In the first three pages of Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel The Interim (Das Provisorum, 2000), the main character, C., is assaulted from behind while descending a stairway, dispatches his attacker efficiently (C. is a former boxer), and emerges on a sidewalk in Nuremberg at rush hour:
“… they all hurried and hustled, their faces radiating the certainty of serving the world’s most righteous case: shopping … And there the contented mingled with the discontented, and the other way around; the deceived joined together with the undeceived, embracing their deceivers in delight when they entered the Boutiques, the Emporiums and Markets and Gallerias, and they bought and paid and paid again, signing their checks with a flourish. And back outside on the Breite Gasse they beamed in the radiance of their liquidity, and all were distinguished and important enough to bear God’ favor in their hearts.”
Now “pushing 50,” C. is an East German poet with a visa that allowed him to travel to the west in 1985. At one point in the novel, the third-person narrator says C. believes it is “possibly September 14 or 15, 1989,” thus just two months before the historic razing of the Berlin Wall. Alcoholic, creatively impotent, a consumer of pornography, unreliable in relationships, ineffectual with women, disgusted by his own ravaged body, C. exists in this “interim” between east and west, shuttling between the two zones, lingering in train stations, drinking alone. “He was unfree by virtue of a far greater freedom,” says the narrator, “because he belonged neither to this side of the world, where people lay and strolled around, nor to the other side, where people yearned to be lying here … He’d arrived here as though under hypnosis. What had hypnotized him were his own thoughts, and they revolved around the figure of a woman.”
C.’s “depressive inertia” generates a recursive tale, pivoting between drink, aimless travel, and abandonments. But in one sense, The Interim really isn’t about C. at all – but rather about the underlying psyche telling this story, a mind absorbed by – and in the grip of — the grim and grimy details of C.’s peripatetic days. Is C. a person who has been victimized by current events, a proof that neither the GDR’s socialism nor western capitalism can nurture humanity? Or is he someone who takes no responsibility for his cynical and self-destructive behavior? C.’s entire life has occurred as an interim in which “the real thing is yet to come.” Or does C. represent something more mysterious, even intriguing? “Something uncanny had happened to him, something with a thousand explanations but no real reason.”
When Hilbig’s 2010 novel Old Rendering Plant was published in 2017 for Anglophones in Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation, one critic described the text as “an allegorical novel about East Germany and the Stasi.” But the novel did not strike me as an allegory. It seemed to judge all humans very severely, peering beyond the facts of history to the disquieting mess of the psyche. Hilbig’s indictments are so trenchant that they preclude the possibility that anyone – perhaps especially the reader – may avoid implication in the century’s crimes. He implicitly blames a communal fecklessness rather than accusing the usual bad guys, even as he appeals on the slant to our humanity. In Old Rendering Plant, the narrator recalls his solitary wanderings as a youth among the sinister remnants of a hollowed-out GDR, while rebuking the limits enforced by family, class, political affiliation, history, and the inanity of daily events.
In Hooked: Art and Attachment (University of Chicago, 2020), Rita Felski examines “how people connect to art and how art connects them to other things.” But she allows that the aesthetic experience of literature “may be a purposeful act of refusal or renunciation, a spurning of communal bonds; an overwhelming sense of absorption where the rest of the world briefly fades into nothingness.” Then she insists, “Such perceptions need to be honored rather than brushed aside.” It seems strange to have to make this insistence, but such are the times.
Persuading us to honor such perceptions was Hilbig’s mission. “There was an indescribable fury inside him, a hatred, grisly and grinding” – C. is unlikable, hurtful, aimless, and Hilbig won’t allow the reader any respite from this portrait. Isabel Fargo Cole not only captures the tone and urgencies of this prickly sourness but makes it possible for us to persist through the repetitions and changelessness of C.’s harsh milieu. “A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in their own nature,” wrote V. S. Pritchett in Midnight Oil. In The Interim, that deposit issues directly from Hilbig’s own nature. Born in 1941 in Meuselwitz among the subcamps of Buchenwald and wartime factories run by slave labor, Hilbig, like C., worked in several small GDR factories and was interrogated by the Stasi for poems published in the west. Like C., Hilbig’s contradictions have a generative effect (for C., more thoughts; for Hilbig, more creative prose). Hilbig died in 2007.
The narrator says, “The life of a novel character – its confusions and sufferings, its obsessions, its misfortune or fortune – was inconsequential, it was foolish and banal compared to the fates that had unfolded in the camps; the stories of characters were no longer worth a thing, not even the stroke of a typewriter key.” The triumph of The Interim is found in its loyalty to this dire perception – and in its contradiction: the insistence on the value of self-expression, however tormented, in a mendacious world.
[Published by Two Lines Press on November 2, 2021, 304 pages, $22.95 hardcover]