The Tidings of the Trees

by Wolfgang Hilbig, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator)

Where once was a beautiful wood now stands a desolate field smothered in ash and garbage, and here a young man named Waller has terrorizing encounters with grotesque figures named “the garbagemen.” As Waller becomes fascinated with these desperate men who eke out a survival by rooting through their nation’s waste, he imagines they are also digging through its past as their government erases its history and walls itself off from the outside world.

One of celebrated East German author Wolfgang Hilbig’s most accessible and resonant works, The Tidings in the Trees is about the politics that rip us apart, the stories we tell for survival, and the absolute importance of words to nations and people. Featuring some of Hilbig’s most striking, poetic, and powerful images, this flawless novella perfectly balances politics and literature.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Novels, Novella, Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Wolfgang 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remained unpublished in the GDR.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

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The garbagemen, Waller said to himself, are the only ones who never forgot anything! They couldn’t forget, for their job was the constant processing of the material of the past.

The late Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007), via Isabel Fargo Cole's magnificent translations and via Two Lines Press, is fast becoming one of my all time favourite authors, with The Sleep of the Righteous and Old Rendering Plant (Cole won the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation) both two of my favourite, 5 star, reads of the last 3 years. Indeed I would say Hilbig has assumed the mantle of the must-read writer in translation previously held by writers such as Saramago, Sebald, Marias, Bolano, Lispector and Krasznahorkai amongst others. And the great news is there is plenty of Hilbig's work left to translate.

The Tidings of the Trees, from the 1992 original Die Kunde von den Bäumen, shares the strengths of The Old Rendering Plant (Alte Abdeckerei, 1990) - both deeply allegorical texts, only around 100 pages long but containing more substance than any 600 page tome. And indeed the two works as well as Die Weiber (1987, forthcoming in 2018 as The Women) were published together in German in a posthumous 2010 edition.

The Tidings of the Tree is largely told in the first person by an East German man named Waller, although strictly what we are reading is the report of an unnamed narrator, to whom Waller is telling his story, and who occasionally interjects his own comments on Waller's demeanor.

Waller (like Hilbig) was 20, when the Berlin Wall was built, and the novel itself is narrated 20 years later, although incidents from the 1960s and the present day tend to merge into one in his account and indeed in his own thoughts: Twenty years had passed like no time at all, and I'd lost the ability to sort separate episodes in my memory into their true into their true time frames.

The novel is set in the area around a village W. ,I believe based on the real life town Wuitz https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuitz), which was abandoned as it was turned into an open air lignite mine. A line of cherry trees, those whose tidings give rise to the novel's title, linked the local town to the village during his youth, but the trees are increasingly engulfed by the pollution from the mining, and the area turned into a large garbage dump:

The invasion of garbage escalated, the rubbish began to encircle the whole forest, advance guards of dead material set out to carve the woods into separate plots, and one of the incursions of garbage came down the cherry lane: following the depletion of the strip mine that would take the village's place, the cherry lane would serve as one of the roads for transporting refuse, the mass of which soon called for a new waste heap - And the air over the expanses of garbage seemed to grow more and more impermeable; the chimes from the church in the village of W. perished in the burning fumes above the ash and fell to earth like poisoned birds.

The building of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent isolation and stagnation of the country is a pivotal moment for Waller, but he observes that for most people:

We lived in a country,cut off, walled in, where we had to end up thinking that time had no relevance for us. Time was outside, the future was outside ... outside everything rushed to its doom. Meanwhile we’ve always lived in the past. For us the passage of time existed only on some withered calendar page.
[...]
[In the local town] they all seemed exclusively engaged - almost to the point of doing themselves violence - with ignoring a certain date in that summer, getting on with their lives as before despite that date. In the end they succeeded, living on in the old way without recalling the summer that had barely passed, but they could do so only at the cost of forgetting not just that that summer date, but also their life prior to that summer ... so of course they didn’t know whether they really were living as before, but because they didn’t know, it didn’t matter.

But Waller himself is determined to remember, and to write (write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness ... Write or you’ll be without a past, without a future, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy.), except that the ash and the pollution physically and metaphorically engulf his thoughts, and he is for many years unable to proceed beyond a first line, 'The trees of the cherry lane have vanished':

Indeed, I always had the sense of walking on used-up matter, burned-out material, on cinders, on ash, on slag. Forgetfulness covered the earth and smothered the life that still stirred within - if it still stirred - ceaseless waves of oblivion slid layer by layer over the ground; the dead present was digested and voided until it was nothing but history. Yes, I was walking on the true substance of history; dry, sandy material, forever lifeless, that whirled here and there with the fickleness of all the winds and settled grey and ruddy on all that lay within its diffuse motion's sphere ... Waller paused for a moment, seeming to ruminate, then suddenly uttered a bleat of laughter.
[...]
And the ash, I thought, coats all my thoughts as well ... the ash has inscribed my papers with its uniform and illegible writing. And I’ve watched these waves of writing rush back and forth, thought Waller, along the lines of the paper, like thoughts that wrote and instantly erased themselves. And in the lower margins, forgetfulness seemed to toss the fleeting eddy of its signature upon the empty pages.
[...]
The trees of the cherry lane have vanished; this single sentence, long since extinguished and grown cold, stood there upon the page and they’d given me infinite time to write a second one. That first sentence was like the uniform sifting of the ash, it was followed by a relentless flood of thoughts, but nothing was willing to go down on paper.

He instead finds a refuge of sorts with the, barely human, 'garbagemen', who sort, and scavenge, the refuse, and who, as the opening quote to my review suggest, are the only people who still remember the past.

He finally comes to turn with his past, and realises what his second line must be - The shame is over! And as the novel ends:

Night falls, and all through the long night I wait for the ghost of the cherry trees to reappear before me.

Highly recommended as is all of Hilbig's work.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...I wrote for an utterly impossible reader, for one reader alone, and that reader was myself."

The prose, oh, the prose. This novella packs a punch in its short, yet bewildering style and in my opinion, is the best representation of thought on the building of the Berlin Wall and its effect on the East German people that I've ever read. The miasmic maelstrom whirls and whirls, with ash and dust, covering everything in its path.

"There was no place for me in this country, and its borders had been closed. It was late afternoon, and for more than an hour I'd be perched on the branch of the cherry tree; with great care I'd placed the noose around my neck and pulled it tight; I couldn't find an end to my thoughts.

It makes no sense, I thought over and over, it makes no sense to cut a process short like that. If I must give my assessment: the country has turned into a hotbed of misfortune -- misfortunate and stagnation -- and doubtless it will all soon come to a head. So if I go on living under these conditions, precisely by maintaining my existence I'll degenerate in the quickest way possible. Without hope of change there's no prospect of emerging unscathed. Misfortune ages you, I said to myself. The constant simulation of nonsense causes habituation until even in your own mind it seems perfectly persuasive. That sort of trick requires oppression, and this backwater will breed plenty of it. Will that plenty be enough?...Certainly it will, if only you firmly believe so. And so I can already imagine no worse affliction than continuing to live in this cloaca. What could be a greater affliction?...Only the misfortune of some West German Communist now left out in the cold, outside the Iron Curtain. If I had the option of joining the West German Communist Party, I'd put in my application now...but to do that, I'd have to be outside. I have no choice but to eke out the misfortune and stagnation in here...and act as thought tings might turn bright again someday.

At that, I removed the noose from my neck...

In its scope, it's powerful; in its weight, it's heavy. Hilbig has found a new reader and I'm happy I came across him.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer struggles to find a place in which to write. He flees the cramped apartment he shares in town with his mother and grandmother. Out beyond the edge of town in the ash fields—domain of the shadowy garbagemen, whose 'job was the constant processing of the material of the past'—he stumbles upon a shack and, with the garbagemen's silent blessing, uses it as a retreat from which to ruminate and attempt to 'extract stories' from his life.

For readers new to Hilbig, this may not be the best place to start. While his hallmark concerns are on full display, I thought this one was kind of slow to find its rhythm—not until about a third of the way in did I feel the full force of Hilbig's familiar atmosphere rise up around me. As in his other fiction, the spectre of the Wall looms large and the resulting isolation in the East becomes palpable, doubly so for this writer-narrator who already feels estranged from those around him, the majority of whom do not seek, as he does, 'a language that deviated from the one formulated by the State, by language’s custodians.'

Themes of memory, trauma, excision, erasure—the manhandling of history—permeate the text. The environment as always is blighted, existing in a liminal state of neglect and decay in the wake of ongoing industrial pollution, and inhabited at its edges by shadowy figures engaged in furtive activities. Hilbig’s storytelling is circuitous—he leads the reader into a labyrinth formed from incessant reconfigurations of the past. Once at the center we are left sifting through the layers of ash, as the writer does at his rickety table in the garbagemen’s shack. Then, near the end of the book the perspective shifts and we are suddenly permitted a wider view of this seemingly doomed world that has been sketched before us.

When pairing this with Hilbig's other fiction that I’ve read, I’m left considering the possibility of a logical order in which to read his entire output—a sequence that taken as a whole tells an even larger story. For, much like the work of Robert Walser, Hilbig's oeuvre does feel like one continuous story, broken down into only partially discrete elements, each of which connects to the others through shared narrative tissue. Also as with Walser, it all feels deeply personal, yet through the mystical workings of fiction becomes universal. It's the writers who produce a body of work with these qualities that tend to interest me the most, and especially if they write passages like this:

And there was a speech in the trees that always ended in darkness…no, even in darkness it didn’t end, it merely spoke more softly than ever, and I recalled the nameless whisper of their leaves in the unseen. It was a language of return, permanently revolving around the existence of those leaves themselves, and thus around the permanence of Earth itself, and thus it spoke of the universe in which each leaf revolved with the Earth, and in the darkness the leaves went on rippling…like ash, and the swells of the ash went on into the darkness, and never ceased, even when the ash-red gloaming came, inaudibly soft, and the short day with its blue gloaming at dusk, when autumn sank its cool claws into the blue ash, or when the spring loosened the ash again, and on and on when the leaves and the ash required no more words, and the leaves of paper chafed together in the dust, and the dust chafed whisperingly at time that turned in space, on and on with that empty chafing in the dark that passed like years and had no age.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wonderful Hilbig translations build on each other so that each new book reverberates with those that Cole has translated for Two Lines Press in past years. We are familiar with the outlying districts of the unnamed city where the narrator lives, with its ash and desolation. With his estrangement, and the odd combination of place and rootlessness under a regime that means, apparently, nothing to him.

But the episodes in each book are like finely cut jewels of experience in this land of ash. The environment is both murky with smoke and pollution, and crystal clear with implications.

Hilbig examines his memories of youth in the ashland, and recurring visits to the area. Here, he recalls when he hid in a row of cherry trees, now hewn down, to spy on the garbage dump scavengers who fascinated him.

No, having glimpsed that figure in the branches of those visionary cherry trees, I didn’t want to lose sight of its fortunes again...if the word fortune isn’t too pretentious.--That figure's fate had begun perhaps twenty years prior, in a summer--no one knew now whether that summer had been hot or cold...in this country they’ve treated history so roughly that nothing is left of reality, not even the simplest things--a summer that would later be called the summer of the Wall. In fact, just a year later nothing could be recalled about that summer. less than nothing, for at once it had begun to fill up with atmospheric fiction.

(Hilbig the author would have been twenty when the Berlin Wall went up, as is presumably the narrator.) And here we are in another summer of confusion about a wall and memory and reality.

And a page later, he talks about whether the scavengers, men who retain what they find meaningful out of the dross tossed out by the townspeople, serve as the country’s memory:

No one, I said, could know more about the past, no one could be deeper in the know than the garbagemen. But no one asked them, for in the eyes of the world they were the ones with the least say. And if asked, they’d probably have seen themselves in the same way, perhaps they ultimately acquiesced in their somnambulistic doings on the terrain of ash...In actuality, they might think, it’s we, out here, who seal and perfect the process of forgetfulness the townspeople struggle with. Yet we ourselves can never forget... and that is the punchline of the story.

Recurring images of storms, ash and damaged mannequins tossed in the sump create rhythm and meaning, and in the case of the mannequins, macabre humor.

Isabel Cole’s translation is outstanding. Highly recommended.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

As ever Hilbig travels familiar pathways, but this work is a more explicit and poetic response to the experience of life in the GDR—its stagnation of the spirit and the determination to escape that fate. Another reread in order before preparing a review for publication.
My review of this book is now published here: https://thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/18...
Re-read in preparation to speak with translator Isabel Fargo Cole in person. Our latest email interview can be found here: https://thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/20...

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

no... i saw no sign of that, there was contentment in their expressions; as always, they'd made their peace with misfortune even before it happened. on their brows i saw no move to escape.

taken from the same collection as old rendering plant (die weiber, alte abdeckerei, die kunde von den baümen), wolfgang hilbig's the tidings of the trees is another bleak tale of "misfortune and stagnation." the late german writer was remarkably adept at creating dark, desolate milieus. waller, a man who has spent 20 years and all but failed in his attempt to put his (and his nation's collective) history down in writing, wanders and inhabits a cast-off field now used as a garbage dump. in this eerie, forsaken setting, waller encounters "the garbagemen" (enigmatic, apparition-like characters who have imposed upon themselves exile, while wading through and reclaiming the shards and leavings of nearby society) and recounts a past perhaps better soon forgotten. although there isn't much action in the novella, the tidings of the trees mulls the legacy, ramifications, and enduring trauma of consequential and devastating political history. through his tormented protagonist, hilbig, as he's done elsewhere, strives to make sense of the haunting aftereffects of his nation's dark history–and the lingering disquiet suffered by all those who managed to endure (and the ensuant dichotomy of memory and forgetting). hilbig's prose is poetic and evocative, if tinged by unforgettable imagery of desolation and existential emptiness.

no one, i said, could know more about the past, no one could be deeper in the know than the garbagemen. but no one asked them, for in the eyes of the world they were the ones with the least say. and if asked, they'd probably have seen themselves the same way; perhaps they ultimately acquiesced in their somnambulistic doings on the terrain of the ash... in actuality, they might think, it's we, out here, who seal and perfect the process of forgetfulness the townspeople struggle with. yet we ourselves can never forget... and that is the punchline of the story.

*translated from the german by isabel fargo cole (hilbig's the tidings of the trees & the sleep of the righteous, ungar, fühmann, hoffer, kalka)

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly, here in the ash I am walking on the ground of my memories…

After reading Hilbig's Old Rendering Plant just two days before, I wanted to delve back into this author's dream-like prose. This novella is less dense, inward-gazing and experimental but would likely be an easier introduction to Hilbig's work.

Our protagonist lives in a timelessness, stagnant netherworld of ash and garbage. His memories of the past are confused, decaying like everything around him and he cannot tell if something happened yesterday or ten years ago. Images recur and scenes are lived over and over again -- if they ever occurred. If it were not for a few choice passages that show our narrator interacting with real people we could easily assume he's a wandering ghost.

He sees the people around him similarly to how he sees decaying shop window mannequins in the junkyard -- they go along, adapting to whatever the elusive State imposes. He escapes these banalities and becomes an outsider amid the ash and garbage-filled fields where mysterious "garbagemen" sort through the rubbish. Here he reflects on the ruin and decay of all things as he struggles to write, as far more ash falls upon his page than words. Obviously this novella can be seen as reflecting on life in behind the Wall, but it's far more about a universal human condition.

Comparing this with Old Rendering Plant, I found that book to be somewhat more imaginative. Although neither has a traditional plot you can really get a good hold on Old Rendering Plant was filled with a bit more grandiose vision.

[Ipsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

fever mud-dreams.

[Robert Lukins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and strange and unsettling; this is my first Hilbig - translated by Isabel Fargo Cole - and it won't be my last. Read this short novella in one sitting with a hangover, as I did, for the full effect.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbw7_...

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another gem, in a beautiful translation. Everything available by Hilbig in English is outstanding; The Tidings is the best of the novellas, I would say, although it takes a few pages to get out of the writers-block starting blocks. The imagery here is astonishing, and although the palette is simple (cherry trees; ash; mannequins), the structure and combinations are all perfectly done. And later pages do redeem the writers-block bit at the start, as the art of story-telling turns out to be what the soul-less human world (i.e., the world of mannequins) lacks, and what separates it from the natural world of the cherry trees, and the ensouled world of human beings. Smart, beautiful, artful, painful. Someone give Isabel Fargo Cole a highly-paid job translating the rest of Hilbig, please.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilbig rivals Poe or Lovecraft in creating a vivid, nightmarish atmosphere for an allegorical novel that speculates on the artist's proper response to state that closes borders and demands conformity.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a Hilbig fanboy through and through. The Females, Old Rendering Plant, The Sleep of the Righteous… incredible works all and I love them to death. And now this one, The Tidings of the Trees. It contains all of what I loved in those other works—an oppressive atmosphere, a story primarily set in a wasteland, an obsession with a (possibly) brighter past (or perhaps more accurately, the few bright spots of the past somehow left untainted by the blight of Nazism, though this is never specifically, directly addressed) giving way to a grim, (spiritually/materially) impoverished present and a perhaps even grimmer future, highly poetic prose, flashes of surprising humor—but in this case, the elegiac tone was prominent to the point of being borderline overwhelming. That sad emotional edge was certainly present in the others, but here it was significantly less obscured, instead put front and center and spotlit, showcased. For this reason, I’d say this is the most conventionally accessible of Hilbig’s books I’ve read to date. Accordingly, if you’re new to this writer’s work, I’d strongly suggest starting here.

The Tidings of the Trees is truly larger within than without; an outwardly slim tome of extraordinary weight and resonance. In less than 100 pages, Hilbig manages what other writers would need at least three times as many pages to accomplish, and it impresses the hell out of me. What a writer!

Highly recommended.

[Andrew]

God I love books like this. Gnawing paranoia, the horror of garbage heaps and desolate roads once lined with cherry trees on the fringes of the thing that deigns to call itself “European civilization.” Beckett's clownish horrors risked being inscrutable. Hilbig, on the other hand, doesn't place the clownish horror front and center, he lets it recede into the background and set the town, with the remnants of an old society cast off in the spring mud. Brilliant.

[Andrew Rolph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambient 4 by Brian Eno

Also, literally just stunning

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, creepy and immensely beautiful. More Hermann Ungar than Franz Kafka, with the narrative intensity of Krasznahorkai or Bernhard. I'm quite convinced that, like Sebald, premature death robbed Hilbig of a Nobel Prize.

[Marina Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I started reading it, I felt I was in safe hands, although that riff on writer's block might fill some people with trepidation. But it's not at all pretentious and self-referential. It is structured almost like an interview, in which this writer type called Waller talks about the vanishing landscape of his childhood, particularly a lane full of cherry trees, and his ongoing fight with the garbage collectors. A political book, which reminded me so much of literature written under censorship, which is ostensibly about one thing, but is actually about another. It is such a slim volume, it is best read in one gulp for the sense of oppression and darkness looming, and then slowly reread to capture all the nuances.

[Amanda]

Wow.

[Erica]

literary equivalent of a soundgarden music video. extremely 90s. like reading someone else's mind wander. my least favorite hilbig so far!

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic and beautifully done.

[Lauren Dostal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's get this out of the way: Wolfgang Hilbig is quickly becoming one of my all time favorite authors, and Two Lines Press is one of the greatest translation publishers out there today. Also, Isabel Fargo Cole did a hell of a job with a very complex work, and she deserves all the awards.

How to describe Hilbig's writing... it moves with the steady stream of consciousness of James Joyce, rolling like a walking tour of the East German (GDR) countryside. Time is one of his main objects--its fluidity, the mark it leaves upon a person and a nation, the darkness of the past and uncertainty of the future which meet together in a single torn figure forced into the fleeting present. This preoccupation with time is especially prominent in The Tidings of the Trees, where Waller, the narrator/main character, seems to be experiencing a 20 year span of his life instantaneously. This 20 year time span has seen a row of once-beautiful cherry trees grow unkempt, a nearby mining village abandoned, and everything torn down, buried, or burned to ash, with the only constant, the ever creeping garbage field and the men who pick through its refuse. Waller examines his life through the eyes of the ever-changing trees and the garbagemen who seem the only ones immune to the devastation of time. It is a striking, bold, haunting book, with the most stunning language I have read in years.


I recommend this and all of Hilbig's novellas (The Sleep of the Righteous and Old Rendering Plant are his other two) with the greatest possible enthusiasm.

[Myhte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The shadow of past things, the tremble of depleted matter weaves in the burned-smelling air. Here’s the flow of what’s been voided, what no longer belongs, what’s substanceless and mixed, and the ash seems to stir with imperceptible gasping

the ash, I thought, coats all my thoughts as well... it has inscribed my papers with its uniform and illegible writing. And I’ve watched these waves of writing rush back and forth, thought Waller, along the lines of the paper, like thoughts that wrote and instantly erased themselves. And in the lower margins, forgetfulness seemed to toss the fleeting eddy of its signature upon the empty pages

Outside, through the parting clouds, the first spears of light shot down, dying out within seconds only to reappear elsewhere; maybe it had rained somewhere after all, for mists suddenly rose up, rolling close over the ground in lagging waves; from enormous heights ash sank down upon the plain, having been blown so far up that its falling seemed without origin, unearthly; and its cataracts, with moonbeams swimming in the ruddy haze about them, shrouded my view for a long time. Amid the ceaseless downward surging of this uncanny, atomized matter, I’d had an apprehension of how much time had passed me by: since the thunderstorm that first chased me into this shack… decades, I repeat, that I was not aware of; only the recurrence of this dry storm reminded me that I had aged—that I had lived without giving life a thought.

throughout those years faintly smiling

Unperturbed, we grinned; impatience is no strength of ours. For one day they’ll all end up here, on the grounds: whole generations of pasteboard heads are already buried in the ash beneath us. All those faces that got to be God for a while are buried down below now; we’ve got a whole grove of the gods down there. Layer upon layer, era after era, and if we thought a bit, we could even say what order they’re stacked in, down there in the depths. But why should we think about it? It’s enough to think that we’ve always been up here and are likely to remain.

The greater part of us will whirl through the air as fine dust... we, dust that we are, will be borne up to prodigious heights, flying through the air with the storm, and the thunder will be below us. And we’ll hear it like bells…far below, in the abysses below, like the forgotten gods’ self celebration.

[Layla · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was impossible to forget that I was writing about things I’d already lost sight of. — I’m writing about things that are vanishing, I told myself, but whenever I set out to do so, I produce nothing but declarations of that loss… I fail to snatch those vanished things back into the light.”

Spent the weekend reading this gem. It felt like a short static dream, weaving time with the materialistic environment. A socialist dystopian setting, where time “ceased to pass”. It’s a story about a totalitarian state dying with “the end of history”, and a writer trying to find a way into his identity, his memories and the ability to stay still and write. with no measurable indications of how much time actually passes, he only sees ashes, rust, and the size of the garbage heaps he watches moving all day.
A very visual, poetic and definitely good writing from Wolfgang.

“Here I was…I’d been here for a near-eternity, and already I was almost a ghost…a monster, shaped from the substance of eternity, a sculpture of ash muffled in ancient ghostly garments”

[Peter Allum · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fever-dream of cherry trees, ash heaps, failure to write.

The protagonist, Waller, is an aspiring writer in East Germany. The slim novella, The Tidings of Trees, describes his recollections of cherry trees that lined the town's road to the ash heaps. At the time he writes, the trees are gone, dead and uprooted, and the ash heaps have been overgrown with dry shrubs and grasses.

The recurrent references to lost cherry trees suggests that this about Waller's memories and yearning for the past. Yet the novella is not elegiac and the past is described as nightmarish. It was in one of the cherry trees that Waller had once considered hanging himself (only to come down out of concern about being drenched in a coming rain storm--one of the few comic aspects in Tidings).

There is something of Beckett in Hilbig's writings here. Waller is a lone figure on a desolately empty stage (like many of Beckett's protagonists), and is preoccupied with the difficulty of writing, of finding a story to tell, a key theme for Beckett. But while the post-war existentialists wrote in the shadows of the war, Hilbig's characters have been hollowed out by life under communism.

This is a work that is easier to admire than to enjoy, but I plan to keep it to re-read. (It can be read easily in a few hours.) For those approaching Hilbig for the first time, I found The Sleep of the Righteous more approachable (albeit still a strange, disquieting read).

German Lit reviews, ranked

[Suhrob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packs so many idea in such short book, yet it doesn't feel overstuffed and flows in a languid, drowsy pace (which is fitting - I don't mean tedious).

Question of memory, identity, individual vs. society, consumerism & communism, the story unfolds non-linearly (even loopingly), some memorable scenes (even funny) and everything is covered under a sense of oppresive uncertainty. Plus great prose.

Very impressive.

[peg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! My first attempt at reading Hilbig and I am overwhelmed by the complex imagery and symbolism. Descriptions of diverse subjects such as a writer struggling, a town turned into an ash heap, and a lane lined with cherry trees all play a part in this impressionist work. Definitely needs a reread before I head off to others by this East German author.

[Plumb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely. I had tried reading Old Rendering Plant previously and found it dull and inscrutable, even though I enjoyed his stylings, but this was much more accessible and the strangeness of it and the lyricism really captured me. Did I understand it all? I doubt it. But it was beautiful regardless.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depressing little book of life in communist / socialist society.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Casts a highly particular, ghostly, ashy atmosphere -- a real feeling of wandering alone on the edge of a forgotten town, wondering who you are and if anything's real ... a dusk book par excellence.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eerie experience of the places where the city crumbles to ash in an East German life