Old cover shop

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Old Covering Shop is a surrealist story by Wolfgang Hilbig , which was written in 1990 based on notes from around 1980 and was published in Frankfurt am Main in 1991.

Thomas Rosenlöcher pays tribute to the author's narrative achievement by addressing the sweetish smell in the covering shop - this “branch of the underworld ”: The anonymous protagonist does not experience “what is described outside of himself, but ... the prevailing smell seems to be its own odor to become."

title

As a schoolboy, the narrator roams through an industrial wasteland near his home town. This closed briquette factory is named after the Germania II underground lignite mine, which was also closed there . In the midst of the ruins, in a "half-ruined brick building", a cladding shop based on a technology from 1920 is operated.

shape

Ingo Schulze prefers to speak of a “sequence of extraordinary situations” instead of an action in his epilogue, emphasizing the incomplete character of the text.

The narrator does not care about the law of linear narrative time. Here are two examples. In the first, the marching narrator, as a child or adolescent, approaches the “destroyed industrial facilities” several times, amidst which production is going on in the old masking shop. Suddenly the reader is offended by the sentence in which the narrator speaks of his house key, which he has been carrying "in his left jacket pocket for twenty-five years". The second example tells of the Germania II's journey into hell . First, the marching narrator finds the result, that is, the huge hole in the ground. Then he reports on the process; the terrible din under which the earth sags over the "disused shafts". There is no simple tunnel collapse. In Wolfgang Hilbig's case, a Leviathan sucks fire and water through its throat at the same time. The reader read that right, fire, because the covering is devoured during production. Much becomes possible in such narrative motley. “Ramp”, “Eastern Europe” and “Thousand Year Reich” can lead to “getting under the wagon roofs of cattle transports [in your mind]”. Wolfgang Hilbig apparently relied on such associations in the reader's brain. For example, the heading of Hajo Steinert's meeting of March 22, 1991 (see below under Reception) could have emerged from such a connection.

content

The unsavory topic of the production of raw materials for the manufacture of soft soap or washing paste from animal carcasses, which is touched on in places, is not further stirred here. Repelled by the unpleasant smell from the concealing shop, it had taken the narrator decades to approach the factory. Almost every afternoon and always alone, he was in the direction of the railway line, behind which production was being carried out in the concealing shop, through the bushes and always turning back before the destination. Even as a teenager, the narrator had searched for and found incredible reasons for the advance: the schoolboy wanted to realize his dream of gardening; wanted to work there. The excuses for staying away all night long had not been made for him at home. Actually, the lonely wanderer near death - his ego seems poisoned by the poisoned plants around the covering shop - cannot explain himself. Because what has disappeared can only be answered with speechlessness.

Now, as an adult, the narrator sets out - again on an autumn afternoon - and offers the reader a showdown of the demise of the Old Covering Shop , this "huge store of stench". In other words, the catastrophe has already happened when the narrator marches towards the circular hole "a few hundred meters in diameter" through "grass and underbrush". A "gigantic moon" rises and illuminates the scene; more precisely, "its glow" [reaches] "no longer the ground, the ground had crashed."

reception

Statements after its publication in 1991

Later statements

  • The narrator does not disclose the reason for his decade-long afternoon wanderings in the direction of the old covering shop . Dahlke writes: “The narrator feels a compulsion to return to the forgotten childhood knowledge, all the more because his surroundings don't want to know anything.” Ingo Schulze names this environment with nobody and builds a bridge to Odysseus (whose name means nobody). Nobody wants to have known anything. And yet: "They [nobody's clan] knew it."
  • With two short sentences, Hinck gets to the heart of the labyrinthine construct: “The prose text turns the feeling of being in an undermined world into a startling literary experience.” And he repeats Adolf Endler's statement from August 1991 (see above): “Allen direct The text resists assignments of meaning. ”Hinck wrote the last sentence in the record book of the interpreters who would like to see the old masking shop as something like the GDR, which has vanished without a sound. When Jürgen P. Wallmann praised the “lively nightmare prose” as a “furious monologue” in the Saarbrücker Zeitung on August 17, 1991 , he met the sums of almost all 1991 reviewers. In contrast, Marcel Reich-Ranicki discredited the text on ZDF in May 1991 as “incredibly rich in adjectives” and as “talkative poeticization of the German past”. Hinck mentions two more critics: Hartmut Lange (see above) and Thomas Rosenlöcher. The latter calls the story - with all the collegial admiration - “an imposition” and discovers pathos. To the address of the performers mentioned above, Rosenlöcher wrote: “Idle ... to ask whether Germania II means the GDR: The realm of the dead means everything, even the GDR. And like all millennial empires rattle off into the realm of the dead, the current states will also rattle off into the realm of the dead. "
  • In her dissertation in 1995, Bärbel Heising investigates in the chapter Die Mottos: Simultaneity of pre-modern and modern a reference by Barbara Meyers (review from 1991, see above) to the double quote from Finnegans Wake : "Oystrygods ( Ostgoten ) gaggin fishygods ( Visigoths ) “Refers to the din during the battle of Attila against Aëtius in 451 on the Catalaunian fields . Of noise is at Wolfgang Hilbig during the tunnel collapse talk. Heising pursues the other - sometimes taciturn - allusions and suspects the word "company" in the above-mentioned brick building to be a base of the MfS . Peter Demetz warns against such "mutual penetration of historical layers". The text does not want to be "understood as a political-historical poetry of parables." Wolfgang Hilbig bypasses "any decided fixation of meaning".
  • Heising goes into two readings of the text - as the apocalypse according to Isaiah and as "fall into the maelstrom " freely based on Edgar Allan Poe .
  • The devastating collapse of the tunnel confirms Rimbaud's postulate about the emergence of "beauty from desecration".
  • Eckart on Wolfgang Hilbig's handling of some nouns: Sometimes he tears one off "of all meaning".

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Jan Strümpel: Bibliography on Wolfgang Hilbig. S. 93–97 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text + criticism. Issue 123. Wolfgang Hilbig. Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88377-470-7
  • Thomas Rosenlöcher: The text from below. 11 chapters on Wolfgang Hilbig. On the occasion of his story “Old Covering Shop”. Pp. 75–85 in Uwe Wittstock (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Materials on life and work. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-12253-8
  • Walter Hinck : Catacombs of History. To the story “Altedeckerei”. Pp. 180-189 in Uwe Wittstock (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Materials on life and work. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-12253-8
  • Gabriele Eckart : Speech trauma in the texts of Wolfgang Hilbig. in Richard Zipser (Ed.): DDR Studies , Vol. 10. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 0-8204-2645-8
  • Bärbel Heising: “Old Covering” - Intertextuality as a memory . Pp. 143–175 in: "Letters full of quotations from oblivion". Intertextuality in Wolfgang Hilbig's work. ( Bochum writings on German literature , Martin Bollacher (Hrsg.)), Hans-Georg Kemper (Hrsg.), Uwe-K. Ketelsen (Ed.), Paul Gerhard Klussmann (Ed.) Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996 (Diss. Bochum 1995), ISBN 3-631-49677-X
  • Sylvie Marie Bordaux: Literature as Subversion. An examination of the prose work by Wolfgang Hilbig. Cuvillier, Göttingen 2000 (Diss. Berlin 2000), ISBN 3-89712-859-4
  • Jens Loescher: Myth, Power and Cellar Language. Wolfgang Hilbig's prose in the mirror of the aftermath. Editions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam 2003 (Diss. Berlin 2002), ISBN 90-420-0864-4
  • Birgit Dahlke : Wolfgang Hilbig. Meteore Vol. 8. Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-238-8

Remarks

  1. ↑ Place of origin: Hinck (p. 183, 14. Zvo) suspects Meuselwitz , the place of birth of Wolfgang Hilbig.
  2. ↑ Covering shop: Ingo Schulze (p. 321, 2nd Zvo) did some research on site - in the Meuselwitz district of "Texas" (Ingo Schulze, p. 322, 5th Zvu). What is meant is the "animal body recycling Meuselwitz" - popularly called "Ponikau".
  3. ↑ This Nobody is mentioned six times on page 199 of the edition used.
  4. ↑ Thomas Rosenlöcher must be counted among Wolfgang Hilbig's admirers when he writes: There would probably be no society “that deserves such a poet; Not that of his origin anyway, but neither is the current okay system. "(Rosenlöcher, p. 85, 4. Zvo)
  5. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hinck, p. 186, 18. Zvo
  2. ↑ Jürgen Hosemann anno 2010 in a comment in the edition used, p. 347, 13th Zvu
  3. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 84, 17. Zvo
  4. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 82, 16. Zvu
  5. ↑ Ingo Schulze, p. 322, 4. Zvo
  6. ↑ Hinck, p. 185, 3. Zvo
  7. ↑ Ingo Schulze, p. 304, 2nd Zvu
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 191 below
  9. ↑ Edition used, pp. 158, 15. Zvo and see also Bordaux, pp. 73, 15. Zvo on the "Allusions to the concentration camp " and "the Stalin era "
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 153, 3rd Zvu
  11. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 82, 9. Zvu
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 199, 13. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 191, 7th Zvo
  14. ↑ Jan Strümpel in Arnold, p. 96, right column center
  15. ^ Rauschen in Meuselwitz
  16. ↑ Wuthenow cited in Hinck, p. 180, 7. Zvo
  17. ↑ Titze cited in Hinck, p. 188, 13. Zvo
  18. ↑ see also Ingo Schulze in the edition used, p. 307, 9th Zvu
  19. ↑ Endler cited in Hinck, p. 188, 19. Zvo
  20. ↑ Dahlke, p. 30, 13. Zvo
  21. ↑ Ingo Schulze in the edition used, p. 318, 1st Zvu
  22. ↑ Edition used, p. 199, 6th Zvu
  23. ↑ Edition used, p. 199, 15. Zvo
  24. ↑ Hinck, p. 189, 2. Zvo (see also Bordaux, p. 74, 15. Zvo and p. 235, 3. Zvu)
  25. ↑ Hinck, p. 188, 9th Zvu
  26. ↑ Hinck, p. 188, 11. Zvu
  27. ↑ Hinck, p. 180, 1. Zvu
  28. ↑ Hinck, p. 181, 4. Zvo
  29. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 83, 2nd Zvu
  30. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 84, 14th Zvu
  31. ↑ Rosenlöcher, p. 84, 11. Zvu
  32. ↑ Heising, pp. 147-153
  33. ↑ engl. FinnegansWiki Oystrygods
  34. ↑ Edition used, p. 115, 2nd Zvu and p. 177, 5th Zvu
  35. ↑ Heising, p. 151, 9th Zvu
  36. ↑ Edition used, p. 171, 11. Zvu
  37. ↑ Heising, p. 145, 8. Zvo
  38. ↑ Hinck, p. 186, 13. Zvo
  39. ↑ Hinck, p. 186, 20. Zvo
  40. ↑ Hinck, p. 186, 8th Zvu
  41. ↑ see also Bordaux, p. 235, 11. Zvu
  42. ↑ Apocalypse Isaiah 24-27: EU and Isaiah 33-39: EU
  43. ↑ engl. A Descent into the Maelström
  44. ↑ Heising, p. 168 and 172
  45. ↑ Bordaux, p. 279, 6. Zvu (see also p. 283, 6. Zvo)
  46. ↑ Eckart, p. 132, 16. Zvu and p. 136, 14. Zvo