The Sleep of the Righteous

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The world, from the point where Wolfgang Hilbig existed, was bleak and desolate. It is only his sentences — wondrously quotable, visionary — that give color, light, indeed, in a certain sense, even a kind of magnificence to this bleak and desolate world. But how is this possible? How is it possible to create linguistic magnificence from what is for Hilbig a bleak and desolate world?

Many have already written about Wolfgang Hilbig, but this is worth nothing. Because the secret of Hilbig — and there is a secret! — remains undisclosed. Hardly anyone knows about him; he remains largely unknown in translation, and even in Germany — despite the fact that he should have received every significant literary prize — he is practically unknown. Here “practically unknown” means that the literary public doesn’t know about him, the critics don’t pay any attention to him, and if it wasn’t for the publication of his works by the highly influential publisher S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt, and moreover, had there not been, in Hilbig’s lifetime, a few — really just a few — older critics who mentioned his name with appreciation (although no one pays attention to them anymore either), then in all likelihood, at least in the short term, he would completely disappear from our view.

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