The letter (Wolfgang Hilbig)

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The letter is a short story by Wolfgang Hilbig , written in 1981 and published in 1985 in the author's second volume of prose in Frankfurt am Main.

Beginning of the 1950s: a bitter Wolfgang Hilbig - hiding behind his first-person narrator - pillories some of the grievances in the young GDR . His first-person narrator, on the trail of himself, feels he was being watched a quarter of a century later in East Berlin in 1978. Stevenson's horror story of the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are seen as models for the complex text.

content

After the first cursory reading of the text, the criminalistic and the socially critical aspects are remembered.

Criminal case

A comfortable reading of the text would be: The first-person narrator, a “working-class writer” and bad manslayer, has every reason to hide his name from the reader. Because he killed the petite, completely innocent postwoman Kora Lippold.

This writer lived around 1978 on the fourth floor of a house in East Berlin with a woman who was always jealous. Because of an injury - he stuck the thorn of a belt buckle in the ball of his right hand - he asks the woman to help. She kindly types parts of his unfinished manuscript into the machine. This leads to a rift between the two. The writer moves into the ground floor of the house. He sustained the injury when he pulled the postman inside his apartment on the ground floor by the leather strap of her mailbag and killed him with a bottle.

The perpetrator has to talk about his act. So he blames an imaginary doppelganger C. Lippold. C. Lippold is also a writer and, like the first-person narrator, comes from M. Both gentlemen are “proletarian types” and independently restore an old tiled stove. Like the first-person narrator, C. Lippold had written the title of the insane letter to himself and asked the post office to hand it over personally. Because Original and Double were both in love with the beautiful postman Kora Lippold. The former life partner of the first-person narrator, that anonymous woman from the fourth floor, was rightly jealous of the postman during her lifetime. The beautiful postman had not delivered the letter. For this she had been slain by the first-person narrator, who suspects his supervisors everywhere - also at the post office.

Wolfgang Hilbig lets his first-person narrator write: "To improve all possible inconsistencies I ...". There are a few inconsistencies. For example, the sequence of events is incorrect, from a purely chronological perspective: the reader is told that after the jealous woman from the fourth floor has typed the manuscript, the writer moves to the ground floor. She typed because his hand made it difficult for him to type. But he had injured his hand only after moving down to the ground floor. Indeed, the text is not a crime story. The “criminal act” is nothing more than a gag; a joke. Wolfgang Hilbig is serious in the text when he talks less, but rather polemics angrily against the power relations in the GDR :

Social criticism

Around 1978 in East Berlin: The first-person narrator's "small literary correspondence" is apparently monitored. This scribe says: "... a police officer who recently observed my person, without my knowledge, asked the residents of the house about me according to my instructions ..." This remains an episode in connection with an invitation to a workers 'writers' conference abroad. Apropos surveillance: C. Lippold fears “the attention of the authorities” and has therefore changed his name; hides behind the "Jewish money Lippold" who has not lived there for centuries.

The conditions in divided Germany, especially in the GDR at the beginning of the 1950s, are branded as unacceptable using the example of the small town of M. The first-person narrator, who was ten years old at the time, suspects that he was no intended child, but is touchingly worried about his single mother. More out of blind obedience than out of inner insight, the woman joined the party and allowed the latter to delegate her as a sales point manager to a miserable village consumption. The boy has to pick up the mother from the village H., which is three kilometers from M., in the dark during the dark season. Fear of the "spring men " (a RIAS duck from the Cold War ) is rampant. These wiry, scattered SS remnants are said to dwell in the lignite shafts underground around M. in the daytime, crawl out of their holes in the dark, jump up to two meters high and quite far and slash especially young women. The ten-year-old knows the rumor mill, always picks up his mother very well, but better not pour pure wine for the innocent woman. The grumpy grandfather on his mother's side at home in M. cannot muster up any understanding for his daughter's “submissive staggering”. He did not put himself in a non-heatable village consumption all day in winter. In general, the boy's late-evening rides by bicycle from M. to H. are extremely dangerous. There are no spare parts for the failed bicycle lights to buy and the practicing tank crews of the Russians sometimes come closer to the deserted side street. The finger is placed on the wounds. The barracks around M. are discussed. In it were the Nazi era prisoners (workers in M.) and then the " settlers from the eastern territories" penned.

It's not just about the mother in M. and the all-German war wounds. The first-person narrator also rolls over far-reaching cultural-political problems; castigates new forms of the old cult of the proletariat and finds it difficult to understand the riders' riding around on one of their fundamental questions about human judgment: Does the person in question belong to the working class ? The narrator simply counts himself in, although he conceals the father's social origin, which was very important for that categorization at the time. After all, the first-person narrator was after his apprenticeship as a stoker in the machine factory M. "in a three-shift system at the machine". However, he was then imprisoned. The details are kept secret.

shape

The first-person narrator speaks to the reader: "You guessed it by now at the latest ..." In some narrative moments, Wolfgang Hilbig's long sentences also fall into a pathetic tone. About the passage - paraphrased above with RIAS duck: The working-class writer does not narrate objectively, but was either linguistically infiltrated by the GDR ideologues omnipresent in the media at the time, or it is his kind of fine mockery when he describes that duck “the horror tales of the American lying broadcaster RIAS " is called. In the newly laid-out pot even those that do not apply value judgments as belonging "filthy rich new farmers population". Many a sentence written down in 1981 is strange in the 21st century: "There were relatively many non-Germans ... in our street, Czechs , Poles , Croats ..."

The narrator studied Kafka's children on the road , philosophizes about Edgar Allan Poe 's Ligeia , Eleonora and Annabel Lee , Stevenson 's The pavilion on the dunes and selected original scripts Byron s. A well-known author is the plebeian first-person narrator, who has largely ineffective texts, emulating his idol Edgar Allan Poe, at least not.

The attentive reader is always in demand with the sometimes bulky text. As soon as the narrator changes from the first-person to the er-form, his double C. Lippold is told. And verbatim speech is not marked by common quotation marks. Fortunately, the dash in the exchange speech announces the other dialogue partner.

The normal reader has to classify the first-person narrator as being out of his mind. One of his thinking results is namely: Presumably almost everyone in Berlin is called Lippold.

In general, subtle humor pervades the text: the first-person narrator, who wants to pass himself off as C. Lippold because of the manslaughter, also levels the stylistic differences between his texts and those of C. Lippold. This is very easy with the “one style of all contemporary prose”. Even in this humorous sense, the story defies any classification in any of the common literary drawers. The subliminally exhilarating “self-referential circle” fits in with this; the alter ego C. Lippold distances itself sometimes piqued from the self-experience of its first-person narrator.

In any case, every reader should decide for himself to what extent he can believe the first-person narrator. The table below edition follows the letter of description II . The final sentence in the latter text announces the following letter, written by "madness ... from the twilight". Martin Lüdke could have alluded to this when he published his review (see below under Reception) in the Spiegel on July 8, 1985 .

reception

Statements after publication
  • April 27, 1985, Jörg Bernhard Bilke in the Rheinisches Merkur : Society only offers its own shadow.
  • July 8, 1985, Martin Lüdke in the mirror : From the consciousness of the pit of my stomach .
  • November 8, 1985, Wolfgang Hegewald in der Zeit : The Conspiracy Called Reality. Wolfgang Hilbig: "The Letter"
Other expressions

The more in-depth reader will discover more than two aspects outlined above under content :

Fantastic
  • Bordaux goes into the fantastic in the text, as it becomes apparent in the form of the spring men, this spawn of the “collective fantasy”, as a fear of an automated world, as a feeling of powerlessness in the face of world history and as a fear of being alone.
Literacy
  • The writing first-person narrator does not want to flatly reflect the latter in the intended approximation to the truth. Writing is also the writer's attempt to endure failure.
  • Sauerland comments on the two tiled stove passages: The above-mentioned surveillance of the writer by the state could bring the writing process to a standstill. Unsuccessful writing can be managed by switching to other hobby horses - for example by restoring an old tiled stove.
  • Wolfgang Hilbig aims at the “center of the [GDR] state doctrine” when he states that workers and writers have “something incompatible with one another”.
  • The secular, remote and secular nature of the first-person narrator reminds Loescher of Benn's radar thinker and his Ptolemaic . The narrator's “description of his own confusion”, this “scattered existence”, turns out to be spooky.
Concrete poetry
  • A prose text is available, but the author uses, just as in Concrete Poetry, linguistic structures and functional dependencies of language components for linguistic experiments. In the more detailed exposition of his narrative theoretical train of thought, Steiner describes the textual character with the heading The Narrator as Sphinx aptly in one word. The narrator, this Sphinx, is beyond belief. If, for example, an interpreter claims that C. Lippold is "nothing more than a self-description of the first-person narrator", this can be debated. Steiner wants to understand the text "as a manifestation of the structure of the self-observing narrator". The narcissism of the first-person narrator ends in a dead end. The shape of one's self dissolves. It seems as if Wolfgang Hilbig and the reader always know more than the narrator.

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Karol Sauerland : Writing against unreasonable demands. S. 44–51 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text + criticism. Issue 123. Wolfgang Hilbig. Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88377-470-7
  • 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
  • Genia Schulz: Postscriptum. To the volume of stories "The Letter". Pp. 141–150 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: "Letters full of quotes from oblivion". Intertextuality in Wolfgang Hilbig's work. In: Bochumer Schriften zur deutschen Literatur , Vol. 48, ( Martin Bollacher (Hrsg.), Hans-Georg Kemper (Hrsg.), Uwe-K. Ketelsen (Hrsg.), Paul Gerhard Klussmann (Hrsg.)) 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
  • André Steiner: The narrative self - studies on Wolfgang Hilbig's narrative work. Short stories 1979–1991. Novels 1989–2000. Pp. 143–180: The Letter (1981) - The narrator as Sphinx. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008 (Diss. Bremen 2007), ISBN 978-3-631-57960-2
  • Ingo Schulze : "Tell me, I tell myself, otherwise everything will stagger into oblivion." Epilogue on pp. 283–346 in Wolfgang Hilbig: Werke. Stories: The women . Old cover shop . The news of the trees . Jörg Bong (ed.), Jürgen pants man (Ed.), Oliver Vogel (ed.). S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-10-033843-3
  • Birgit Dahlke : Wolfgang Hilbig. Meteore Vol. 8. Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-238-8

Remarks

  1. ↑ Heising writes on the one hand that the first-person narrator only becomes the perpetrator in a dream or in his text (p. 54 above) and later relativizes the question of whether murder or just the dream of murder remains unanswered (p. 136, 2. Zvu).
  2. ↑ By M. Wolfgang Hilbig always means his place of birth Meuselwitz near Leipzig .
  3. ↑ The writer admits the incomprehensibility of his product, in which he speaks of incest, expulsion from the womb and copulating machines (Genia Schulz, p. 148, 20. Zvo and Steiner, p. 143, 19. Zvo).
  4. ↑ The model is ETA Hoffmanns Münzjude Lippold from 1572 in Die Brautwahl (see also Genia Schulz, p. 145 above).
  5. ↑ It could mean Heukendorf (Ingo Schulze, p. 295, 13th Zvu).
  6. ↑ Heising (p. 54) thinks that the first-person narrator had the idea of ​​killing the postwoman through such scary stories.
  7. ↑ Loescher (p. 27, 9. Zvo) speaks of "advance [m] obedience to an inner thought censorship".
  8. ↑ Lüdke (see under Reception 1985) notes a schizophrenic logic with a paranoid accent .
  9. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, pp. 763 and 765
  2. ↑ Steiner, p. 169, 6th Zvu
  3. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 144, 12. Zvo
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 197, 6th Zvu
  5. ↑ Dahlke, p. 140, entry anno 1978 and Steiner, p. 170, 17. Zvo
  6. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 149, 9. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 256, 14. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 197, 4th Zvu
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 228, 11. Zvo
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 199, 16. Zvu
  11. ↑ see for example the sentence of 135 words on p. 200, 18. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 201, 15. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 204, 4. Zvo
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 207, 12. Zvu
  15. ↑ Edition used, p. 219 middle (see also Heising, p. 81 above)
  16. ↑ Edition used, pp. 219, 221 and 222, see also Eckart, p. 170
  17. ↑ Edition used, p. 194 middle (see also Heising, p. 95 middle)
  18. ↑ Steiner, p. 163, 21. Zvo
  19. ↑ Steiner, p. 165, 3. Zvo
  20. ↑ Loescher, p. 34, 7th Zvu
  21. ↑ Edition used, p. 190, 2nd Zvu
  22. ^ Jan Strümpel bei Arnold, p. 95, right column, 2nd entry
  23. ↑ Martin Lüdke
  24. ↑ Wolfgang Hegewald
  25. ^ Bordaux, p. 240, 15. Zvo
  26. ↑ Bordaux, p. 241, 1. Zvo
  27. ^ Bordaux, p. 253, 8. Zvo
  28. ^ Bordaux, p. 260, 15. Zvo
  29. ↑ Sauerland, p. 49, 18. Zvu
  30. ↑ Sauerland, p. 48, 4. Zvo
  31. ↑ Dahlke, p. 64, 6th Zvu
  32. ↑ Loescher, p. 34, footnote 26
  33. ↑ see also Just two things
  34. ↑ Entry at Wissen.de: The Ptolemy
  35. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 143, 5. Zvo
  36. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 142, 14th Zvu
  37. ↑ Steiner, p. 148 middle
  38. ↑ Steiner, p. 143 middle
  39. ↑ Steiner, p. 175, 4th Zvu
  40. ↑ Steiner, p. 174, 3. Zvo
  41. ↑ Steiner, p. 165, 13. Zvo
  42. ↑ Steiner, p. 179, 8th Zvu