The news of the trees

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The News of the Trees is a story by Wolfgang Hilbig that was written in 1991 and published in Berlin in 1992.

Around 1981 in the GDR : The first-person narrator - that's the working-class writer Waller - has to admit it: Sometime after the wall was built , he began to hate his work colleagues. So he had turned his back on them and looked for the garbage collectors at the gates of the city.

background

The village W. - Wolfgang Hilbig means Wuitz - was dredged in 1955.

content

Waller lives with his mother and grandmother in cramped conditions. For years he has been hatching a text that addresses the fate of the trees on the road from his hometown to the village of W. Waller can't get beyond a single sentence: “The trees in Kirschallee have disappeared.” Waller names “the inland stagnation” as the subject of the project, rejects his “confused reflections” and thinks back to August 13, 1961. As a reaction When the wall is being built, the shift worker Waller “switches off the machine one afternoon” and leaves the company. He doesn't want to go on living in “this sewer”. So he goes to his cherry avenue and wants to hang himself on one of the old trees. Waller loses the fight against cowardice and loosens the noose from the neck on the sturdy cross branch.

How did that go after the suicide attempt? Waller had to remain immured in the GDR. After 1961, the open pit at the site of the former village of W. was filled with rubbish and ashes. One day Waller was dismayed to discover that the avenue to W. had done its job and the cherry trees had been felled. So he writes the first sentence mentioned above and cannot come to terms with the disappearance of the trees. He is "still looking for them". Waller can't finish the second sentence of his current project. Why? Perhaps because he had never been in the village of W. when it was still there? Maybe because he pondered things that had gone before for too long? All wrong. Waller doesn't get any further because the first sentence is wrong. Here the reader pauses and turns the page: “The trees on the Kirschallee have disappeared” cannot be true. Because every writer who writes about old trees sees them in his mind's eye, even if they have long been cut down because of the lignite mining. Wolfgang Hilbig cannot give such a reason. Another reason for the years of writer's block - called "paralysis" - is put forward. The hateful "speechless raging" of the author!

When the raving has given way to melancholy, Waller can finally write the next sentence: “The shame is over!” The idea of ​​the spiritual eye was not so wrong. Because from now on Waller is waiting for “the spirits of the cherry trees to appear again”. In vain - the reader is dismissed without consolation.

Solutions

  • Sayings hang on the wall of Waller's vocational school:
    • "We emulate our best!"
    • "For outstanding achievements to strengthen our socialist homeland!"

shape

Everything in the news of the trees is uncertain. Did Waller start his project in 1981? Or was it much earlier? There are many unanswered questions.

The first-person narrator Waller writes, alternating with an anonymous second narrator, about himself: “The main character of this story was I, Waller”. Usually jumps from I to He indicate the narrator change or the ominous narrator helps the reader with such empty phrases as "said Waller" or "asked Waller".

Most of the time, the "action" takes place on the garbage dump near the former village of W. - a dusty affair. The goldenrods grow better there than in the garden. Waller tolerates the taciturn garbage workers. However, there is no dialogue. In contrast to Waller's former work colleagues, the garbage workers cannot forget, because dealing with what has been is their job. With a mixture of contempt and hatred, Waller looks down on his former work colleagues who "made their peace" with the GDR conditions after 1961. He can't write around his old colleagues. Before he could even put a sentence on paper, he had to flee to the garbage collectors. What is Waller writing? "... the stories of apostasy from this people!" What are meant are those who were walled in.

In places it almost seems as if Waller is writing his hatred of the holders of state power in the GDR off his mind. For example, when he thinks back to the summer of 1961 in 1981 and no longer knows whether it was hot or rainy, he invents culprits for his memory gap: “... in this country [meaning the GDR] one is so raw with history dealt with the fact that there are no longer the simplest things left of reality ... ".

Sometimes the reader can't get rid of the feeling, Wolfgang Hilbig not only cites posters, but also writes boldly himself. Cadre files are lying on the dump , he claims - a little exaggerated in 1981.

reception

  • 1994 in the time : The "east modern" Wolfgang Hilbig, seen from many sides. Song of ashes and fatigue . The anonymous reviewer tears down the text as “unbearably sensitive, timeless” and sums it up: “Reading Hilbig means confiding in a twilight state. It is a preparatory course for cremating the world. "
  • Bordaux responds to the image of workers - on the one hand an indifferent crowd (Waller's former colleagues) and on the other hand people with dignity and revolutionary potential (the garbage collectors). Bordaux writes: "The classic symbols and elements of the German romantic idyll ... are being hollowed out, destroyed ...". In the GDR, according to Bordaux, people were unable to live out their subjectivity.
  • Loescher considers the suitability of cherry trees as Warburg symbols and calls Waller a clairvoyant who lives blind and deaf on the garbage dump.
  • Wolfgang Hilbig repeats himself - here with his "logic of disgust and defense".

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • 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

Web links

annotation

  1. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Hosemann anno 2010 in a comment in the edition used, p. 347, 8th Zvu
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 258, 4th Zvo
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 262, 13. Zvo
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 273, 10. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 279, 10. Zvo
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 257, 13. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 224, 3rd Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 255, 2. Zvo
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 279, 7. Zvo
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 248, 14. Zvo
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 269, 2nd Zvu
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 278, 4th Zvu
  13. ↑ Bordaux, p. 38, 10. Zvo
  14. ^ Bordaux, p. 17, 12th Zvu
  15. ^ Bordaux, p. 82, 8. Zvo
  16. ↑ Loescher, p. 286 center - p. 287
  17. ↑ Loescher, p. 324 below
  18. ↑ Dahlke, p. 14, 16. Zvo
  19. ↑ grafikliebhaber.de