He, not me

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He, not me is a story by Wolfgang Hilbig from 1991, the first version of which the author wrote down ten years earlier. Reclam published the text in 1992 in the collection Between the Paradises .

It seems as if the author repeats himself incessantly. Because this representation of disgust, downfall, withering and decay could - on the surface - just as well be called The Letter . But beneath its surface lie dormant images of the “time that stood still” from the last years of the decaying GDR . In this desperate story of doubt even the existence of that weighty letter is seriously questioned by the scribe, a restless doubter.

title

The title is ambiguous. Below are two of the more obvious interpretations.

The first interpretation should be preceded by the fairly complete description of the "plot" in a short sentence: The brooder and loiter C. carries a letter to the mailbox in East Berlin .

He has forgotten the contents of this paper. He signed his letter to the ruling administration of the capital with Cebolla . C. doubts whether he really wrote this letter - which breaks a silence that should not be broken - and would like to blame his "imaginary doppelganger" for it, but suddenly he remembers the exact content of long passages. It seems that on November 7, 1979, C. murdered a 39-year-old unmarried woman Korall in the K. district of Berlin. Later C. had slipped into the role of a witness in the murder case and had taken officials of the above-mentioned administration to the grave of the murdered. The timing was right. The administration was able to arrest a man - presumably that imaginary doppelganger - as a murderer, just as he was about to lay flowers on the grave. The man - probably the almost 50-year-old unemployed GC from the Berlin district of L. - had thrown the ostrich in C.'s face and shouted: "It was him ... he, not me!"

The second interpretation is based on an I-Er-motto from the 10th book of Plato's State , which Wolfgang Hilbig put in front of his text: “But what I want to present is not a story by the soft Alcinous, but that of a weatherproof man , des Er ... “The narration - or in the case of C. writing - in the first person form C. considers an unforgivable weakness of a text producer. What does weakness mean here? The very use of the word I am a subversion .

content

The former worker C. has only lived in East Berlin for a few years. He knows the area through which he carries that letter "to a high-ranking authority in the city" on foot. A good year ago, his daily commute passed through the same district.

What was that like? C. had been unable to avoid many encounters with that administration. The administration had asked C. in chattering for hours about remote things. It was only later that C. had guessed the rudimentary sense of some of the management's statements. In C's opinion there had been so many administrative activities that it would have been worthwhile to exchange ideas. C. only spreads one of these administrative activities to the reader - the sale of entire sections of the population to western countries. He calls the process human trafficking . Of course, this trade is only made known to the reader. The narrator says that if C. had brought up human trafficking in those discussions with the administration, he would have been arrested. The narrator allows C. to speak verbatim; more precisely: C. reveals thoughts on his letter in the accursed first-person form. The document is about the adoption of an idea. C. put the associated clearing out for over a year. He was driven towards a hole in concentric circles. The misleading reader could associate this nebulous talk with the above-mentioned decline of the GDR. The text could be a “self-criticism” of the social critic C., who poses “as a collaborator and informer”. Questions about questions remain unanswered. Why does the letter address contain "a treacherous sentence"? Why does C. still fear this after a long year of writing? Why did C. invent the above-mentioned murder? Because he wanted to be hurled to the West? Impossible, because that would have overshot the target far too far. Perhaps the confused C. had already lost his mind a good year ago when he asked the “responsible bodies” in writing “to ... abolish reality”.

The explosion does not materialize, as Bauer and Schoor aptly described the unsatisfactory conclusion. Wolfgang Hilbig had installed a sack full of time detonators on the way as a precaution.

shape

The semantics of the narrator's commentary on the stray thoughts Cs are highly complex; in German: the text is incomprehensible. For example, there is talk of the places (workplaces) of East Berlin workers "where the essence of their function prevailed". Despite the clauses in the description, the reader knows which game is playing. For example, these “lands”, i.e. the dead “zone in front of a border”, ie the “no man's land” that the above-mentioned administration reserves for itself, are nothing more than the border strip in front of the wall around West Berlin .

reception

  • In their more detailed investigation, Bauer and Schoor would like to know why they like to read “such twisted stuff”. The two Hilbig researchers see - as the title of their study indicates - the exploration of the text as a continuation story. Write: "The best of his [meaning the text] pictures ... mock any resolution." Of course, Bauer and Schoor also notice something tangible enough. Most of the people on the way to the mailbox were damaged during the forty years of the GDR. Like other researchers, Bauer and Schoor deal with Trakl 's poem of the same name in connection with the dominant decline . When examining the “puffing structure” a question arises: “Is the author trying to fool us?” The intrinsic value of the text is only accessible after the reader has “gone beyond the“ crazy ”coincidences and reactions”. Cebolla is included in the ancestral gallery of the "dumb gates" behind ETA Hoffmanns Coppola and Thomas Manns Cipolla .
  • Heising sees C. as an absurd, and even worse, as an alien hero.
  • Loescher dedicates the chapter Myth, Utopia and Memory in “He, Not Me” to the text in his dissertation and says that C. has no message and even if he had one he could not deliver it.
  • Steiner looks at C's subjective memory work and contrasts it with “real time”.

literature

Text output

  • He, not me. P. 21–97 in Wolfgang Hilbig: Grünes Grünes Grab. Stories (also contains: Fester Grund . The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach ). Fischer Taschenbuch 12356, Frankfurt am Main 1993 (1995 edition). ISBN 3-596-12356-9
  • Wolfgang Hilbig: He, not me. P. 397-447 in Jörg Bong (ed.), Jürgen Hosemann (ed.), Oliver Vogel (ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Works . Volume stories and short prose. With an afterword by Katja Lange-Müller . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-033642-2

Secondary literature

  • Gerhard Bauer and Uwe Schoor: The power of negation. Beginning of a comment on Hilbig's text He, not me . Pp. 190–214 in Uwe Wittstock (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Materials on life and work. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-12253-8
  • 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
  • André Steiner: The narrative self - studies on Wolfgang Hilbig's narrative work. Short stories 1979–1991. Novels 1989–2000. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008 (Diss. Bremen 2007), ISBN 978-3-631-57960-2

Remarks

  1. ↑ C. describes the way to Pankow (edition used, p. 25, 1. Zvo) and the journey between the Ostkreuz and Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn stations (edition used, p. 26, center).
  2. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 96, 1. Zvu
  2. ^ Bong, Hosemann and Vogel, edition 2009, p. 766, 8. Zvo and p. 763, 16. Zvo
  3. ↑ see for example Bordaux, p. 265, 13. Zvu
  4. ^ Bordaux, p. 256, 13. Zvo and 4. Zvu
  5. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 193, 6. Zvo
  6. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 195, 8. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 89, 6th Zvo (see also discussion in Bordaux, p. 226, 11th Zvo)
  8. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 212, 5. Zvo
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 79, 13. Zvo
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 94, 7. Zvo
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 92, 2. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 21, 2. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 82, 2. Zvo
  14. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 190, 17th Zvu
  15. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 205, 4. Zvo
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 94, 5. Zvo
  17. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 195, 11. Zvu
  18. ↑ Edition used, p. 37, 12. Zvo
  19. ↑ Edition used, p. 49, 6. Zvo
  20. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 190, 13th Zvu
  21. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 194, 17. Zvo
  22. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 197, 5th Zvu
  23. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 200
  24. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 208, 6. Zvo
  25. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 190, 13. Zvo
  26. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 209, 7th Zvo
  27. ^ Bauer and Schoor, p. 210, 6. Zvo
  28. ↑ Bauer and Schoor, p. 214 above
  29. ↑ Heising, p. 108, 19. Zvo
  30. ↑ Loescher, pp. 171–181
  31. ↑ Loescher, p. 174, 16. Zvo
  32. ↑ Steiner, p. 108 middle