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Ο ύπνος των δικαίων
"O Wolgang Hilbig είναι ένας τεραστίου διαμετρήματος καλλιτέχνης. Ανακάλυψε μια θεσπέσια γλώσσα για να περιγράφει έναν φρικαλέο κόσμο". (Laszlo Krasznahorkai)
Η σκληρότητα της περιγραφής μιας κοινωνίας που μάχεται με τους πιο σκοτεινούς δαίμονές της, η ωμή, ενίοτε αβάσταχτη αλήθεια των ηρώων του σε συνδυασμό με την παράνοια της καθημερινότητας, κατέταξε τον Χίλμπιχ στους "σκληρούς" συγγραφείς, τον οποίο οι συμπατριώτες του συνήθως απέφευγαν να διαβάσουν. Σήμερα αποκτά πολυάριθμο και ολοένα και πιο φανατικό κοινό.
Σωσίες, η ένοχη συνείδηση ενός δολοφόνου, φανατική αστυνομία και αδιανόητοι έρωτες συνθέτουν τον αποκαλυπτικό πίνακα της μεταπολεμικής Γερμανίας, ο οποίος σύμφωνα με τους κριτικούς φέρνει στο νου εικόνες από κινηματογραφικά αριστουργήματα όπως το "Στάλκερ" του Ταρκόφσκι και "Οι ζωές των άλλων". Ένα βιβλίο για την ανθρώπινη παράνοια και τα σκοτάδια της ανθρώπινης ψυχής, τα γυμνά βιομηχανικά τοπία που την αντικατοπτρίζουν, απ' όπου προκύπτει όχι μια ποιητική πρόζα, αλλά μια καθαρή ποίηση, η οποία θέλει, ως τέτοια, να σώσει τον κόσμο. Το βιβλίο του Χίλμπιχ δεν συγκρίθηκε απλώς με τη Μελαγχολία της Αντίστασης και Το Τανγκό του Σατανά του Λάζλο Κρασναχορκάι, αλλά επαινέθηκε από τον ίδιο τον Ούγγρο συγγραφέα ως ένα από τα καλύτερα βιβλία του καιρού του. Ο Χίλμπιχ καταπιάνεται με το αρχέγονο θέμα της λογοτεχνίας: το πέρασμα μέσα απ' το σκοτάδι προς ένα κάποιο φως.
Η σκληρότητα της περιγραφής μιας κοινωνίας που μάχεται με τους πιο σκοτεινούς δαίμονές της, η ωμή, ενίοτε αβάσταχτη αλήθεια των ηρώων του σε συνδυασμό με την παράνοια της καθημερινότητας, κατέταξε τον Χίλμπιχ στους "σκληρούς" συγγραφείς, τον οποίο οι συμπατριώτες του συνήθως απέφευγαν να διαβάσουν. Σήμερα αποκτά πολυάριθμο και ολοένα και πιο φανατικό κοινό.
Σωσίες, η ένοχη συνείδηση ενός δολοφόνου, φανατική αστυνομία και αδιανόητοι έρωτες συνθέτουν τον αποκαλυπτικό πίνακα της μεταπολεμικής Γερμανίας, ο οποίος σύμφωνα με τους κριτικούς φέρνει στο νου εικόνες από κινηματογραφικά αριστουργήματα όπως το "Στάλκερ" του Ταρκόφσκι και "Οι ζωές των άλλων". Ένα βιβλίο για την ανθρώπινη παράνοια και τα σκοτάδια της ανθρώπινης ψυχής, τα γυμνά βιομηχανικά τοπία που την αντικατοπτρίζουν, απ' όπου προκύπτει όχι μια ποιητική πρόζα, αλλά μια καθαρή ποίηση, η οποία θέλει, ως τέτοια, να σώσει τον κόσμο. Το βιβλίο του Χίλμπιχ δεν συγκρίθηκε απλώς με τη Μελαγχολία της Αντίστασης και Το Τανγκό του Σατανά του Λάζλο Κρασναχορκάι, αλλά επαινέθηκε από τον ίδιο τον Ούγγρο συγγραφέα ως ένα από τα καλύτερα βιβλία του καιρού του. Ο Χίλμπιχ καταπιάνεται με το αρχέγονο θέμα της λογοτεχνίας: το πέρασμα μέσα απ' το σκοτάδι προς ένα κάποιο φως.
208 pages
First published January 1, 2002
27 people are currently reading
1449 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
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
July 17, 2020
Keeping Your Head Down
Little kids are bullied by bigger kids, until they become bigger kids who are then bullied by yet bigger adults. The bullying is especially harsh when carried out by the agents of a dictatorial state. In such a state these agents are everywhere. They suppress everything - all cultural movement, all but the most trivial conversations, anyone who sees anything different about the future, especially poets. Thus the common literary trope of life under European communism used to express existence in the totalitarian state: the stopped clock.
Some children, those who sense the game perhaps, don’t want to grow into bigger bullies. But escape is of course impossible. They will mature and be one part of the bleakness of the post-war German East. This bleakness never changes. The Russian insistence on time-keeping is a parody since time has stopped. Even after unification, the bleakness prevails. Commuting to the West brings economic improvement to individuals at the cost of familial and communal disintegration. The physical infrastructure follows close behind, “swiftly metamorphosed into a sociopolitical rubble heap of vacant houses, empty shops with dusty windows, and defunct factories.”
Telling one’s own story in such a timeless, desperately tedious environment is difficult. Memory is inhibited by sameness and attacked by sheer ugliness. Identical layers of lignite ash and coal dust bury emotion. “Perhaps it’s that we’re unable to love the world enough anymore. Why should we tell ourselves things about a world that matters less and less to us?” Memories, like families, “are all under the ground.” If the East is cholera, the West is plague. Location doesn’t matter much: ...“[M]ost people who live here belong to a lost class.”
But one’s youth and its secrets are never lost. They return constantly - in disturbing dreams, in neurotic fears, in individuals whom we would prefer not to encounter, and most pointedly in archives. Archives of the secret police are more precise than memory, and far more terrifying. “I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages,” thinks Hilbig’s narrator. His estranged wife knows the reason, a life in the East: “You people show no initiative, my wife said, all you’ve learned is how to wait for orders, you have no sense of self.” Or perhaps what she missed was a far too developed sense of self as someone hidden.
Little kids are bullied by bigger kids, until they become bigger kids who are then bullied by yet bigger adults. The bullying is especially harsh when carried out by the agents of a dictatorial state. In such a state these agents are everywhere. They suppress everything - all cultural movement, all but the most trivial conversations, anyone who sees anything different about the future, especially poets. Thus the common literary trope of life under European communism used to express existence in the totalitarian state: the stopped clock.
Some children, those who sense the game perhaps, don’t want to grow into bigger bullies. But escape is of course impossible. They will mature and be one part of the bleakness of the post-war German East. This bleakness never changes. The Russian insistence on time-keeping is a parody since time has stopped. Even after unification, the bleakness prevails. Commuting to the West brings economic improvement to individuals at the cost of familial and communal disintegration. The physical infrastructure follows close behind, “swiftly metamorphosed into a sociopolitical rubble heap of vacant houses, empty shops with dusty windows, and defunct factories.”
Telling one’s own story in such a timeless, desperately tedious environment is difficult. Memory is inhibited by sameness and attacked by sheer ugliness. Identical layers of lignite ash and coal dust bury emotion. “Perhaps it’s that we’re unable to love the world enough anymore. Why should we tell ourselves things about a world that matters less and less to us?” Memories, like families, “are all under the ground.” If the East is cholera, the West is plague. Location doesn’t matter much: ...“[M]ost people who live here belong to a lost class.”
But one’s youth and its secrets are never lost. They return constantly - in disturbing dreams, in neurotic fears, in individuals whom we would prefer not to encounter, and most pointedly in archives. Archives of the secret police are more precise than memory, and far more terrifying. “I feared my face would break out in scabies if I submitted to reading these inhuman pages,” thinks Hilbig’s narrator. His estranged wife knows the reason, a life in the East: “You people show no initiative, my wife said, all you’ve learned is how to wait for orders, you have no sense of self.” Or perhaps what she missed was a far too developed sense of self as someone hidden.
January 30, 2019
This is an extraordinary, sad work of a kind that could only have been written by a man of Hilbig's unique era: born in 1941, growing up in the rubble of East Germany, and already in late middle age when the Germanies reunified, when he was too old to change much about his life view or habits or to do anything other than chronicle his times with extreme, even painful truthfulness.
I disagree with those who find this work surreal, or who compare it with Kafka or even Poe. Anyone who had the experience of spending any time at all in pre-1989 East Germany would remember how reality itself was surreal, in the DDR. The stories in The Sleep of the Righteous capture the paranoia and the surreal nature of living in that culture of paranoia and defeat.
But this isn't a nihilistic book. It's full of humanity, and that's what makes the tragedy it chronicles so deeply affecting. Every one of these stories is heartbreaking in some way, from the first in the collection, about a boy growing up in a world defined by unexploded ordinance and industrial waste--a world so natural to the boy that he doesn't think to complain--to the last, extraordinary story, narrated by an older man, post-unification, who tells of his chance meeting with the Stasi officer who had been assigned to spy on him for decades.
This is an incredible book.
I disagree with those who find this work surreal, or who compare it with Kafka or even Poe. Anyone who had the experience of spending any time at all in pre-1989 East Germany would remember how reality itself was surreal, in the DDR. The stories in The Sleep of the Righteous capture the paranoia and the surreal nature of living in that culture of paranoia and defeat.
But this isn't a nihilistic book. It's full of humanity, and that's what makes the tragedy it chronicles so deeply affecting. Every one of these stories is heartbreaking in some way, from the first in the collection, about a boy growing up in a world defined by unexploded ordinance and industrial waste--a world so natural to the boy that he doesn't think to complain--to the last, extraordinary story, narrated by an older man, post-unification, who tells of his chance meeting with the Stasi officer who had been assigned to spy on him for decades.
This is an incredible book.
June 11, 2020
Much like Hilbig’s novel Old Rendering Plant, this collection of stories carries with it the weight of post-WWII Germany without explicitly enumerating all of that weight. It is an atmospheric book, moving seamlessly through the narrator’s life from youth to perhaps middle age—the individual stories not so much stopping and starting as appearing in glimpses seen through a pervasive mist. In fact it reads more like an episodic novel. The perspective is most often from first-person although in one story Hilbig switches curiously back and forth from first to third-person in a manner I am still puzzling over. There is a sense of the narrator—whom it is tempting to surmise is the same individual throughout the stories—grappling with the past as his grip on the present hovers in a tenuous position. Even as he now lives in the West, he can’t help being drawn—both physically and emotionally—back to the small forsaken town of his youth in the East. He both haunts and is haunted by this place. In both style and theme, the book is reminiscent of Old Rendering Plant, and between the two books one gets the sense of Hilbig as some spectral gardener in the throes of resigned diligence, forever churning over the same ash-saturated soil with his rusted old rototiller. What grows from this forsaken plot is literature both personal yet strangely remote—describing abandoned, polluted landscapes with the care of someone who still sees a beauty here and is able to transmit it seemingly without effort.
November 9, 2015
Wonderful, wonderful writing in multiple voices. Highly recommended.
(Review slightly revised after sleeping on it to a 5 rating.)
The first third of the book is in the voice of the young narrator, at times in the bleak daytime ash, grit, and smoldering pit fires of a hopeless GDR mining town, devoid of the fathers who never came back from the war:
In reality, though, we took in the incandescent air as though every trickle of sentimentality had to be parched from our innards. We breathed the smoke that rose from the furrows and faults in the street dust, we took in the afternoon’s paralyzing stillness like the golden-yellow vapors of alchemistic smelters…
At times he writes in the absolutely beautiful voice of the same youth at night, freed from the gray daytime of bullies, poverty and family, wandering the abandoned pits and ponds. First he escapes after dark from the women in the house:
I heard the voices of the women, waging their war against the summer in the streets: He just doesn’t hear, no he simply doesn’t hear…oh, I could just throw myself into the lake! And their voices made the sickle moon tremble, thin as a thread, a symbol of remote, unearthly elegance floating in the east above the black woods.
Then he becomes deaf to them, and glories in the night:
At night the gleaming birch leaves caught the moonlight, and when they stirred in a breeze, a flutter or flicker passed down the edge of the causeway, an iridescent glitter like crinkled tinfoil, coming from beyond, from the rubbish heaps that loomed nearby forbiddingly with the blood-red light of fires, hellfires, shooting up between them…
Later the grown-up narrator-author adopts a more straightforward style as he wallows in the passivity of his life after The Change (the collapse of the GDR and reunification). He lives in a house in Frankfurt with his common-law wife, who despises his lack of drive, occupies two top-floor rooms leaving him the bottom room, and behaves (with his concurrence) as if she owned it although he supports them. She is clearly meant to represent West German dominance and contempt for the easterners.
The narrator is drawn back time and time again to his childhood home and village. He provides two episodes that exemplify his assessment of the quandary of the East German heritage. On the one hand his narrator-author is compelled by the memories of state police and the need of the now-freed to know who informed, what they knew about you, how they interfered in your life. On the other he claims contempt for the intellectuals who blather endlessly on television panel shows about this the Stasi files when they should be talking about global warming, melting ice caps, the future end of the world.
There is no plot here. Instead, there are episode that gradually build up a picture of a man without a country, although he still very much lives in the country that preceded and succeeded his. In many ways the book is Sebaldean, but while Sebald is displaced from his physical home and his family, Hilbig is unredeemably, psychologically, mired in his.
The voice of the grown-up narrator is flatter, than that of the early chapters. This is fitting, as the intensely impressed experiences of the child give way to the resigned, also-collapsed voice of the post-GDR adult, but it is a bit of a let down. But it supports the ambiguity of the last chapter, when one doesn’t know whether the shadowy agent from the past is real or a persistent paranoid being that lives with all East Germans, the ‘maybe they are investigating me’ fear.
Introduction by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Terrific translation by Isabel Fargo Cole.
(Review slightly revised after sleeping on it to a 5 rating.)
The first third of the book is in the voice of the young narrator, at times in the bleak daytime ash, grit, and smoldering pit fires of a hopeless GDR mining town, devoid of the fathers who never came back from the war:
In reality, though, we took in the incandescent air as though every trickle of sentimentality had to be parched from our innards. We breathed the smoke that rose from the furrows and faults in the street dust, we took in the afternoon’s paralyzing stillness like the golden-yellow vapors of alchemistic smelters…
At times he writes in the absolutely beautiful voice of the same youth at night, freed from the gray daytime of bullies, poverty and family, wandering the abandoned pits and ponds. First he escapes after dark from the women in the house:
I heard the voices of the women, waging their war against the summer in the streets: He just doesn’t hear, no he simply doesn’t hear…oh, I could just throw myself into the lake! And their voices made the sickle moon tremble, thin as a thread, a symbol of remote, unearthly elegance floating in the east above the black woods.
Then he becomes deaf to them, and glories in the night:
At night the gleaming birch leaves caught the moonlight, and when they stirred in a breeze, a flutter or flicker passed down the edge of the causeway, an iridescent glitter like crinkled tinfoil, coming from beyond, from the rubbish heaps that loomed nearby forbiddingly with the blood-red light of fires, hellfires, shooting up between them…
Later the grown-up narrator-author adopts a more straightforward style as he wallows in the passivity of his life after The Change (the collapse of the GDR and reunification). He lives in a house in Frankfurt with his common-law wife, who despises his lack of drive, occupies two top-floor rooms leaving him the bottom room, and behaves (with his concurrence) as if she owned it although he supports them. She is clearly meant to represent West German dominance and contempt for the easterners.
The narrator is drawn back time and time again to his childhood home and village. He provides two episodes that exemplify his assessment of the quandary of the East German heritage. On the one hand his narrator-author is compelled by the memories of state police and the need of the now-freed to know who informed, what they knew about you, how they interfered in your life. On the other he claims contempt for the intellectuals who blather endlessly on television panel shows about this the Stasi files when they should be talking about global warming, melting ice caps, the future end of the world.
There is no plot here. Instead, there are episode that gradually build up a picture of a man without a country, although he still very much lives in the country that preceded and succeeded his. In many ways the book is Sebaldean, but while Sebald is displaced from his physical home and his family, Hilbig is unredeemably, psychologically, mired in his.
The voice of the grown-up narrator is flatter, than that of the early chapters. This is fitting, as the intensely impressed experiences of the child give way to the resigned, also-collapsed voice of the post-GDR adult, but it is a bit of a let down. But it supports the ambiguity of the last chapter, when one doesn’t know whether the shadowy agent from the past is real or a persistent paranoid being that lives with all East Germans, the ‘maybe they are investigating me’ fear.
Introduction by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Terrific translation by Isabel Fargo Cole.
November 2, 2021
My third Hilbig novel in quick succession. Whereas his others were solid blocks of interior narration, this one perfectly captures an elegiac wonderment characteristic of childhood's hurtle through strata of growth, confusion, and sadness.
The author summons reality with abundance through the distorted mirror of his character's psyche. He is a master at conjuring the fear and trembling of the past, the smoggy, mud-caked byways of German economic decline. The introduction by László Krasznahorkai only cemented my intuition that Hilbig was a better, more efficient and readable version of L. K. An author I could reread, who does not simply relish empty blathering sentences, strung like overcooked spaghetti over an inhuman, mathematical premise.
Hilbig was startlingly in touch with human instinct, pain, and joy, and offered us the precise observations of a humanist who processed his share of darkness.
As in The Females, the grit of the factory will enter your eyes, and no matter how irritated you get at the accumulation of minute details, the pathological exploration will draw you deeper into the eerie confines of Hilbig's vision. The polish upon the filth is Tarkovskian. The colors pop and the grayscale contains so many affecting shades of light and shadow, layered, grainy, ghostly and obscurant. How fascinating, his palpitating nightmares become, as murderers and madmen weave through steam-spitting pipes lit against a coal-blackened sky.
It is a foregone conclusion that I will read every book by the author available in English.
The author summons reality with abundance through the distorted mirror of his character's psyche. He is a master at conjuring the fear and trembling of the past, the smoggy, mud-caked byways of German economic decline. The introduction by László Krasznahorkai only cemented my intuition that Hilbig was a better, more efficient and readable version of L. K. An author I could reread, who does not simply relish empty blathering sentences, strung like overcooked spaghetti over an inhuman, mathematical premise.
Hilbig was startlingly in touch with human instinct, pain, and joy, and offered us the precise observations of a humanist who processed his share of darkness.
As in The Females, the grit of the factory will enter your eyes, and no matter how irritated you get at the accumulation of minute details, the pathological exploration will draw you deeper into the eerie confines of Hilbig's vision. The polish upon the filth is Tarkovskian. The colors pop and the grayscale contains so many affecting shades of light and shadow, layered, grainy, ghostly and obscurant. How fascinating, his palpitating nightmares become, as murderers and madmen weave through steam-spitting pipes lit against a coal-blackened sky.
It is a foregone conclusion that I will read every book by the author available in English.
January 16, 2022
Και έρχονται οι εκδόσεις Ποταμός και σου λένε "να, εδώ, βγάλαμε Βόλφγκανγκ Χίλμπιχ. Όχι για να μην μπορείς να προσφέρεις το όνομά του, αλλά γιατί αξίζει να δεις μια μεταπολεμική Γερμανία από την πένα αυτού για τον οποίο ο Λάσλο Κρασναχορκάι μιλάει με τα πλέον κολακευτικά λόγια". Να σου πω κάτι; Και πολύ καλά έκαναν.
Στις πρώτες ιστορίες, μέσα από μια σχεδόν κινηματογραφική οπτική, ο Χίλμπιχ δείχνει την Ανατολική Γερμανία όπως την ένιωθε, ζοφερή και αφιλόξενη. "Πάνω απ' όλη την πόλη, μα ιδιαίτερα αισθητή πάνω απ' τον δρόμο μας, πλανιόταν μια συμφορά: πατεράδες που θα μπορούσαν να κάνουν μικρότερα παιδιά δεν υπήρχαν".
Ευτυχώς ήρθε η αλλαγή, η επανένωση της χώρας. Αλλά και από τις επόμενες ιστορίες, αυτή "η αλλαγή του συστήματος έμοιαζε να μην επιβεβαιώνεται από τίποτα". Άλλο γκρίζο εδώ, διαφορετικό.
Διαβάζοντας τις επτά ιστορίες του Ύπνου των δικαίων, λες δεν υπάρχει χώρος για λίγο φως. Ευτυχώς, ο Χίλμπιχ ανοίγει κάποια παραθυράκια. Και εδώ κάπως σαν να μου ταιριάζει το ανοιχτό ροζ στο εξώφυλλο (που ήταν και τον πρώτο στοιχείο του βιβλίου που μου τράβηξε την προσοχή και είπα "ΟΚ ΤΟ ΘΕΛΩ ΧΘΕΣ"). Αυτό το ροζ που αγκαλιάζει το γκρι, ή το γκρι σπάει το ροζ (όπως το δει κανείς).
Λάσλο, *τώρα* καταλαβαίνω.
Στις πρώτες ιστορίες, μέσα από μια σχεδόν κινηματογραφική οπτική, ο Χίλμπιχ δείχνει την Ανατολική Γερμανία όπως την ένιωθε, ζοφερή και αφιλόξενη. "Πάνω απ' όλη την πόλη, μα ιδιαίτερα αισθητή πάνω απ' τον δρόμο μας, πλανιόταν μια συμφορά: πατεράδες που θα μπορούσαν να κάνουν μικρότερα παιδιά δεν υπήρχαν".
Ευτυχώς ήρθε η αλλαγή, η επανένωση της χώρας. Αλλά και από τις επόμενες ιστορίες, αυτή "η αλλαγή του συστήματος έμοιαζε να μην επιβεβαιώνεται από τίποτα". Άλλο γκρίζο εδώ, διαφορετικό.
Διαβάζοντας τις επτά ιστορίες του Ύπνου των δικαίων, λες δεν υπάρχει χώρος για λίγο φως. Ευτυχώς, ο Χίλμπιχ ανοίγει κάποια παραθυράκια. Και εδώ κάπως σαν να μου ταιριάζει το ανοιχτό ροζ στο εξώφυλλο (που ήταν και τον πρώτο στοιχείο του βιβλίου που μου τράβηξε την προσοχή και είπα "ΟΚ ΤΟ ΘΕΛΩ ΧΘΕΣ"). Αυτό το ροζ που αγκαλιάζει το γκρι, ή το γκρι σπάει το ροζ (όπως το δει κανείς).
Λάσλο, *τώρα* καταλαβαίνω.
October 19, 2023
(2.5) When you look at the title of Hilbig's loosely-related book of short stories, doesn't it sound a little ominous? Doesn't the book cover full of white and black smoke elicit a vision of pyre with darkness?
Hilbig's writing is chock full of the same types of themes: coal, dirt, industrial setting, cancerous death. The life of the GDR has perished and the wall has crumbled and left behind these thoughts in incremental writings.
While his "The Tiding of the Trees" left me amazed, "The Sleep of the Righteous" personally left me a bit bored at times. His short prose is reminiscent of his longer prose, yet its main flaw is that it's short. There's no elaboration of his subject which drew me in with my initial exposure. The dirtiness, the grit, the isolation of self was all there, but not spread over a single work, but redundantly over several. If there was one story with a redeeming quality, I'd say 'The Memories'.
I know you're not supposed to power through short stories as they tend to have something unique to say, but Hilbig's felt like a metronome - hear that click, click, click, click - eternally keeping time, stuck in the past, but never truly going forward. The dirge plays, yet we wonder why?
Hilbig's writing is chock full of the same types of themes: coal, dirt, industrial setting, cancerous death. The life of the GDR has perished and the wall has crumbled and left behind these thoughts in incremental writings.
While his "The Tiding of the Trees" left me amazed, "The Sleep of the Righteous" personally left me a bit bored at times. His short prose is reminiscent of his longer prose, yet its main flaw is that it's short. There's no elaboration of his subject which drew me in with my initial exposure. The dirtiness, the grit, the isolation of self was all there, but not spread over a single work, but redundantly over several. If there was one story with a redeeming quality, I'd say 'The Memories'.
I know you're not supposed to power through short stories as they tend to have something unique to say, but Hilbig's felt like a metronome - hear that click, click, click, click - eternally keeping time, stuck in the past, but never truly going forward. The dirge plays, yet we wonder why?
June 27, 2016
"The horrendous, deathly, unquiet, baleful, murderous everyday situations of the petty bourgeois. These routine occurrences do not pass. The petty bourgeois does not pass. A world comes into being through these everyday events and these are the mundane situations that Hilbig lived through during the decades of the East German pseudo-Communist dictatorship."
From the foreword by the great Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Muzilet, and it is easy to see the affinity of prose between the "Hungarian master of apocalypse" (Susan Sontag) and Hilbig, albeit Hilbig's world is less surreal that that of Satantango or Melancholy of Resistance.
The Sleep of the Righteous is a collection of 7 pieces, short stories perhaps one could call them but more like fictional essays and certainly strongly linked by theme forming a novel as a whole, linked by their common theme of Hilbig's narrators (a similar but not necessarily the same character) navigating their way through East German history. Part I contains four pieces set in the pre-unification East and the three stories in Part III are post-unification.
In the first, The Palace of Storms, the narrator relates his time as a young child, growing up in a post-War East, separated from the West, with "a death of men in town, most of the children were fatherless and would remain so forever", and in the midst of a devastated landscape of destroyed factories and abandoned mines, and set over a sweltering summer as the locals wait for storms to break and bring relief:
"We could claim but a small part of the street; our street, as we called it, stretched town-ward to the point where the pavement began - uneven and jolting, made of square granite cobbles - and out the other way to the railroad crossing, where the town, at least its inhabited part, really had already ended. The sedate, brassy clanging when the red and white gates were cranked down - a sour note made by a tiny hammer striking the inside wall of a shallow, bowl-like mold - was, in a way, the town's death knell, for past the railroad crossing, at least on the right side, lay vast fields of rubble with looming black beams and ruined walls: the remains of munitions factories where concentration camp inmates had laboured in wartime."
Much of the story focuses on his learning to swim, not, as his mother thinks, in the local pool, but rather in abandoned coal pits, heated by the still burning lignite:
"Writing resembled swimming in this sense, once you'd gotten your head above water, once you'd started to swim, it was impossible to stop until you at last felt the sand of the far shore. In similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over the surface of a mine pit smelling of coal and rot ... only there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words you had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words went under."
In the 2nd, and perhaps my favourite, "The Bottles in the Cellar" the narrator is a little older, on the reluctant verge of adulthood: "it grew unmistakably clear that I, once I had ceased to be a child, would be the only serviceable male in the household: it was a divine verdict and every day I was relieved to find that I was a child still...but time was passing, and in a week, in two weeks, next winter or the following spring it could happen, I would be grown up."
And his biggest fear - the "iron verdict" he faces - is that it will be his responsibility to clear the family house of its accumulated clutter from the previous generations, and in particular:
"the true calamity was the bottles in the cellar ... a pile of empty wine bottles stacked with the greatest of care, reaching almost as high as one's head, covered over the years by thick coats of coal and potato dust that blackened cobwebs kept from sliding off ... suddenly, when one dared to look, there were many more bottles still, still more of these pyramids had been started, but foundered, they had collapsed upon themselves, dark green glass had poured out beneath the shelves, it seemed the shelves themselves, crammed full of bottles, had been washed up by glassy waves to freeze, unstable and askew, upon a glassy gelid flood that had rushed shrilly singing to fill every corner."
The bottles being the residue of a family cider making attempt gone wrong:
"The invincible fruit having made a laughingstock of the juicer and its inventor, suddenly began to flow of its own accord, for its own pleasure the mead of fruit juices flowed and seemed to set even the containers to melting: the fruit washed the yard with a gaze reflecting gigantic swarms of wasps and flies that alone knew no fear of earthly sweetness and whose hordes did not retreat until the juices had turned to vinegar. When the blue vinegar flood transformed the moonlit yard into a tract of hell, when out of false sweetness was fermented the true sourness in which one could hold back one's tears no longer, in which all human skin began desperately to pucker and to crawl, then suddenly it was as if youth were over and done with."
He concludes:
"I wanted to vomit a sleep that brought me no satisfaction because it always had to end again. The sleep that gave me no rest in the nights when, thirsting, half-asleep, half-awake, I listened to the howling of the bottles in the cellar."
"Coming" is an equally fevered piece, as the narrator remembers his adolescent struggles with his mother and aunts:
"When I was ten or twelve, when I had given up all hegemonic claims within the family and ceased to respond to the cries of the women. Only then did I guess the exact words they spoke, did I think I understood when they gasped out the seeming non sequitur: 'The lake! The lake! I'm going to throw myself into the lake!'
And often it seemed to sound like: We're going to throw ourselves into the lake! - But that couldn't be; the term we , in this random lot of people cooped in a tiny flat and forced into a group, had fallen completely out of use.
All women uttered this threat, at every opportunity that arose, it was the most devastating declaration of a ruptured, ever-unravelling communal life; these were words that could come only from the women, whose numbers in the house were incontestably superior."
(In passing, it is worth commenting that Hilbig's narrator, a boy growing in a world largely depopulated of adult males by WW2, rather sees women as very much other).
The title piece The Sleep of the Righteous is the shortest (5 pages) in the book.
"When Grandmother died, it was decided without discussion that I, still a child, would move that same day to her vacated bed, next to my grandfather, so as to banish for good all clarity as to who had killed the old woman."
It was one of us two, that much is for sure: it was a blow from the cast-iron poker, descending with a thud to strike her on the hip, right between kidney and spine, a blow to which, after weeks of hunched shuffling and vomiting of black blood, she ultimately succumbed. How absurd that her end was ascribed to several prunes, soaked in cold water, which she was said to have eaten too greedily; it was the farcical justification that we had all agreed to believe, and no one dared call it cowardly fiction.
...
Whichever ever of us two dies first will sink redeemed into his grave ... no doubt that's why we hold our breath so often and so long. - The survivor, suddenly isolated, suddenly lacking his consort, lacking his accuser by his side, will fully grasp his guilt, while the innocent one sleeps forever."
This desire to "banish for good all clarity" feels to be another common Hilbig theme (see The Dark Man).
Part II starts with The Afternoon and the narrators "return" to the town of M..., which remains much as it was pre-reunification. [M... is not named as such in the novel but Hilbig's own home town in Meuselwitz, and the town in the book is clearly based closely on it]
"I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that's all: in truth it was the town that never really left me. The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval ... in a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis and that collapse had survived the regime change."
The town seems locked in a perpetual 3pm - but a gloomy one:
"More and more smoke seemed to spill from the lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal."
Memories has a similar theme, with the subject of the story wandering through his hometown as it gradually transforms, and diminishes, post reunification:
"The factories were closed, keys rusting in distant safes in Munich or Dortmund until they were sold to a demolition firm. If they were lucky, and not yet too old, they might find a job driving one of the long-distance freight trains transporting rolls of pink toilet paper or tins of condensed milk from Munich to Leipzig - And looking ahead, they shuddered to think of their sons who went about with shaved heads in combat boots and black bomber jackets, staring with alcohol into their eyes into a future that was none..."
His walk is haunted by memories of the past, in particular his time in the boiler room with the "scrawny, somber individual who answered to the name of Grunsch; his first name was unknown, forgotten because it couldn't be pronounced, and as no one called him by it, perhaps he himself had long since forgotten it"
The story switches oddly but presumably deliberately between first ("Shut up..just shut up! I bellowed") and third ("For a long time after that C. was bothered by his fit of temper") narration, which perhaps hints at a dual identity and leads in neatly to the final story, The Dark Man.
The Dark Man starts with the narrator watching authors on TV discussing the opening of their Stasi files - both those who discover they are victims and those named as collaborators:
"It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurrent torrents of verbiage: no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television
...
Ah, I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! - And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives!"
He then encounters someone claiming to be his Stasi case agent, but who appears to be almost his double, hinting again at an ambiguous duality in how the narrator's life could have played out. And the story ends, violently in the same boiler room, as in Memories:
"All the things he had known about me - while all I knew of him was that we had been very similar - had suddenly vanished."
Credit must go to Isabel Fargo Cole for bringing the works, and the power of Hilbig's prose, so ably into English. And both of the below, written by her on Hilbig, are valuable for their insights including her account of a visit to present day Meuselwitz:
http://www.necessaryfiction.com/blog/...
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
From the foreword by the great Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Muzilet, and it is easy to see the affinity of prose between the "Hungarian master of apocalypse" (Susan Sontag) and Hilbig, albeit Hilbig's world is less surreal that that of Satantango or Melancholy of Resistance.
The Sleep of the Righteous is a collection of 7 pieces, short stories perhaps one could call them but more like fictional essays and certainly strongly linked by theme forming a novel as a whole, linked by their common theme of Hilbig's narrators (a similar but not necessarily the same character) navigating their way through East German history. Part I contains four pieces set in the pre-unification East and the three stories in Part III are post-unification.
In the first, The Palace of Storms, the narrator relates his time as a young child, growing up in a post-War East, separated from the West, with "a death of men in town, most of the children were fatherless and would remain so forever", and in the midst of a devastated landscape of destroyed factories and abandoned mines, and set over a sweltering summer as the locals wait for storms to break and bring relief:
"We could claim but a small part of the street; our street, as we called it, stretched town-ward to the point where the pavement began - uneven and jolting, made of square granite cobbles - and out the other way to the railroad crossing, where the town, at least its inhabited part, really had already ended. The sedate, brassy clanging when the red and white gates were cranked down - a sour note made by a tiny hammer striking the inside wall of a shallow, bowl-like mold - was, in a way, the town's death knell, for past the railroad crossing, at least on the right side, lay vast fields of rubble with looming black beams and ruined walls: the remains of munitions factories where concentration camp inmates had laboured in wartime."
Much of the story focuses on his learning to swim, not, as his mother thinks, in the local pool, but rather in abandoned coal pits, heated by the still burning lignite:
"Writing resembled swimming in this sense, once you'd gotten your head above water, once you'd started to swim, it was impossible to stop until you at last felt the sand of the far shore. In similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over the surface of a mine pit smelling of coal and rot ... only there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words you had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words went under."
In the 2nd, and perhaps my favourite, "The Bottles in the Cellar" the narrator is a little older, on the reluctant verge of adulthood: "it grew unmistakably clear that I, once I had ceased to be a child, would be the only serviceable male in the household: it was a divine verdict and every day I was relieved to find that I was a child still...but time was passing, and in a week, in two weeks, next winter or the following spring it could happen, I would be grown up."
And his biggest fear - the "iron verdict" he faces - is that it will be his responsibility to clear the family house of its accumulated clutter from the previous generations, and in particular:
"the true calamity was the bottles in the cellar ... a pile of empty wine bottles stacked with the greatest of care, reaching almost as high as one's head, covered over the years by thick coats of coal and potato dust that blackened cobwebs kept from sliding off ... suddenly, when one dared to look, there were many more bottles still, still more of these pyramids had been started, but foundered, they had collapsed upon themselves, dark green glass had poured out beneath the shelves, it seemed the shelves themselves, crammed full of bottles, had been washed up by glassy waves to freeze, unstable and askew, upon a glassy gelid flood that had rushed shrilly singing to fill every corner."
The bottles being the residue of a family cider making attempt gone wrong:
"The invincible fruit having made a laughingstock of the juicer and its inventor, suddenly began to flow of its own accord, for its own pleasure the mead of fruit juices flowed and seemed to set even the containers to melting: the fruit washed the yard with a gaze reflecting gigantic swarms of wasps and flies that alone knew no fear of earthly sweetness and whose hordes did not retreat until the juices had turned to vinegar. When the blue vinegar flood transformed the moonlit yard into a tract of hell, when out of false sweetness was fermented the true sourness in which one could hold back one's tears no longer, in which all human skin began desperately to pucker and to crawl, then suddenly it was as if youth were over and done with."
He concludes:
"I wanted to vomit a sleep that brought me no satisfaction because it always had to end again. The sleep that gave me no rest in the nights when, thirsting, half-asleep, half-awake, I listened to the howling of the bottles in the cellar."
"Coming" is an equally fevered piece, as the narrator remembers his adolescent struggles with his mother and aunts:
"When I was ten or twelve, when I had given up all hegemonic claims within the family and ceased to respond to the cries of the women. Only then did I guess the exact words they spoke, did I think I understood when they gasped out the seeming non sequitur: 'The lake! The lake! I'm going to throw myself into the lake!'
And often it seemed to sound like: We're going to throw ourselves into the lake! - But that couldn't be; the term we , in this random lot of people cooped in a tiny flat and forced into a group, had fallen completely out of use.
All women uttered this threat, at every opportunity that arose, it was the most devastating declaration of a ruptured, ever-unravelling communal life; these were words that could come only from the women, whose numbers in the house were incontestably superior."
(In passing, it is worth commenting that Hilbig's narrator, a boy growing in a world largely depopulated of adult males by WW2, rather sees women as very much other).
The title piece The Sleep of the Righteous is the shortest (5 pages) in the book.
"When Grandmother died, it was decided without discussion that I, still a child, would move that same day to her vacated bed, next to my grandfather, so as to banish for good all clarity as to who had killed the old woman."
It was one of us two, that much is for sure: it was a blow from the cast-iron poker, descending with a thud to strike her on the hip, right between kidney and spine, a blow to which, after weeks of hunched shuffling and vomiting of black blood, she ultimately succumbed. How absurd that her end was ascribed to several prunes, soaked in cold water, which she was said to have eaten too greedily; it was the farcical justification that we had all agreed to believe, and no one dared call it cowardly fiction.
...
Whichever ever of us two dies first will sink redeemed into his grave ... no doubt that's why we hold our breath so often and so long. - The survivor, suddenly isolated, suddenly lacking his consort, lacking his accuser by his side, will fully grasp his guilt, while the innocent one sleeps forever."
This desire to "banish for good all clarity" feels to be another common Hilbig theme (see The Dark Man).
Part II starts with The Afternoon and the narrators "return" to the town of M..., which remains much as it was pre-reunification. [M... is not named as such in the novel but Hilbig's own home town in Meuselwitz, and the town in the book is clearly based closely on it]
"I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that's all: in truth it was the town that never really left me. The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval ... in a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis and that collapse had survived the regime change."
The town seems locked in a perpetual 3pm - but a gloomy one:
"More and more smoke seemed to spill from the lowlands into the flat clouds, which, even in the afternoon, were nocturnal."
Memories has a similar theme, with the subject of the story wandering through his hometown as it gradually transforms, and diminishes, post reunification:
"The factories were closed, keys rusting in distant safes in Munich or Dortmund until they were sold to a demolition firm. If they were lucky, and not yet too old, they might find a job driving one of the long-distance freight trains transporting rolls of pink toilet paper or tins of condensed milk from Munich to Leipzig - And looking ahead, they shuddered to think of their sons who went about with shaved heads in combat boots and black bomber jackets, staring with alcohol into their eyes into a future that was none..."
His walk is haunted by memories of the past, in particular his time in the boiler room with the "scrawny, somber individual who answered to the name of Grunsch; his first name was unknown, forgotten because it couldn't be pronounced, and as no one called him by it, perhaps he himself had long since forgotten it"
The story switches oddly but presumably deliberately between first ("Shut up..just shut up! I bellowed") and third ("For a long time after that C. was bothered by his fit of temper") narration, which perhaps hints at a dual identity and leads in neatly to the final story, The Dark Man.
The Dark Man starts with the narrator watching authors on TV discussing the opening of their Stasi files - both those who discover they are victims and those named as collaborators:
"It was mostly authors who grappled with this subject or buried it under recurrent torrents of verbiage: no one from the legions of the unknown, those whom, without the protection of fame, the Stasi had truly tormented, ever appeared on television
...
Ah, I thought, suddenly they have a real theme! - And they clung to this theme with such an iron grip, it was hard not to suspect that these files, suddenly made public, had saved their literary lives!"
He then encounters someone claiming to be his Stasi case agent, but who appears to be almost his double, hinting again at an ambiguous duality in how the narrator's life could have played out. And the story ends, violently in the same boiler room, as in Memories:
"All the things he had known about me - while all I knew of him was that we had been very similar - had suddenly vanished."
Credit must go to Isabel Fargo Cole for bringing the works, and the power of Hilbig's prose, so ably into English. And both of the below, written by her on Hilbig, are valuable for their insights including her account of a visit to present day Meuselwitz:
http://www.necessaryfiction.com/blog/...
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Read
January 26, 2025Few writers understand wintry misery on the peripheries quite like Hilbig, and this is pretty much him in classic form. A few other Central Europeans do too – Trakl, Handke, and Krasznahorkai, and it’s only natural that Laszlo K. wrote the intro. The Germanies reunified, and… what now? Maybe the end of history isn’t quite the end. Maybe there will still be those who are stranded in the darkness at the edge of town. And maybe they’re liable to start look to put their boot on someone else’s neck. I’m from the creepy margins myself, and my god it resonated.
January 22, 2017
Not as challenging as Hilbig's 'I,' but just as intelligent, just as well-written, just as well-translated. Where that monster was about living in an authoritarian state/ how you can be a decent human being at any point (i.e., not easily), this looks at the aftermath of trying to live in such a state or trying to be a decent human being, as well as doing a quick bit of "What would Proust be like if set in the DDR?"
If that doesn't get you to read it, well, okay, that would get me to read it. I understand other people have other priorities.
If that doesn't get you to read it, well, okay, that would get me to read it. I understand other people have other priorities.
July 9, 2024
Entering my Hilbig era...watch this space... Loved the 7 stories in Sleep of the Righteous -dreamlike, dreary, grimy, bold. East German and post-GDR settings. In the introduction, Krasznahorkai says 'he discovered a wondrous language to describe a horrific world. I admit this is a sick illumination. Nonetheless, it is illumination. Unforgettable.'
December 30, 2015
dark, desolate, and somber, wolfgang hilbig's the sleep of the righteous (der schlaf der gerechten) is as much a collection of linked stories as it is a single work of fiction. set in the decades following world war ii, hilbig's (apparently semi-autobiographical) reminiscences span the years from adolescence to post-reunification. funereal, stark, and dimly light, the sleep of the righteous inhabits whatever realm is beyond foreboding, a dreadful tedium wherein echoes remind and recall ad infinitum.
*translated from the german by isabel fargo cole with a wonderful introduction by lászló krasznahorkai
the dark divests us of our qualities. — though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness...it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten...it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of his breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. and we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling each other, still and hostile. by day we keep silent, we know too much about ourselves, and our resolve to skirt or ignore this knowledge of ourselves is unshakeable.
*translated from the german by isabel fargo cole with a wonderful introduction by lászló krasznahorkai
May 13, 2024
Μέσα από επτά διηγήματα -που όλα μαζι καταλαμβάνουν 200 σελίδες- o Hilbig επιτυγχάνει όχι απλά να απεικονίσει το μεταπολεμικό βιομηχανικό τοπίο της ανατολικής Γερμανίας, αλλά να εντοπίσει την ποίηση μέσα στον ευρύτερο παραλογισμό αλλά και την ασφυξία της ζωής υπό την επιτήρηση του καθεστώτος, που γίνεται σταδιακά, εντονότερη με αποκορύφωμα το τελευταίο διήγημα «Ο σκοτεινός άντρας», όπου αποκαλύπτεται χωρίς φτιασίδια και υπερβολές ο πολιτικός τρόμος του παρελθόντος.
Οι ιστορίες, που συγκροτούν μια ενότητα, είναι γεμάτες από συντρίμια και σκοτάδια, τα οποία συνυπάρχουν παράλληλα, μιας και στο βιβλίο η διάκριση ανάμεσα στο παρελθόν και το παρόν, στον αφηγητή και τους πολλούς, στη παρουσία και την απουσία δεν είναι πάντοτε αυτονόητη.
«Ο ύπνος των δικαίων» είναι ένα πραγματικό λογοτεχνικό επίτευγμα, στο οποίο οι φρικαλεότητες γίνονται το εφαλτήριο για να εκφραστεί η καθολικότητα του πόνου και της απογοήτευσης πέρα και έξω από τα σύνορα των ιστορικών καταστροφών, των πολιτικών αποτυχιών και ερειπίων.
Πρόκειται για ένα πραγματικά ΣΗΜΑΝΤΙΚΟ βιβλίο.
Οι ιστορίες, που συγκροτούν μια ενότητα, είναι γεμάτες από συντρίμια και σκοτάδια, τα οποία συνυπάρχουν παράλληλα, μιας και στο βιβλίο η διάκριση ανάμεσα στο παρελθόν και το παρόν, στον αφηγητή και τους πολλούς, στη παρουσία και την απουσία δεν είναι πάντοτε αυτονόητη.
«Ο ύπνος των δικαίων» είναι ένα πραγματικό λογοτεχνικό επίτευγμα, στο οποίο οι φρικαλεότητες γίνονται το εφαλτήριο για να εκφραστεί η καθολικότητα του πόνου και της απογοήτευσης πέρα και έξω από τα σύνορα των ιστορικών καταστροφών, των πολιτικών αποτυχιών και ερειπίων.
Πρόκειται για ένα πραγματικά ΣΗΜΑΝΤΙΚΟ βιβλίο.
July 13, 2022
The author is skilled at evoking the unreal atmosphere of childhood and that's what made me enjoy the first few stories the most. I might not have been captivated by most of those stories, but I can't deny they're all successful at conveying a unique mood. Simply put - they're well-written, and I felt the purposefulness of their imagery and embellishment even if I didn't always appreciate the purpose.
May 14, 2019
It is difficult for me to not think of the Peter Handke when contemplating this book. The 1970s Handke of Goalie’s Anxiety. Both are rural industrial; a landscape of factories and mud—the latter so prevalent that the bovine of Satantango wouldn’t be unexpected. This collection sports its own messianism, though it is faded and confused—melded with the droning of game show tv from the next room. Everyone is sick or jaded. The walk to the mailbox is an act of hope, a ritualized deliverance. When the organs of state security are suddenly on the dole, deals with the devil may just arrive in a mail order catalog. I read this in Frankfurt on a clear morning, surrounded by West Africans.
January 2, 2020
Vivid, bleak stories from some very strange and not so very distant times and places, in a variety of compelling voices. I absolutely loved this little book.
It also must be said: Cole’s translations are absolutely stunning. They are incredibly fluid, highly polished, never even the slightest bit dry or awkward. Truly masterful work.
It also must be said: Cole’s translations are absolutely stunning. They are incredibly fluid, highly polished, never even the slightest bit dry or awkward. Truly masterful work.
July 31, 2017
This was ok, but I am overall a bit disappointed in it. I don't know why I expected so much from this author when really I have no measure to hold it against as I never read anything else by him. He is hailed as an underrated, yet important author and as a master of poetry, short form and long form. His writing is often classed as post-modern and inventive. All things, I love and appreciate in an author and yet, dare I say it, I was profoundly bored reading this selection of short stories. In some I could appreciate the form, but the narrative left me cold, in others, I thought the story idea was interesting but the form was messy. I am still going to check out more by him and I want to finally read ICH by him, so I shall hope for the best.
November 16, 2024
I just couldn't warm up to Hilbig's style. Complex, dark, elaborate, repeatedly excursive. And I couldn't relate to the content either. All the short stories are looks back on times and societies past. The first four are about the time in Hilbig's homeland Saxonia after WW II. The last three stories about the same area directly after the unification. They focus on what was lost.
Hilbig mixes the real environment as he knew it with ordinary activities and dashes of Saxonian magical realism if such a thing exists. A man walks to the letterbox as every night and suddenly finds himself as a heater in a coal power plant. The author visits his mother in his hometown and a dying female friend in Leipzig, just to meet an anonymous former Stasi agent in a lethal duel. A young boy explores the landscape of abandoned surface mines to end up among magical growth on a peninsula in a flooded mine crater.
The only story I enjoyed was the last one with the author facing his Stasi watchman. All the others didn't touch me.
Hilbig mixes the real environment as he knew it with ordinary activities and dashes of Saxonian magical realism if such a thing exists. A man walks to the letterbox as every night and suddenly finds himself as a heater in a coal power plant. The author visits his mother in his hometown and a dying female friend in Leipzig, just to meet an anonymous former Stasi agent in a lethal duel. A young boy explores the landscape of abandoned surface mines to end up among magical growth on a peninsula in a flooded mine crater.
The only story I enjoyed was the last one with the author facing his Stasi watchman. All the others didn't touch me.
January 13, 2017
This small book is a 2015 translation from German of an author described as "one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar [WWII] era," and an author who received many major German literary prizes. This book is divided into two parts. The first has 4 pieces and the second has 3 pieces. The stories seem to all be being told by the same person about periods of his life from when he was a child to when he is a middle-age adult. As another reviewer notes, these pieces lack plot and feel more like essays than stories.
I liked the first piece, which described life in a small East German town. It was a pretty bleak life, although the picture of the swimming trunks the mother knitted for the boy is pretty funny. It is certainly understandable why he never wore them! The rest of the pieces in Part I were more abstract than I like. My impression is that Part I concerned the narrator's life prior to the reunification of Germany. In the three stories in Part II, the narrator is returning to the town he grew up. While he appears to have fled the town as soon as East Germany disappeared, he doesn't seem to be able to shed the town and its impact on him. I liked the last story the best. In it, the narrator, an author, encounters a former Stasi agent. I did not, however, understand the connection between the narrator, Marie, and the agent. The narrator never seems to have been able to slough off the bleak life he lived under communism.
I liked the first piece, which described life in a small East German town. It was a pretty bleak life, although the picture of the swimming trunks the mother knitted for the boy is pretty funny. It is certainly understandable why he never wore them! The rest of the pieces in Part I were more abstract than I like. My impression is that Part I concerned the narrator's life prior to the reunification of Germany. In the three stories in Part II, the narrator is returning to the town he grew up. While he appears to have fled the town as soon as East Germany disappeared, he doesn't seem to be able to shed the town and its impact on him. I liked the last story the best. In it, the narrator, an author, encounters a former Stasi agent. I did not, however, understand the connection between the narrator, Marie, and the agent. The narrator never seems to have been able to slough off the bleak life he lived under communism.
July 1, 2016
Holy cow, this book was incredible. The prose is so beautifully written that it feels like poetry. Full review up soon.
December 12, 2021
Η γραφή του Hilbig θυμίζει ακατέργαστο διαμάντι° πηγαία, ανεπιτήδευτη, ρεαλιστική, δημιουργεί εξίσου την εικόνα του ζοφερού περιβάλλοντος χώρου όσο και των βιωμένων συναισθημάτων.
Γεννήθηκε το 1941 στην Κομμουνιστική Ανατολική Γερμανία και όπως έγραψε στον πρόλογο του ο Krasznahorkai : "Πολλοί έχουν σκεφτεί και έχουν πει για τον Χίλμπιχ πως, με δεδομένο ότι η μοίρα και η συγγραφική του τέχνη είναι τόσο συνυφασμένες με την κομμουνιστική Ανατολική Γερμανία, ο ίδιος αποτελεί μόλις και μετά βίας κάτι περισσότερο από έναν απλό χρονικογράφο της Ανατολικής Γερμανίας, ένα χλωμό Καφκικό απείκασμα…"
Ο Ύπνος των Δικαίων είναι μια συλλογή διηγημάτων με αυτοβιογραφικό χαρακτήρα που παρουσιάζει μια πραγματικότητα βγαλμένη από δυστοπία.
Ένα μικρό αγόρι που το μεγαλώνει η μητέρα του. Εικόνες και μνήμες από τη συμβίωση με τον παππού, κληροδοτημένες αντιδράσεις και συμπεριφορές τις οποίες προσπαθεί να αποτινάξει.
Μια μικρή πόλη χτισμένη δίπλα σε ορυχεία, καλυμμένη με το γκρίζο χρώμα της καρβουνόσκονης, ζωές γκρίζες στα ερείπια της ρημαγμένης Γερμανίας.
Προσπαθεί να μεταφέρει στο χαρτί όσα νιώθει, όσα σκέφτεται, τον κόσμο του. Εικόνες της κατακερματισμένης Ανατολικής Γερμανίας, προσωπικές αφηγήσεις , περιγραφές των δασών, των λιμνών, των ορυχείων, ενός υποβαθμισμένου περιβάλλοντος. Εικόνες που κουβαλά στην ενήλικη ζωή του, παραμένοντας το ίδιο μοναχικός, η επανένωση των δυο Γερμανιών, η φυγή στη Δύση και η επιστροφή στις ρίζες, οι αναμνήσεις του σε αυτό το ζοφερό μεταπολεμικό τοπίο, οι ψυχικές μετατοπίσεις ενός μετανάστη της εποχής του Ψυχρού Πολέμου που ένιωθε ξένος και μετέωρος. Χρονικογράφος και μάρτυρας μιας εποχής.
"Πώς γίνεται ν' απαιτείς από μια σκιά να περιγράψει το απείκασμα μιας πόλης-σκιάς;"
Μια διήγηση αλληγοριών όπου το προσωπικό στοιχείο οδηγεί και συγχω��εύεται με το πολιτικό.
Γεννήθηκε το 1941 στην Κομμουνιστική Ανατολική Γερμανία και όπως έγραψε στον πρόλογο του ο Krasznahorkai : "Πολλοί έχουν σκεφτεί και έχουν πει για τον Χίλμπιχ πως, με δεδομένο ότι η μοίρα και η συγγραφική του τέχνη είναι τόσο συνυφασμένες με την κομμουνιστική Ανατολική Γερμανία, ο ίδιος αποτελεί μόλις και μετά βίας κάτι περισσότερο από έναν απλό χρονικογράφο της Ανατολικής Γερμανίας, ένα χλωμό Καφκικό απείκασμα…"
Ο Ύπνος των Δικαίων είναι μια συλλογή διηγημάτων με αυτοβιογραφικό χαρακτήρα που παρουσιάζει μια πραγματικότητα βγαλμένη από δυστοπία.
Ένα μικρό αγόρι που το μεγαλώνει η μητέρα του. Εικόνες και μνήμες από τη συμβίωση με τον παππού, κληροδοτημένες αντιδράσεις και συμπεριφορές τις οποίες προσπαθεί να αποτινάξει.
Μια μικρή πόλη χτισμένη δίπλα σε ορυχεία, καλυμμένη με το γκρίζο χρώμα της καρβουνόσκονης, ζωές γκρίζες στα ερείπια της ρημαγμένης Γερμανίας.
Προσπαθεί να μεταφέρει στο χαρτί όσα νιώθει, όσα σκέφτεται, τον κόσμο του. Εικόνες της κατακερματισμένης Ανατολικής Γερμανίας, προσωπικές αφηγήσεις , περιγραφές των δασών, των λιμνών, των ορυχείων, ενός υποβαθμισμένου περιβάλλοντος. Εικόνες που κουβαλά στην ενήλικη ζωή του, παραμένοντας το ίδιο μοναχικός, η επανένωση των δυο Γερμανιών, η φυγή στη Δύση και η επιστροφή στις ρίζες, οι αναμνήσεις του σε αυτό το ζοφερό μεταπολεμικό τοπίο, οι ψυχικές μετατοπίσεις ενός μετανάστη της εποχής του Ψυχρού Πολέμου που ένιωθε ξένος και μετέωρος. Χρονικογράφος και μάρτυρας μιας εποχής.
"Πώς γίνεται ν' απαιτείς από μια σκιά να περιγράψει το απείκασμα μιας πόλης-σκιάς;"
Μια διήγηση αλληγοριών όπου το προσωπικό στοιχείο οδηγεί και συγχω��εύεται με το πολιτικό.
October 8, 2015
The Sleep of The Righteous, Hilbig (Translated by Isabel Cole) is extremely fucking great, an accumulating in snapshots, of one character or another (the narrator? writer? perhaps...or becoming one of those); the most striking thing is perhaps how barren the landscape and life is and how devoid of any hope yet...you still long for time to pass, and then you still long for time to be regained and some things still glitter (here and in the world of the book) - a political (set in a barely-sketched in East German town) book in a sense, (as most maybe are) but so alien and beautiful and glum, cracks and bulges in the asphalt as if there is a rumbling of escape under ground ....(all the comparison to Poe and it has me thinking that if they are right ...than i've read Poe in simply the most superficial way), set really nowhere at all, a new progression or rather different in the bildungsroman for there is no escape really, no Edenic escape and/ or return, the world remains as it is, the changes on the periphery are given what significance they deserve, not much, but consciousness glows, but not much differently than when it first did, it just continues to do so, on its way, like all else
February 23, 2018
A real sensuous sourpuss. Great translation!
March 22, 2017
In the introduction to The Sleep of the Righteous, Laszlo Krasznahorkai describes Wolfgang Hilbig as "an artist of immense stature". That description came back to me when I was trying to understand why I disliked this book so much.
I just now came back from discussing it with my book group. They didn't like it so much either, although few disliked it as much as I did. I told them that my main gripe was that Hilbig seemed to me (translation notwithstanding) to use words more for their aesthetic effect than for their meaning. Writing can have merit for more than just conveying meaning, of course, and aesthetics are one of the other things to appreciate about it, but in The Sleep of the Righteous meaning at times seemed to have been sacrificed almost entirely on the alter of sounding writerly.
I said to my book group I thought TSotR would have worked better as poetry, but walking home I decided even that wasn't quite right, because often good poetry conveys as much meaning as prose. Instead, I realised, it seemed to me that Hilbig wanted to convey a mood or a feeling - of bleakness, waste, desolation, fruitlessness - but that in using writing of any form he'd chosen the wrong artistic medium for his aims.
Rather than writing a novella or collection of short stories, I thought, Hilbig would have been better off composing a piece of dissonant music or etching a murmuration of scratches onto a piece of slate. I could well accept the description "an artist of immense stature" being applied to Hilbig if he'd produced a Sunn O)))-esque piece of dirge or Gerhard Richter-esque monochrome scrape.
But for TSotR? No.
I just now came back from discussing it with my book group. They didn't like it so much either, although few disliked it as much as I did. I told them that my main gripe was that Hilbig seemed to me (translation notwithstanding) to use words more for their aesthetic effect than for their meaning. Writing can have merit for more than just conveying meaning, of course, and aesthetics are one of the other things to appreciate about it, but in The Sleep of the Righteous meaning at times seemed to have been sacrificed almost entirely on the alter of sounding writerly.
I said to my book group I thought TSotR would have worked better as poetry, but walking home I decided even that wasn't quite right, because often good poetry conveys as much meaning as prose. Instead, I realised, it seemed to me that Hilbig wanted to convey a mood or a feeling - of bleakness, waste, desolation, fruitlessness - but that in using writing of any form he'd chosen the wrong artistic medium for his aims.
Rather than writing a novella or collection of short stories, I thought, Hilbig would have been better off composing a piece of dissonant music or etching a murmuration of scratches onto a piece of slate. I could well accept the description "an artist of immense stature" being applied to Hilbig if he'd produced a Sunn O)))-esque piece of dirge or Gerhard Richter-esque monochrome scrape.
But for TSotR? No.
Read
March 24, 2016"The Sleep of the Righteous is held together by the desolate little coal-mining town of “M.” (Meuselwitz) in which Hilbig grew up, with few men remaining after the war, and where he worked for many years. While he has long since moved away, the town lives on in him with all its environmental and political depredations. Not only does Hilbig give us a palpable sense of what it was like to live and write under a regime like that of the GDR but also what it was like for those East German adults to lose their whole world to this rush of radical westernization." - Ulf Zimmerman
This book was reviewed in the March 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the March 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
October 27, 2016
Reminded me of Alistair MacLeod, strangely enough: a lyricism and intimate knowledge of a place that brings dignity to what others can only see as an unfashionable backwater.
That being said, there were some stories that bored me to tears. The second-to-last one I don't think I finished. The ones about his childhood (the popular swimming spot an old strip mine slowly filling up with ash, and the one about fruit and bottles overrunning the backyard and cellar, respectively, were great details) and the final story, about the unemployed spy blackmailing him over love letters, were great though.
Also, I think having read Limonov kind of spoiled this a bit for me. I guess because Limonov makes his war-scarred industrial town fun. I don't know.
That being said, there were some stories that bored me to tears. The second-to-last one I don't think I finished. The ones about his childhood (the popular swimming spot an old strip mine slowly filling up with ash, and the one about fruit and bottles overrunning the backyard and cellar, respectively, were great details) and the final story, about the unemployed spy blackmailing him over love letters, were great though.
Also, I think having read Limonov kind of spoiled this a bit for me. I guess because Limonov makes his war-scarred industrial town fun. I don't know.
April 14, 2018
Painful brilliance that shines only more given the darkness that it explores. This is grim poetry, devilish realism. It took me a long time to move through these short stories - through the life's experience concentrated in them. Hilbig cannot be stopped; he can only be ignored.
December 30, 2018
Hilbig's stories are birthed in the frozen mud of post-war East Germany. There are always eyes watching. You are always guilty. Escape is most likely into death or madness, and those that do manage to escape carry their cautiousness and paranoia with them always.
May 16, 2016
A sad book I picked up after watching the recent German TV series Deutschland 83, beautifully written, that illuminates the post-war history of the former GDR (East Germany) through the eyes of the narrator, from boy to man.
"Writing resembled swimming in this sense: once you'd gotten your head above water, once you'd started to swim, it was impossible to stop until at last you felt the sand of the far shore. In a similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over a mine out smelling of coal and rot….only that there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words you had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words themselves went under. But swimming in the words was safe, you couldn't drown in them, you could start over with them the next day…"
The book is made up of several linked short stories and works in a similar way to an episodic TV series covering an extended time frame. Gradually the stories form a revealing picture, with striking imagery, atmosphere, intensity. Fiction conveys what bare historical accounts lack in terms of personal experience, feelings and emotions. It is quite a depressing book, with a weary, wary tone.
“… the hulk of the former industrial bakery, its courtyard surrounded by nineteenth-century façades of dark-red brick, with stone steps outside and ramps with guardrails where the delivery trucks used to line up and load the bread . . . so that the whole side street smelled of it, freshly baked, still warm. . . and drove off, fully laden, through a massive cast-iron gate: from here the town, the surrounding villages, and the industrial plants were supplied with this chestnut brown, eternally same-tasting foodstuff—a kilo for fifty-two pfennigs . . . the bread was of incomparable quality, and it never changed. Now the bakery is empty too, cleared out, abandoned to decay.”
Centred on a small industrial town near Leipzig described in all its coal-dusted grimness, a playground of swimming pits and youth hangouts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a place of worn-out women, children and old men, the fathers lost to the war, with a station clock permanently stuck at 3 o'clock . The narrator escapes reality by becoming a writer. He describes a world of fear, buried secrets, hidden past, surreal, a haunted place where ghosts can appear, a people and landscape hollowed, out of time and place. A strange, poetic book.
And I ask myself over and over what I never asked myself then: what is it that lies beneath us? Bygone clans lie there beneath us. Long-forgotten clans lie down there, clans no one now asks about, clans long fermented to coal, clumped together blackly, clans rising up at night against the life that lives in above them. Rising up like a ferment if memories, like endless tribes of memories no one knows of now.
"Writing resembled swimming in this sense: once you'd gotten your head above water, once you'd started to swim, it was impossible to stop until at last you felt the sand of the far shore. In a similar fashion you swam off with your words, born up by the blood-warm written words as over a mine out smelling of coal and rot….only that there seemed to be no far shore for these words, with the words you had to swim on and on, until the words ended by themselves, until the words themselves went under. But swimming in the words was safe, you couldn't drown in them, you could start over with them the next day…"
The book is made up of several linked short stories and works in a similar way to an episodic TV series covering an extended time frame. Gradually the stories form a revealing picture, with striking imagery, atmosphere, intensity. Fiction conveys what bare historical accounts lack in terms of personal experience, feelings and emotions. It is quite a depressing book, with a weary, wary tone.
“… the hulk of the former industrial bakery, its courtyard surrounded by nineteenth-century façades of dark-red brick, with stone steps outside and ramps with guardrails where the delivery trucks used to line up and load the bread . . . so that the whole side street smelled of it, freshly baked, still warm. . . and drove off, fully laden, through a massive cast-iron gate: from here the town, the surrounding villages, and the industrial plants were supplied with this chestnut brown, eternally same-tasting foodstuff—a kilo for fifty-two pfennigs . . . the bread was of incomparable quality, and it never changed. Now the bakery is empty too, cleared out, abandoned to decay.”
Centred on a small industrial town near Leipzig described in all its coal-dusted grimness, a playground of swimming pits and youth hangouts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a place of worn-out women, children and old men, the fathers lost to the war, with a station clock permanently stuck at 3 o'clock . The narrator escapes reality by becoming a writer. He describes a world of fear, buried secrets, hidden past, surreal, a haunted place where ghosts can appear, a people and landscape hollowed, out of time and place. A strange, poetic book.
And I ask myself over and over what I never asked myself then: what is it that lies beneath us? Bygone clans lie there beneath us. Long-forgotten clans lie down there, clans no one now asks about, clans long fermented to coal, clumped together blackly, clans rising up at night against the life that lives in above them. Rising up like a ferment if memories, like endless tribes of memories no one knows of now.
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