The Females

by Wolfgang Hilbig, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator)

Already acclaimed for providing unique insight into some of history's greatest wrongs—and today's issues of mass surveillance, neofascism, and the individual's role in society—what does Wolfgang Hilbig have to add to contemporary questions about gender? A lot, it turns out. Acclaimed as one of Hilbig's major works, The Females finds the lauded and legendarily irascible author focusing his labyrinthine, mercurial mind on how unequal societies can pervert sexuality and destroy a healthy, productive understanding of gender.

It begins with a factory laborer who ogles women in secret on the job. When those same women mysteriously vanish from their small town, the worker sets out on a uniquely Hilbiggian, hallucinatory journey to find them. Powerful and at times disturbing, The Females leaves us with some of the most challenging, radical, and enduring insights of any novel from the GDR.

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

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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remained unpublished in the GDR.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

[Glenn Russell]

Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007) had a tough life - he grew up in the mining town of Meuselwitz, Germany with his mother (he never knew his father who went missing in WWII) and started working in a boring mill as a teenager. Following military service, he worked as a tool maker and in assembly construction for the Meuselwitz lignite mine. It wasn't until he reached age thirty-seven that Hilbig moved to East Berlin where he finally seized the opportunity to live by his writing.

Reading Females, one can smell all those grimy Meuselwitz years as if their oily, sooty filth and stench coat every page, especially the opening scene where the narrator relates how he's trapped in a damp, hot hell, sweat and stink gushing from each pore, his eyeballs bulging and welling with a sort of slime as he arranges steel casting molds and cutting tools on shelves in a factory basement. Call-out to Isabel Fargo Cole for her clear, vivid translation.

Later in the novel, a government official addresses our unnamed narrator as Herr C., thus I'lI call him Carl. Anyway, Carl will occasionally stand on a chair in his basement and peer up through a grating at the backs of females working in a pressing shop, "they sat on tall three-legged stools that swayed and seemed to squeak; due to the heat they dispensed with cushions, the mass of each gigantic behind completely swallowing the stool's round wooden seat." As Carl relates, nearly all the workers in this factory are females.

Wave after wave of noxious, nauseating ooze in many potent forms continue to assail the senses of Carl the factory worker. "Nothing met my lips but dust washed from the floor, nothing clung to my hands but the fouled water's gasoline smell, all I had in my nostrils was the burned-rubber smell, the inhuman smell of plastic which, cooled for a few seconds by the water, now tasted even more vivid and more obscene."

It can't be stated too forcefully: Hilbig's short novel makes for one visceral experience; it's as if we're right there with Carl, almost inside his skin as Carl moves through his cruddy, squalid world, a cramped world smeared with grease and stinking of garbage. But as foul as his outside environment, Carl spits his deadliest venom at an even more loathsome target: himself.

Carl, a stand-in for Wolfgang Hilbig, recognizes he's a misfit, an outsider, a middle-aged man who still lives with his mother, a man stuck with a teenager's view of women, a man who smothered himself in pornography in his younger years and now feels powerless, even castrated, a man who must distort his everyday reality by constantly twisting it in obscene and freakish ways through images phallic and vaginal.

Added to this, Carl rages over the state's control of women and men's sexual identity and creative expression. For Carl, suffocation and dehumanization reach the tipping point - Carl lashes out at a man in the factory, a man he witnessed degrading a young lady. His violent outburst gets him fired. Once free to roam the streets day and night, Carl observes there's been a mass exodus of females from his town.

My take as to why Wolfgang Hilbig uses "females" and not "women" - it's the feminine aspect of life that has disappeared since East Germany has transformed itself into a debased form of masculine-only society, a society that's hard, static, unfeeling, unemotional, devoid of imagination and nurturing elements so critical to the life of a creative artist and writer.

At one point Carl tells us, "If I ever managed to feel that I possessed an identity, if I was able to develop any nebulous ideal of my I, it was only through experiencing myself, in writing as an active subject, albeit a subject I never dared disclose in public: I had made that mistake at the labor office, and my I had instantly been rebuffed in the harshest conceivable fashion."

Ah, art and literature can count for so much when one is held under thumb by a suffocating society. And Carl possesses a keen sensitivity to glimmers of life that contain a tincture of beauty. One of the more tender moments in the tale finds Carl on a bus, sitting behind a young lady where his hand is half an inch beside her soft hanging hair - oh, to be so close to the feminine but without the capacity or opportunity to touch it or bring its sweetness into one's life.

How much grime and scum and deprivation must an aspiring literary writer like Wolfgang Hilbig overcome in an oppressive culture (or anti-culture) like East Germany? One short sentence can express a wealth of feeling -

"I felt wretched again. In just five minutes I concluded I lacked the education to glimpse the females, even if they were still present, even if they existed by the millions."

Equally profound, a society can exert such power that individuals, both artists and non-artists, are deprived of the ability to even take the first step in knowing themselves. I'll conclude with an author quote most befitting:

"Whenever I'd felt within me the unforeseen power to examine myself, even to know myself, and consequently, perhaps, expunge the germs of my sickness, I found that the state snatched every tool from my hands, or hid all those tools from me, obscuring the means of ascertaining any kind of probability. The inevitable result was a serious disease, a pervasive disease of my ability to really and truly perceive the world, and a disease of my ability to truly make myself known to another person as a figure in reality. For me, reality had been stolen and annihilated, so by necessity I had to exist as a form of annihilated reality, as a mere delusion of reality, and by that same token had to annihilate the reality of the people around me."


German author Wolfgang Hilbig, age 46 in 1987, the year of publication for The Females

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to hallucinate in order to discover the world and the possibilities I had for living in it.  
 [..]
I would call these creatures the females rather than women, flying in the face of prohibition, because it sounded more animal, more earthly.
 
Die Weiber was Wolfgang Hilbig's first novella, published in 1987, but closely thematically linked to the two following novellas, Alte Abdeckerei (1991), translated as The Old Rendering Plant (2017), and Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1992), novella, translated as The Tidings of the Trees (2018).

All three books, and indeed all five Hilbig works in English, have been very ably translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, who has also done so much to bring Hilbig's wonderful to the attention of publishers and readers. And credit must also go to Two Lines Press.

Die Weiber must have presented a particular issue with the title. “Weiber” in German is a macho or pejorative term used to describe wives or women - see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Weib#G.... There isn't an easy English equivalent, and the females is a very good, but necessarily imperfect, choice.

And this distinction between the more neutral 'frauen' - rendered here as women - and weiber/females, is at the heart of the book, although the exact logic of the distinction that, given the narrator's feverish prose, is not always clear or consistent.

As the novel opens the first person narrator is working in the basement of a factory, largely staffed by women, and where the females are working tantalisingly above him, out of physical reach but within his voyeuristic gaze.

And the pressing shop was where the females worked—through the grating above me, damp, smoldering heat flooded down with steady force. I sat on a chair beneath the grate amid this hot tide, hidden in semidarkness, several bottles of beer by my chair; when I drank, the beer seemed to gush instantly from all my pores, lukewarm, not even changing temperature inside my body. It was a ceaseless strain—head constantly tilted back—to stare through the grate into the light, always hoping to see the women up there step across the bars. Sometimes I climbed onto the chair, almost touching the iron grid with my brow, to gain a narrow, densely crisscrossed view into the pressing shop; I could see the short stepladder, a bit more than a yard high, by which the women reached the capacious hopper of a mill that ground away with a terrible racket, reducing scraps of cooled plastic—left from the casting of coil-like radio parts in the presses—to granules enough for reuse.
 
But when he is dismissed from the factory - we later discover for physically threatening a male supervisor who he felt had treated a young female workers on a bus with disdain - a curious absence follows:
 
I’d felt the lack of some particular thing: venturing out in the evening I struggled for air, it was as though the air were drained of a special aroma, an aroma I needed in order to live. I sought the cause of this sensation; then came a suspicion that grew stronger, and soon I roamed for days at a time just to see how right I was, for nights at a time just to confirm my hideous suspicion: all the females had vanished from town. It was no help at all to sense I was possessed by an obsession, in my overpotent head a cascade of letters blazed: all the females of the species had vanished from town, and with them had fled every trace of femininity.

Not only that, I felt that even feminine nouns had fallen out of use; I thought I suddenly noticed people in town referring to trash cans as der Kübel instead of die Tonne. When I saw those trash cans from afar, set up in long rows along the curbs that summer—something unlikely to change, as the trash collection service was still more dysfunctional then than in the winter—at first I’d think a line of unshapely females was loitering there, dully iridescent in the bluish streetlights, and I’d hurry toward them. I’d realize they were just the trash cans I saw every night, from their gaping orifices hung rubbish that looked hairy, that had some indefinable evil about it.

The rest of the novella is a non-linear series of rather febrile, sometimes masturbatory, recollections, roaming between his childhood, his relationship with his mother, his earlier putative career as an author, his summoning by the local labour office to demand he perform productive work, his time at the pressing plant, bus journeys in the surrounding area, littered with open-air garbage dumps and incinerators (as revisited in The Tiding of the Trees), and the immediate aftermath of his dismissal when he attempts to complain to the authorities.

As just one chain of thoughts, a voyeuristic fantasy of stroking the long hair of a young woman worker sitting in front of him on a bus (her long dark hair, in several smooth spills, hung down over the upholstery toward me, and after a sharp curve I noticed that my hand, feeling the need to brace me, had grabbed the seat and lingered there [...] I saw my hand twitch, the crippling urge to instantly hurdle that one half inch pulsing unmistakably), which as a consequence also leads indirectly to his dismissal as noted above, later morphs into a vision of piles of hair burning on the garbage heaps outside of town (I saw hair smoking upon the plain, cloudy skeins of it drifting towards the last bare trees, where they snagged in crippled winter branches to flutter like black scraps of flags, flags to mourn the murderous traditions of my homeland), which itself brings to mind a much earlier pornographic text he wrote where he described himself with a girlfriend on a soft bed on different kinds of hair, heaps of women’s hair ... tresses, thick braids, wild half-spoiled snarls offering protection from the icy cold of a filthy concrete floor; fear and loathing of this hair merged with the shamelessness of our lust, a text he ascribes to influences from his early years (some childhood experience must have caused these imaginings ... it must have been connected to the empty barracks of the concentration camp on the edge of M., which was my chief playground until the age of 12,), and, later, in the novel to an erotic dream involving the same concentration camp and the infamous Ilse Koch.  

This is at times a difficult read, particularly in the #metoo era of 2019. Hiblig's narrator has a very difficult and distant relationship with the women / females. For instance, they seem to represent scorn, threatening his manhood. The interview a year earlier at the Workforce Steering Office, which ultimately forced him to give up his attempt to write a novella for factory work, was, he admits, all the more painful for being conducted by a hefty female interrogator, and earlier in life his mother was also dismissive of his writing, both women regarding writing as an unworthy occupation.
 
In an otherwise generally positive review (e.g. "Cole, herself a talented writer, perfectly captures Hilbig’s lush melancholia, at once devastating and devastated") by Amada Damarco in the TLS of of The Old Rendering Plant and The Tidings of the Trees (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pr...), she commented that "at their worst, they descend into a sort of apocalyptic masculine hysteria." The Females arguably, indeed quite deliberately, takes apocalyptic masculine hysteria as its lodestone. 
  
Isabel Fargo Cole discussed Hilbig's narrators, and their relationship with women, in a 2015 interview with Sarah Coolidge (https://www.catranslation.org/blog-po...) about The Sleep of the Righteous, but The Females is a more extreme example of the approach:

Either the women are unattainable, or the narrator finds himself embroiled in excruciating conflicts with them. There’s a profound alienation – but then, Hilbig’s narrators are alienated from everyone. Only with the women, though, is this alienation so tormenting, because they are in some ways the fullest human beings in Hilbig’s work, the ones who seem to hold the secret of feeling and decency and vitality. The narrator feels this keenly, but for all his yearning is unable to form a human connection with them, to understand them, avoid disappointing and betraying them; he is not equal to them. He is like an alien confronted with human beings.

 
In 2019, Misogyny it often a function of political extremism as we see today, in the right in the US and the left in the UK. Hiblig's narrator sees a link with his stunted sexuality, and his difficulty in dealing with the females, and with the post War partition of Germany, both symbolically but also practically, in particular given the Leninist/Stalinist view of sexuality and the role of women workers in rebuilding the economy:

I grew up under the rule of psychopathologists who declared the sex drive to be abnormal ... and sex to be capitalistic.  
[...]
I imagined the country’s partition first being explored through the waists of the females [...] the females lower bodies, their perfumed refinement - or so I gathered from the polemical stew my brain was fed - belonged in the other side of the wall in the reactionary camp, where they’d be stuffed with money. [...] The females’ upper bodies remained here, buttoned up torsoes dressed in grey or blue, with muscular arms longing to embrace the rebuilding of the country.  And the heads of the females remained here as well, heads filled with clean thoughts, heads that would reward me with brotherly love if I managed to do my part to rebuild.
 
On 'psychopathology' the narrator makes explicit reference to Lenin’s remarks as reported by Clara Zetkin, an expanded version of which I found in The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V. I. Lenin:

I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard it. The first country of proletarian dictatorship surrounded by the counter-revolutionaries of the whole world, the situation in Germany itself requires the greatest possible concentration of all proletarian, revolutionary forces to defeat the ever-growing and ever-increasing counter-revolution. But working women comrades discuss sexual problems and the question of forms of marriage in the past, present and future.
[...]
This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters.  ... It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.

 
And near the novel's end, the narrator also links the root source of his issues back to the concentration camps that surrounded his childhood home:

Yes, I felt I must describe the females who had lived in the torment and the simple solidarity of these barracks, where they were called females, because women staffed the guard details. That was where the honorific was invented: the females.

Ultimately, an earlier work that the 4 other Hilbig works I have read, and his themes and writing are less well refined, although all the more striking for it. It isn't where I would advise someone to start with Hilbig, but as with all his writing, highly worthwhile. 4.5 stars.

Appendix 1: Bibliography of Hilbig's fiction and English translations by Isabel Fargo Cole where applicable
 
Unterm Neomond (1982), stories
 
Der Brief (1985), 3 stories
 
Die Weiber (1987), novella, translated as The Females (2018)
my review
 
Eine Übertragung (1989), his first novel
 
Alte Abdeckerei (1991), novella, translated as The 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
 
Die Arbeit an den Öfen (1994), stories
 
Das Provisorium (2000), novel
Translation as The Interim forthcoming in 2021.
 
Der Schlaf der Gerechten (2003), stories, translated as The Sleep of the Righteous (2015)
my review
 
In addition he published a number of books of poems and of prose pieces.
 
Source: https://www.wolfgang-hilbig.de/wolfga...
 
Appendix 2: Other useful sources

Extract:
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018...

A podcast on the novella:
https://soundcloud.com/user-63759823/...
 
Other useful reviews (by no means comprehensive):
 
https://www.cleavermagazine.com/the-f...
 
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/revi...
 
https://roughghosts.com/2018/11/29/na...
 
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2018/10/...

[Héctor Genta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un viaggio al termine della notte tra Dostoevskij, Céline e Lamborghini

Le femmine e Vecchio scorticatoio sono due monologhi potenti, apocalittici e disperati con i quali Hilbig urla al mondo la sua rabbia e impotenza nei confronti della società che lo circonda, figlia di una generazione che non ha fatto ancora davvero i conti con la tragedia della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Quello che descrive con un'efficacissima scrittura "espressionista" è un cammino di sconfitta, un viaggio al termine della notte tra rifiuti, incubi e fantasie distorte, un viaggio che parte da un'ossessione e lo precipita in un vuoto esistenziale.
Il protagonista de Le femmine è un uomo perduto, un'anima solitaria incapace di comunicare con gli altri, di sentire come loro sentono. Vive tra bidoni di immondizia, scarto tra gli scarti, diviso dal mondo e avvitato su se stesso, vittima anche della sua incapacità di definirsi.

«Sì, la mia era una malattia della parola…»
«Fuori il mio corpo correva nella notte, del tutto insensibile, mentre dietro di me la parola era immersa nel miasma stantio, diffuso e tuttavia tenace di un'angoscia vecchia e impenetrabile, i vocaboli si dibattevano imprigionati in reti nebulose, e più i guizzi di terrore laceravano fili e maglie, più quelle si tendevano fitte e sottili. Che cosa ci facevano le mie parole in mezzo a quel groviglio, mi domandavo: forse cercavano di accoppiarsi e non ci riuscivano; va' via, su vieni, resta qui…erano parole guastate dalla diffidenza verso il luogo in cui venivano pronunciate.»

Il dramma nasce anche da questo: dal comprendere di essere affetto da una specie di schizofrenia della parola proprio nel momento in cui ci si è appesi alla scrittura come ciambella di salvataggio da un mondo che va alla deriva. Incapace di entrare in sintonia con la realtà, il protagonista de Le femmine si rifugia in un solipsismo esasperato, finendo per perdere anche il contatto con se stesso e precipitando in uno stato di abulia, solo con l'unico conforto delle sue visioni.

Simile è il percorso del protagonista di Vecchio scorticatoio, un ragazzo che cerca di scomparire, alla ricerca di un luogo fisico che in realtà è un luogo dell'anima, esule in un terra di mezzo ai margini della società. Il suo è un viaggio veloce verso il dubbio, la confusione, il nulla. Anche qui le parole, ultima bussola per orientarsi nello disfacimento generale, perdono il loro significato e lasciano l'uomo solo, abbandonato al suo destino. Solo a urlare il suo grido afasico nel vuoto.

Link
http://www.altrianimali.it/2021/04/09...

[Gianni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libro per molti versi sorprendente, prima di tutto per la scrittura ricca, articolata, evocativa, che costringe quasi all’apnea perché non consente pause e, anzi, spesso fa ritornare su quanto appena letto perché non c’è quasi soluzione di continuità, è una trasformazione continua. Il testo è un profluvio di odori, spesso sgradevoli, materia molle e marcescente, rifiuti e scarichi di ogni genere, buio o penombra o luce opalescente, lattiginosa, una vegetazione ruderale che riconquista territori industriali fatiscenti, cave minerarie abbandonate e macerie. In entrambi i racconti l’io narrante e protagonista è un personaggio che, per scelta o per “natura”, vive ai margini del tessuto sociale e schiacciato dalla soverchiante presenza dello Stato e delle sue convenzioni.

Ne Le femmine, il protagonista è un operaio che lavora o vive negli scantinati di una fabbrica e riesce solo ad osservare le donne attraverso una grata, assorbendone gli umori e gli odori, e sviluppando un desiderio morboso e ossessivo, “avevo iniziato a trasformarmi lentamente in una malattia. Come ogni cosa che producevo, anche questa trasformazione era del tutto sopra le righe, non era la sofferenza di un essere umano e in fondo nemmeno più quella di un animale. Portò al mio licenziamento dalla fabbrica.”
E nel suo vagare notturno e solitario, dopo il licenziamento, l’operaio si accorge che “dalla città erano scomparse tutte le femmine” e pure “ogni traccia di femminino.”. E la dimensione del desiderio deve essere in qualche modo giustificata e gestita dallo Stato al fine di mantenere il controllo sociale, “Già Lenin, come riferisce Clara Zetkin, aveva definito il ‘grufolare nelle questioni sessuali’ una ‘passione degli intellettuali’ che non ha posto fra il proletariato ‘dotato di coscienza di classe’”, che tradotto in linguaggio politico corrente suona così: “Io crebbi mentre spadroneggiavano gli psicopatologi che dichiaravano anormali le pulsioni sessuali… e il ‘sesso’ roba da capitalisti. […] C’era un cupo presentimento dei guai che avrebbero portato i cazzi della mia generazione, all’epoca non c’erano abbastanza soldi per comprare gli interessi sessuali dei giovani, se non si fosse riusciti a tenere giù i cazzi il declino dello Stato era imminente.”
Non c’è altro, in questo tipo di società totalizzante, che ripartire a ripensare l’universo femminile, “sì dovevano essere ricomposte a partire dai materiali che avevo a disposizione. Quel che potevo vedere erano le descrizioni di donne nella letteratura,, sui giornali…”, riacquistando la propria dimensione terrena: “eppure dovevano essere fatte di terra. Non erano state create dalla terra, un tempo, proprio come me? […] Non era forse semplicemente così, che tutta la malattia e la putrefazione che mi stavano appiccicate addosso erano l’inizio della mia ritrasformazione in terra, e non era così per tutti gli esseri umani, e non dovevano essere fatte di terra anche loro, le femmine?”
In questo percorso di ripensamento Hiblig contrappone il termine femmine a donne, “avrei chiamato quelle creature ‘femmine’, malgrado il divieto, perché suonava più ‘femminile’. […] E di colpo capii qul era il luogo dove c’erano veramente state delle femmine. […] Sentivo di dover descrivere le femmine che avevano vissuto nello strazio e nella solidarietà semplice di quelle baracche [del Lager], là dove le chiamavano ‘femmine’ perché le donne erano quelle appartenenti al personale delle guardie. Era lì che avevano inventato il nome onorifico che uso anch’io: le femmine.”

L’inizio del Vecchio scorticatoio mi ha ricordato un po’ Acque strette, di Julien Gracq, per la descrizione del paesaggio rurale e delle passeggiate del protagonista, prima bambino e poi adulto, in quel luogo.
Ben presto il paesaggio muta e si ridefinisce, trasformandosi in una fatiscente zona industriale e in cave minerarie in cui il crollo delle volte delle gallerie ha portato alla formazione di alcuni laghetti; un ambiente dai tratti post-industriali orrorifici, tra carri-vagone fantasma e binari morti, in parte occupato da “’gli stranieri’, gente dell’Est Europa che lì dentro era sopravvissuta alla guerra e nemmeno dopo aveva abbandonato il nascondiglio.”. Un luogo in cui vige la proibizione di recarsi, anche per la periodica scomparsa di diverse persone, ma che il protagonista-bambino aggira quotidianamente. Un luogo in cui la natura si riappropria degli spazi, “era la vegetazione tipica di quella zona, capace di sopravvivere su scorie slavate e rottami sfatti, né utile né bella, cresciuta solo per coprire le ferite di quell’area…”; una vegetazione che si sviluppa anche in maniera abnorme, emanando odori nauseanti “da bambino sapevo essere l’odore delle acque lattiginose riversate nel fiumiciattolo, che la sera ribollivano e fumavano come saponata calda. Sapevo che l’odore penetrava nelle rive e da lì si infiltrava nei campi; le nebbie sulla roggia erano quell’odore, e le stesse nebbie salivano dalla terra infettando qualsiasi cosa spuntasse nei campi, ed esalavano dai prati, […] gli steli arruffati sul greto erano coperti di sego, grasso stravecchio spalmato inarginabile sugli argini”, dovute agli versamenti di uno scorticatoio simile a un lager in cui si abbattono gli animali per farne saponi e basi per detersivi.
Il protagonista è attratto in quei luoghi anche per il desiderio di conoscere le proprie origini proletarie, come quelle di Hilbig del resto, “era come se il divieto fosse volto a impedirmi di ritrovare qualcosa di sepolto, di mettere piede in una delle località dove ci eravamo guadagnati da vivere, con un lavoro sporco e infimo che ci aveva confinati ai margini della società, uno dei motivi di disprezzo di sé che dominava il nostro ceto.”
E il mito delle origini si scontra anche con la realtà di uno Stato totalitario che disumanizza ricorrendo anche alla delazione come strumento di controllo sociale, “i tipi umani in cui talvolta mi imbattevo nelle scorribande senza uscita dei miei pensieri erano l’espressione più lampante di un carattere che lo Stato tendeva, volente o nolente, a favorire negli animi: il modo d’essere di coloro che praticavano la delazione come lavoro ambiguo e malfamato.”

Lettura decisamente impegnativa che richiede di tornare continuamente sul testo e forse spinge anche a interpretazioni azzardate talvolta, ma credo che alla fine ne valga la pena.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

the fourth of the late wolfgang hilbig's books published by two lines press (and fifth to be translated overall), the females (die weiber) is the third book in hilbig's trilogy –which also includes old rendering plant (alte abdeckerei) and the tidings of the trees (die kunde von den baümen). with all of the darkness, desolation, and disillusionment found his previous works, the females concerns a factory worker and his disquieting, delirious take on the world around him. after losing his job, the aspiring (pornographic) writer also notices that all of the women in his town have simply disappeared (or have they?).

each of hilbig's books contain a foreboding, forlorn atmosphere and such it is again in the females. while his plots certainly could not be described as propulsive, they nonetheless offer ruminative takes on a variety of subjects (including society and politics). the east german writer was apparently quite cantankerous and though his fiction is filled with existential dread, his writing is frequently beautiful. the poetic quality evident throughout his prose makes him an always-engaging, thought-provoking writer... and it's easy to see why he was so well-regarded in germany prior to his passing.

whenever i'd felt within me the unforeseen power to examine myself, even to know myself, and consequently, perhaps, expunge the germs of my sickness, i found that the state snatched every tool from my hands, or hid all those tools from me, obscuring the means of ascertaining any kind of probability. the inevitable result was a serious disease, a pervasive disease of my ability to really and truly perceive the world, and a disease of my ability to truly make myself known to another person as a figure in reality. for me, reality had been stolen and annihilated, so by necessity i had to exist as a form of annihilated reality, as a mere delusion of reality, and by that same token had to annihilate the reality of the people around me.

*translated from the german by isabel fargo cole (hilbig's the sleep of the righteous, old rendering plant, and the tidings of the trees; ungar, fühmann, hoffer, kalka; and fiction writer herself)

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one didn't speak to me as persistently as the other two books in the loose trilogy that also includes Old Rendering Plant and The Tidings of the Trees. In fairness this was Hilbig's first novella, and to me it did not feel as elegantly constructed as the following two novellas did. Instead it felt kind of muddled; there is a primitive, raw quality to the prose, even more so than in the later two novellas. That being said, I find with Hilbig it's important to read as much of his work as possible in order to yield the best experience of traveling in his autofictional universe. Each book offers another few pieces of the puzzle, and this one does not fail to deliver those. With that in mind, I will look forward next to reading The Interim, the most recent of Isabel Fargo Cole's translations of Hilbig's works into English, and once again published by Two Lines Press.

[Andrew]

Well that was intense.

But what else would I expect from Hilbig? I read this shortly after a jaunt through the old GDR. Our narrator is a typical fucked up Hilbig narrator, trying to figure out his position within the totalitarian state and/or the ruins to follow, and in this case, has something of a chip on his shoulder regarding the other sex, and how it pertains to the state in which he lives. Hallucinatory, violent, weird, full of incel rants and strange beauty. I loved it.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My last read of 2020, and somewhat fittingly the most warped. The less I say about it the better, but I’ll leave one tantalizing hint: sexualized garbage cans. Don’t read any more about this book anyplace else, don’t question, don’t speculate, just let those three little words sit on your consciousness and make you curious. Allow that curiosity to fester until you feel compelled to buy this book. Once you’ve bought it, read it and tell me it isn’t among the most insane and wonderful things you’ve read in some time. I certainly found it to be so. It’s a wild, filthy ride with a highly enigmatic ending, the writing is goddamn gorgeous, and don’t forget: sexualized garbage cans. That ought to do it. You know what to do. You may thank me or not, but either way: read The Females by Wolfgang Hilbig.

This is the third book of Hilbig’s I’ve read, and they’ve all been easy 5-stars so far. By now it’s safe to say that he’s become an official favorite of mine. Imagine, if you will, that Kafka, Sebald and Krasznahorkai somehow all got together in the old GDR and, utilizing some obscure magic ritual, birthed some sort of literary hellspawn, and the resurrected James Joyce helped the poor kid out with his lines from time to time, and then John Hawkes did some additional tutoring over a summer while the kid was a teenager. Something like that. That’s the best I can do to describe Hilbig, and if that doesn’t make you want to read him, I’m afraid I just can’t help you and I’m terribly sorry.

Okay, I can’t resist, here’s an example of the prose. I promise it spoils nothing. Enjoy.

“I arrived in town that evening not knowing how I’d gotten there, August, the month of my birth, or at least I hoped time could still be defined so precisely. The air was brown that evening... by that time of day I’d already been born, a little bundle, appalled to the point of stupefaction, lying paralyzed in its cage and staring out at its first night... the brown seemed to be sucked up by a black yawn, and somewhere in that blackout sparks glowed, eerily red, giving no light, emitting nothing but smoke, heavy noxious smoke. — The town received me with great silence—the spellbound silence that anticipates an attack—and with an emptiness whose borders seemed sealed, so that even now I found myself inside an empty container... and I was part of the emptiness, I was its empty, reinstated consciousness. I had misgivings about returning to my apartment... I could make no headway against my aimlessness; I had grasped that life was a crude, clumsy fake.” (p. 71-72)

That’s it. Read it. Highest recommendation.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within the context of Hilbig’s shorter works this novella is more explicit in its anger toward the State, the control of desire, creative and sexual. The recent history of his country, the GDR, the ruins of war, looms large. The imagery is gritty, coarse and vulgar, but the narrator’s tragic desperation lends him a level of sympathy. Less refined than Old Rendering Plant and the Tidings of the Trees which follow several years later. Having this earlier work published in English later shows developmental themes at play. Full review here: https://roughghosts.com/2018/11/29/na...

[Lars Meijer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Op welke manier beïnvloedt een (totalitaire) staat het lichaam van zijn bewoners en de manier waarop ze hun seksualiteit beleven? Er zijn weinig romans die op zo'n dichterlijk en plastisch manier het lichaam in al zijn smerigheid weet te omschrijven. Hilbig schakelt schijnbaar moeiteloos tussen lyrische omschrijvingen van rottende tomaten tot aan seksuele uitstapjes met vuilnisbakken. The Females is een complex en rijk boek, maar bovenal de ultieme 'read it to believe it'-roman. Ik zal dit zeker nog eens gaan herlezen. Ik moest ook vaak denken aan dit fragment: linkje!

[WillemC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Een seksueel gefrustreerd individu wordt ontslagen van zijn job als gereedschapsrangschikker ergens in de kelder van een fabriek en begint rond te dwalen en zijn eigen bestaan(srecht) in vraag te stellen. Hij komt daarbij tot de vaststelling dat de vrouwen uit de stad verdwenen zijn en zoekt plaatsen op met veel vuilnis. Op zich wel iets voor mij, ware het niet dat de protagonist wat te vaak vervalt in surrealistisch gezwets. Freud had dit boekje waarschijnlijk wel graag gelezen. We zijn gul en geven Hilbig een 3.5/5!

"En ik zou die schepselen de wijven noemen, ook tegen elk verbod in, omdat het krachtiger klonk."

[Adina]

Oh my god, this was so German. I know the book is making a point but I think I could have done without the trash cans and busses as analogies for vaginas. Maybe I just think this descent into madness shtick is more interesting when a woman does it.

[Brandon Prince · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense, incantatory, and grotesque — Hilbig particularly excels at evoking odor and rot as metaphors for spiritual, existential and social decay. Lovely descriptions of diseased stenches, stagnant unwashed flesh, pungent sexual odors, pus and tissue necrosis, and copious amounts of human and industrial waste. Non-erotic visions of sexual fantasy recall the anxious sexual horror of Herman Ungar as well as the slimy, semen drenched hallucinations of William Burroughs’ weirder books.

The book is also laced with misogynist anger, and contains a considerable amount of dubious and clumsy sexual-political metaphors. The book fits squarely in the "dirty libertarian old man under communism” sub-genre of Eastern Bloc dissident literature: the nice little manosphere of decrepit men driven mad or frothing at the mouth over their lost sexual (and economic) privileges. Hilbig is considerably less humorous than Gombrowicz and Hrabal — although there are moments of hyperbolic absurdity and crescendoing irony similar in style to Bernhard — but, on the whole, Hilbig’s narrator comes across as deadly serious (sometimes silly, sometimes whiny.) Central to the book are Hilbig’s (largely unoriginal) 'socialism destroys sex’ arguments. If he were writing today, we could easily see him figuring in that pitiable crowd that decries such progressive social events like #yesallwomen and #metoo as “totalitarian group think”. His most significant image is of the GDR state bureaucracy as a cabal of frigid women and castrating mothers hell bent on destroying him and all that is holy and sacred in the world. Predictably, he is jealous of — and exaggerates in his madness — their passion for Stalin/communism as ultimately sexual in nature, leaving of themselves no time, or flesh, for him to enjoy. The narrator, who is thus friend/comrade-zoned in the GDR, embarks on a quest to find the good old fashioned, idealized, earthy and willing “females” of the title. Much absurdity and masturbation ensue, including one scene involving the creative use of a champagne bottle in a pile of trash screaming at a police station.

[Mass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due racconti di un imponente liricismo allucinante eppure realistico, sulla cui densità sicuramente dovrò tornare più e più volte (e allora saranno sicuramente cinque stelle). La DDR di Hilbig è un luogo ctonio e nebbioso, metallico e stagnante, descritto con una scrittura incredibile.

[Ina Cawl · Rating 4 out of 5]

i need sometime to process what i red

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Erica]

feels like it was written from inside a nin album. fans of kobo abe will enjoy!

[claybaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gross but not repulsive. Drinking dripping butt sweat, gasoline affusion, pornographic graphomania, and a stinky kind of transvestism with moldy women’s clothes and clumps of dirty hair from garbage cans.

“I led a secret life, that in black nights I huddled in smoke-filled dens brooding over grimy papers, in the foul-smelling sequestration of my hiding places I saw more and more vividly how I grew into a giant bestial spider that clung to its filth, chewing its cud of toxic letters amid convulsive mutterings. A monster with putrefaction written in the crannies of its skin as hectic red blotches, with uric acid drying and itching on its pate, a madness no longer stoppable as damp tufts of hair began painlessly detaching themselves. The freak who stubbed out his cigarettes in the spaces between his toes to deaden the oozy moistening itch that broke out again and again… that finally drove me out into the night, where I roamed through the most unsavory of all the ravaged spots on the hateful margins of town.”

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75*

[Salty Swift · Rating 3 out of 5]

File under - what the fuck did I just read?

[Veronica Gavilanes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this book because I heard a podcast about it and it seemed a good idea to discover an author I haven't read before. However, this was not my cup of tea. This is the story of a factory worker in East Germany who starts secretly looking at women in his workplace, but as the book continues and he deepens his reflections (about his relationship with his mother, with the state, with his future, with his self-doubts about his role in society, and with females, of course), he is not able to see women anymore (did they disappear or was it just him?). It is an intense, disturbing journey that combines reality with his subjectivity, so it is written as if it was a dream or several hallucinations mixed with his daily life. It was an interesting book.

What I liked: Regardless of my taste in books, I do understand the literary qualities of this one. His questions about society are still important, and the writer knows how to express the anguish of the existential crisis the main character is having, which makes it easy to relate with some of his reflections.

What I did not like: The style is supposed to be erotic, and I have read other reviews (including the one in the podcast I mentioned) that say it is a beautiful style, but for me, most of his analogies about the human body or sex were actually grotesque and really disturbing. The atmosphere created by his monologue of rants was not my favorite either.

[Giulia Basso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ogni riga è poesia. Viscerale, intimista, nero perlacea

[L · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredible translating, and a couple of really resonant ideas/passages in addition to its’ very interesting concept: what happens to a place or the people in it when the feminine disappears? Not women, but even the idea of them? The answer, it would seem, is misery and squalid filth and obsession at every turn.

Unfortunately, reading it in 2022, I feel like I’m in an incel’s mind or at least—someone who has not been given…has maybe even been denied contact or social skills with women and so can’t help but constantly think about them, defile them mentally while also exalting them spiritually and defending “their honor.”
An interesting and complex look at misogyny.
I found the language so abstract and poetic as to be difficult to read. I always kept going because the imagery was so disturbing and beautiful, I found myself simultaneously recoiling and drawn in.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit like if "Love Affairs of Nathaniel P" had been written in the era of the incel counter-revolution, and by a man, who worked with post-war experimental forms, hallucination, and social theory, and had as his target not self-satisfied left-liberal assholes (a worthy target, I accept), but the horrors of the DDR and the world in general. As with all of Cole's translations of Hilbig, this is fantastic, though certainly not the place to start. You'll need to build up some love for the author, and the implied author, and have some accumulated sympathy for the narrator himself, to get through this one in good faith.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Females is an ugly, detestable story-on purpose, I’m sure. But this journey into the mind of a deeply antisocial pervert, when married to Hilbig’s dizzying prose, poses a challenge even to those who have admired his other works. What is it about? a mentally ill middle aged man who is both repelled and obsessed with the opposite sex, and whose sensitivity to the corruption at the heart of East Germany doom him to the life of an outcast. I’m not sure i would recommend this as one’s introduction to Hilbig, as it is so convincingly repellant. i would suggest starting with The Old Rendering Plant instead.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 3 out of 5]

First and foremost, this book went over my head like a V2. Quick, sharp, and powerful. The writing is delirious, confounding, confessing, and conflictual. Much like Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, this book is an antidote for the ills by displaying them at all odds and ends. Set somewhere with concentration camps and General Stalin, the story is out of place and time yet presciently tempo-setting for mid-20th century.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Females I fucking loved, he’s great, Hilbig is

[Beverly · Rating 3 out of 5]

thoughts coming to shortly

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Andrew Rolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have many thoughts I won’t share