The women (Hilbig)

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Die Weiber is a story by Wolfgang Hilbig , the writing of which began in 1982 and which appeared in 1987 in Frankfurt am Main.

Crude sexuality and disgusting rummaging through rubbish bins dominate the self-description of the completely lonely Mr. C., this "walking grave" of "saliva, semen, shit ... blood, scales, peeling, grind, sweat, dirt and" and and. The state power in Cs GDR, on the other hand, is presented in this neurotic satire - full of ludicrous comedy - as consistently clean in the sense that if the reader's gaze falls on idols of the young GDR such as Lenin , Generalissimo Stalin , Karl Marx or Clara Zetkin , then belong such word coining simply because of their cleanliness.

The editor in Barner's literary history reads both “detailed ... powerful narrative prose” and passages “on the verge of kitsch”.

title

The first-person narrator, Mr. C. from M., had often played after the war as a child on the outskirts of his hometown in the empty barracks of the offshoot of a former concentration camp . In the neighboring former ammunition factories, mostly female prisoners had to roll grenades . The adult C. experiences a nightmare the evening after his birth. In the fearful dream, the women are driven from the factory through Cs Street into the barracks mentioned. While the guards are called women in Nazi parlance , the humiliated prisoners are scolded at the women .

There are quite a few hair-raising dream images in the text. Then Ilse Koch loops a line around the dreamer's genitals and pulls him behind her by the lead cord to the blaring sounds of military music that would have been played in the concentration camp during beatings.

content

The 40-year-old C. becomes “unsustainable for the tool shop” and has to do auxiliary work in the mold cellar below. Some time after he was released from his company - the same factory in which the above mentioned female forced laborers were employed for armaments during the war - he was summoned to the office for labor management in the nearby district town of A. There he has to explain his wandering. When Cs said he wanted to be a writer, the officer met with incomprehension. He didn't have a high school diploma or even a secondary school leaving certificate . The refusing officer ponders. Yes, garbage collection is a very important area of ​​work with the labor shortage in M. This woman, apparently authorized to punish, wants only good things for the summoned person. He would already be on the wrong track. At home in M. C's mother is tooting the same horn. She accuses her only boy of incompetence and laziness. The worried woman fears the son might end up in a labor camp. In the seventh grade, C. had already made his mother aware of his future career. Writer? - Embarrassing for the surprised mother. C's father had been a tailor the customer could always rely on. The disappointed mother predicts the son that he will get no further than the unskilled worker. C. but does not give up. He does not want to write “love stories with a tragic outcome”, because “the subsoil of this country [meaning the GDR] groaned from suppressed descriptions”.

The public prosecutor at the labor court was not available for C. knocking. It was getting late. Before returning to M., C. had to wait in the A. station pub. Alone in the midst of a herd of drunk men, the first-person narrator plays through a lawsuit at the labor court in a rambling inner monologue . Again a woman sits across from him. He calls her Mrs. Chairman, Mrs. Magister and Mrs. Public Prosecutor.

The mother's statement about C's ineptitude proves to be apt. Before he goes to East Berlin - there he will find women trapped in reality - he wants to set another highlight in M. In front of the police station, C. pours gasoline over himself, but has no matches with him. In Berlin he works as a boiler heater in a large laundry. The farm is kept alive by prisoners. C. has always wanted a woman and yells at the workers: "I love you." C. describes their answer: "... they made a dirty sign to me, the dirtiest thing possible, they had allied themselves with me, it was a sign against the pure state. "

Testimonials

  • Wolfgang Hilbig in 1988 on the role of women in post-war Germany: “... in the GDR, women were not actually a consumer item in any phase of the country's development as here [meaning West Germany]. There she was always a necessary worker. "
  • Wolfgang Hilbig on 14 October 2002 on the occasion of the imminent award of the Georg Büchner Prize in Spiegel interview with Volker Hage and Wolfgang Höbel to his relationship with women at that time in the GDR: "As a worker and writer who published back then still nothing you were a weirdo and had a hard time with women. Besides, I only moved out with my mother when I was 37 or 38. "

shape

He does not tell the reader why C. had become intolerable in the tool shop and why he was later dismissed from his company after the chicane in the basement. Retarding, the narrator admits that the dismissal was preceded by a serious argument with his superior. After being kicked out, C. immediately complained to the employment office in A.

C. deals exclusively with women, but never has a woman. He would like to have one for his life.

Almost everything that has been said is uncertain. The cry “I love you!” (See above) is the only word that has surely passed C's lips.

Wolfgang Hilbig enjoys juggling with less common terms: antimatter .

The GDR citizen was educated. For example, C. mentions the “political class” during his military service. C. swears: "Damn city, ... damn country."

reception

Statements after publication

Later statements

  • Cazzola writes: "Hilbig's world, albeit a distorted one, is a world of sensual perception."
  • Gabriele Eckart thinks: Wolfgang Hilbig's garbage dumps represent, to speak with Freud , the id . C., who always masturbates once in his cellar, is a voyeur who looks through a grating under the skirts of the muscular women who work on hand presses on the ground floor for performance wages. Fortunately, women no longer roll grenades, but instead press plastic parts for radios. For this man, the woman stands as “the good object on high”. A central problem is the protagonist's search for the right language. The would-be writer C. states that the existing language should be discarded because it was made by men. “Becoming a woman” is also part of the search for women's language. So C. tried on women's clothes from the trash. In the GDR, according to Eckart, the "desired flows" were blocked. In this context, the text is “the most radical book about desire within GDR literature .” In search of the women who allegedly disappeared from M., C. tries several times to have sexual intercourse with a garbage can (the female bin is chosen and not the male bucket ). Eckart goes into the reflection of the abnormal phenomenon in research and discusses C's illness as a result of the discharge from his VEB . The first-person narrator puts “Death to the Men” in the mouths of female forced laborers who toiled during the Nazi era . This word, according to Eckart, could be the motto of this story.
  • The loss of a job in a "women's business" means for C. the loss of love. He only found the latter among the women who are locked up in the Berlin prison.
  • Bordaux writes: Sexism is presented in connection with violence. Such things as masturbating and masturbating would on the one hand be reproduced almost scientifically exactly. On the other hand, Wolfgang Hilbig uses some other symbols - such as the phallus - ambiguously. The ascetic C. would appear self-sufficient - here in the story alone in the basement. On the theory of colors: Blue is positively assigned in the text. Finally, Bordaux goes into the biblical motifs in the story.
  • In his chapter "The most public of all prisons": Unjust State of the GDR , Loescher dedicates the subchapter "Consultant" to the book of the Enlightenment versus "The Women": Sexualities at Hilbig .
  • The suicide attempt in front of the police station is a clear indication of the suicide of Pastor Brüsewitz in Zeitz .
  • Dahlke registers the occurrence of some of Wolfgang Hilbig's central objects: garbage, thirst (C. is a beer drinker), mud, water and greenery. The language used is aptly described in a short sentence: "Instead of being born, you spit out and vomit."

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Wilfried Barner (ed.): History of German literature. Volume 12: History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1
  • 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
  • Roberto Cazzola: Contaminates the land, the people, the language. To the story “The women”. Pp. 153–173 From the Italian by Alexandra Hausner 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. ( Bochum writings on German literature ( 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
  • Birgit Dahlke : Wolfgang Hilbig. Meteore Vol. 8. Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-238-8

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The protagonist complains: "... I really only see this city of mine through the ring of a cunt ." (Edition used, p. 101, 13. Zvo)
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Hilbig means his place of birth Meuselwitz .
  3. ↑ This refers to Altenburg in the district of the same name .
  4. ↑ Berlin is the only "real name" in the text. (Ingo Schulze in the afterword of the edition used, p. 289, 3rd Zvo).
  5. ↑ It could mean Wolfgang Hilbig's job in Berlin-Lichtenberg . (Dahlke, p. 71, 6. Zvo)
  6. ↑ C. tells about his "illness - which was a disease" of his "language" (edition used, p. 33, 13. Zvo) and speaks of the " schizophrenia of his language". (Edition used, p. 34, 9. Zvo) He feels spiritually lobotomized . (Edition used, p. 50, 11. Zvo)
  7. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Hosemann anno 2010 in a comment in the edition used, p. 347, 7th Zvo
  2. ↑ Ingo Schulze in the edition used, p. 285
  3. ↑ see also the chapter of the same name in Cazzola, pp. 162–167
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 97, 7. Zvo
  5. ↑ Barner, p. 892, 20. Zvu
  6. ↑ see also Ingo Schulze in the afterword of the edition used, p. 292, 15. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 92, 16. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 110, 3. Zvo
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Hilbig in an interview with Manfred Treib, quoted in Cazzola, p. 161, 5th Zvu
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 23, 5. Zvo
  11. ↑ Ingo Schulze in the afterword of the edition used, p. 293, 5. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 90, 3. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 102, 12. Zvo
  14. ↑ Jan Strümpel in Arnold, p. 96, top left column
  15. ↑ Hajo Steinert
  16. ↑ Cazzola, p. 157, 13th Zvu (see also Bordaux, p. 105, from 3rd Zvo)
  17. ↑ Eckart, p. 118 middle
  18. ↑ Eckart, p. 126, 15. Zvu
  19. ↑ Eckart, p. 134, 13. Zvo
  20. ↑ Eckart, p. 139, middle
  21. ↑ see Bordaux, p. 98 below
  22. ↑ Eckart, p. 144 above
  23. ↑ Eckart, p. 146 above
  24. ↑ Eckart, p. 185, 11. Zvo
  25. ↑ Heising, p. 113, 1st Zvu
  26. ↑ Bordaux, p. 26 above
  27. ^ Bordaux, p. 103, 9. Zvo
  28. ↑ Bordaux, p. 112 middle
  29. ↑ Bordaux, p. 116 middle
  30. ^ Bordaux, p. 233, 5. Zvo
  31. ↑ Bordaux, p. 237, center
  32. ↑ Loescher, pp. 64–70
  33. ↑ Ingo Schulze in the afterword of the edition used, p. 324, 16. Zvo
  34. ↑ Dahlke, p. 17, 2. Zvo