubs. Everyone knows it's the fumes from a factory on the outskirts that produces some sort of ingredients for detergents, where masses of cadavers, animal cadavers, are rendered and work begins at nightfall.
But none of the drinkers in the pubs know when the smell in the streets will lift, in their barrooms, too, the windows and doors are slammed shut, curtains are drawn, you settle in as though resolved to drink till the early daybreak, you shun the streets as though dreading an epidemic, you sit and drink in the awareness of a smell outside the doors, a smell casting, as a blue gas, a dull phosphor glow through the night, you think you hear it gnawing at the houses' outer skins, you think you hear desiccation spreading inward through the wood of the doorframes, you must drown this awareness within you.
You must drink until all memory of that repulsive gas yields to a drunken, reeling flood of thoughts that revolve around the barroom's increasingly inscrutable goings-on. Yellow and green are the hues of all things capable of warding off the pestilence. At the counter of yellow wood, fogged by dampness, about to vanish behind swaths of stale breath and tobacco smoke, beer's being poured in an endless series of glasses that race off to the tables, the tablecloths are swept to the floor, and on the wet wood the glasses slide faster into the splayed hands, lots and lots of yellow foam-crowned glasses that soon seem to merge, so that all at once you see them as a single wave of cool-bitter, white-yellow beer foam surging toward you, but still so shallow that it fails to reach your round, open mouth; it reaches waist-high, and from every opening, every sucking, protruding orifice, every hose-end, the unconsumed dregs flow back, trickling away in quick loops on the floorboards; the voices in the room have the raucous force of a storm, resounding in the breasts of the people around you, though their gaping mouths seem to release no sound.
Wolfgang Hilbig's fiction, with translations, where shown, by Isabel Fargo Cole
Unterm Neomond (1982), stories, translated as Under the Neomoon
my review
Der Brief (1985), 3 stories
Tony's review of (2/3rds of) the German original
Die Weiber (1987), novella, translated as The Females (2018)
my review
Eine Übertragung (1989), novel, as yet untranslated
Alte Abdeckerei (1991), novella, translated as Old Rendering Plant (2017)
my review
Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1992), novella, translated as The Tidings of the Trees (2018)
my review
»Ich« (1993), novel, translated as I (2015)
my review
Grünes grünes Grab (1993), stories, as yet untranslated
Tony's review of (2/3rds of) the German original
Die Arbeit an den Öfen (1994), stories, as yet untranslated
Das Provisorium (2000), novel, translated as The Interim (2021)
my review
Der Schlaf der Gerechten (2003), stories, translated as The Sleep of the Righteous (2015)
my review
seen and off again,
the beginning is open
Under the Neomoon is Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of the 1982 collection Unterm Neomond by Wolfgang Hilbig. His writing, as rendered into English by Fargo Cole, has been one of the highlights of my reading in the last decade, and I would include him in my personal Panthéon of favourite all-time authors.
Tony of Tony's Reading List reviewed the original German version on his blog in 2022, concluding 'Unterm Neomond is another wonderful little collection, but if you want to try it in English, you’ll have to take the matter up with Fargo Cole', so I was delighted to see that she has indeed now translated the work for those of us who abandoned German more than forty years ago when it came to make GCSE choices.
Under the Neomoon contains 12 pieces over 150 pages. Most are relatively short - a few pages - with the last piece The Stoker 44 pages.
The highlight for me of the shorter stories was Thirst, a Dantean portrayal of a pub in a town which seals itself off from the smell of the local rendering plant.
The Stoker was another highlight. The story is narrated by a man who works alone as a stoker on the night-shift in a factory, keeping the building warm for the workers the next morning, and who use (as did, I believe, Hilbig) his spare time during the shift, and his solitude, to work on his literary second career. The story itself has him taking a bus ride to another plant to pick up his annual bonus, but the journey takes on a nightmarish quality.
Overall, not the strongest of Hiblig's work in translation - there's a reason why other pieces were translated first and I'd start with the novella the Old Rendering Plant, or, for stories, the collection The Sleep of the Righteous. And my rating here is relative to these other works. But still a delight for Hilbig fans - and let's hope the remaining works are also translated in due course.
Extract from Thirst
Abends, in der sommerlichen Dämmerung, bei leichtem Südwestwind, füllen sich alle Straßen und Plätze dieser Stadt mit einem süßlichem, kaum zu ertragenden Leichengeruch.
In the evenings, in the summer twilight, with a southwest breeze blowing, all the town's streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers.
Everywhere windows are slammed shut, the few lone pedestrians withdraw into the crowded, hermetically shut pubs. Everyone knows it's the fumes from a factory on the outskirts that produces some sort of ingredients for detergents, where masses of cadavers, animal cadavers, are rendered and work begins at nightfall.
But none of the drinkers in the pubs know when the smell in the streets will lift, in their barrooms, too, the windows and doors are slammed shut, curtains are drawn, you settle in as though resolved to drink till the early daybreak, you shun the streets as though dreading an epidemic, you sit and drink in the awareness of a smell outside the doors, a smell casting, as a blue gas, a dull phosphor glow through the night, you think you hear it gnawing at the houses' outer skins, you think you hear desiccation spreading inward through the wood of the doorframes, you must drown this awareness within you.
You must drink until all memory of that repulsive gas yields to a drunken, reeling flood of thoughts that revolve around the barroom's increasingly inscrutable goings-on. Yellow and green are the hues of all things capable of warding off the pestilence. At the counter of yellow wood, fogged by dampness, about to vanish behind swaths of stale breath and tobacco smoke, beer's being poured in an endless series of glasses that race off to the tables, the tablecloths are swept to the floor, and on the wet wood the glasses slide faster into the splayed hands, lots and lots of yellow foam-crowned glasses that soon seem to merge, so that all at once you see them as a single wave of cool-bitter, white-yellow beer foam surging toward you, but still so shallow that it fails to reach your round, open mouth; it reaches waist-high, and from every opening, every sucking, protruding orifice, every hose-end, the unconsumed dregs flow back, trickling away in quick loops on the floorboards; the voices in the room have the raucous force of a storm, resounding in the breasts of the people around you, though their gaping mouths seem to release no sound.
Wolfgang Hilbig's fiction, with translations, where shown, by Isabel Fargo Cole
Unterm Neomond (1982), stories, translated as Under the Neomoon
my review
Der Brief (1985), 3 stories
Tony's review of (2/3rds of) the German original
Die Weiber (1987), novella, translated as The Females (2018)
my review
Eine Übertragung (1989), novel, as yet untranslated
Alte Abdeckerei (1991), novella, translated as Old Rendering Plant (2017)
my review
Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1992), novella, translated as The Tidings of the Trees (2018)
my review
»Ich« (1993), novel, translated as I (2015)
my review
Grünes grünes Grab (1993), stories, as yet untranslated
Tony's review of (2/3rds of) the German original
Die Arbeit an den Öfen (1994), stories, as yet untranslated
Das Provisorium (2000), novel, translated as The Interim (2021)
my review
Der Schlaf der Gerechten (2003), stories, translated as The Sleep of the Righteous (2015)
my review
November 5, 2024
A vibes collection of short stories that capture a certain East German post-industrial mood. Haunting, grim, oppressive, with just a bit of beauty.
Read
September 5, 2025A lot of this flew straight over my head because I think you have to have more in depth knowledge of post-war Germany to really understand a lot of what’s going on here. Also the more experimental, abstract short stories were very difficult to me and I missed out on like 75% of their meaning. Not sure whether it’s my own inattentiveness as a reader, the inscrutability of the translation, or Hilbig’s own doing as a writer. Probably some combo of all three, though I think mainly the blame is my own. Whatever it was, I felt sad to miss out. The short story from which the collection gets its title, “Half An Autumn,” was the most prominent example of this for me. I could tell there was a great and primordial power behind Hilbig’s story, but I just couldn’t get it. “The Reader” and “The Precinct of Peace” are similar stories for me.
But the parts that I did understand were really fantastic, really awfully atmospheric. Hilbig is able to create such a dismal misty hopelessly insane sort of atmosphere that I really dig. But again, I could only access this author’s power when he’s at his most concrete. :(
My favorite from the collection was “The Stoker,” though I also really liked “St. John’s Eve” and “Idyll” and “Bungalows.” I feel like I definitely understand—if not the history of post-war Germany—then some of its internal machinations and emotions.
But the parts that I did understand were really fantastic, really awfully atmospheric. Hilbig is able to create such a dismal misty hopelessly insane sort of atmosphere that I really dig. But again, I could only access this author’s power when he’s at his most concrete. :(
My favorite from the collection was “The Stoker,” though I also really liked “St. John’s Eve” and “Idyll” and “Bungalows.” I feel like I definitely understand—if not the history of post-war Germany—then some of its internal machinations and emotions.
June 5, 2024
Thanks to Two Lines Press and Edelweiss for this review copy.
I started off really enjoying this. The stories are sort of surreal Kafkaesque explorations of industry and capitalism, and the writing is appropriately dreamy (though a little more stream-of-consciousness than I typically go for). But about 3/4 through, it started to feel tedious. The last 2-3 stories took me about as long to read as the rest of the book up to that point, and I didn't enjoy them nearly as much, even though they seemed to be more focused than some of the earlier ones. Overall not bad, and I'm looking forward to reading more of this author.
Standout stories for me were "Thirst" (an almost Lovecraftian story about people sheltering in a bar from the decaying-corpse stench of a nearby chemical detergent factory) and "The Workers: An Essay" (about those in authority pitting different groups of exploited workers against each other).
I started off really enjoying this. The stories are sort of surreal Kafkaesque explorations of industry and capitalism, and the writing is appropriately dreamy (though a little more stream-of-consciousness than I typically go for). But about 3/4 through, it started to feel tedious. The last 2-3 stories took me about as long to read as the rest of the book up to that point, and I didn't enjoy them nearly as much, even though they seemed to be more focused than some of the earlier ones. Overall not bad, and I'm looking forward to reading more of this author.
Standout stories for me were "Thirst" (an almost Lovecraftian story about people sheltering in a bar from the decaying-corpse stench of a nearby chemical detergent factory) and "The Workers: An Essay" (about those in authority pitting different groups of exploited workers against each other).
Read
October 10, 2025pretty intense walls of text here, the layout reinforced whatever feelings i had about the prose - really savored every sentence in all the pieces from books 1 and 2, had a hard time getting into the stoker (that may have been me falling into the slurry drudgery brain of the narrator though!)
Read
July 31, 2024Reviewed Under the Neomoon and Hilbig's Territories of the Soul/On Intonation for the LA Review of Books! https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/peering-through-the-darkness/
--
More thoughts on this soon! Loving Hilbig & the tonal differences I noticed between this earlier collection (his first, newly translated, which he wrote in 1982 while still living in East Germany before the wall came down) and The Sleep of the Righteous, a collection written/published almost two decades later in 2002, just a few years before he passed away
--
More thoughts on this soon! Loving Hilbig & the tonal differences I noticed between this earlier collection (his first, newly translated, which he wrote in 1982 while still living in East Germany before the wall came down) and The Sleep of the Righteous, a collection written/published almost two decades later in 2002, just a few years before he passed away
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews