‘Ich'(‘I’) by Wolfgang Hilbig (Review)

One of my favourite German-language discoveries in recent years has been Wolfgang Hilbig, so I’m happy to be looking at more of his work for German Literature Month this time around.  You might have expected me to be trying his recent release in English, The Interim, but I actually got around to that one a while back; surprisingly, it’s his first release in English that I hadn’t yet read.  It’s time, then, to head off to the mean streets of East Berlin to make the acquaintance of a man with a bit of an identity crisis, and a peculiar liking for smoky cafés and spending time underground…

*****
Hilbig’s 1993 novel Ich (I) takes us back to a time before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Over in East Berlin, we meet a writer working as a Spitzel (informant) for the dreaded secret police, the Stasi, who goes by the codename Cambert.  He’s a rather unlikely figure, a bit of a mess of a man, truth be told, who drifts between literary gatherings in ‘the scene’ in search of information on a writer called Reader, and spending time in the tunnels running beneath the city, hiding from his boss, Feuerbach, and using the time to reflect on how he got to where he is.

The first part of the book is a confusing mess, deliberately so.  However, the narrator gradually starts to reflect on his life, taking us back to his beginnings.  Slowly, we see how he morphed from a struggling writer in a provincial town to a hard-bitten informer in the big city.  By itself, each small decision he makes along the way seems harmless enough, yet together they make him the man he’s become, and chip away little by little at his true identity.

Ich provides another wonderful insight into Hilbig’s world, taking us back to the grey days behind the Iron Curtain.  The extended canvas of a near 400-page novel allows the writer to take his time with his story, and he uses the space to its full extent.  It’s an incredibly evocative work in which we can see the dull light, the shabby buildings, the filthy bedclothes, and smell the smoke-filled rooms and the urine-stained walls of underground tunnels.  This world, where stasis is the norm, is where the writer finds himself trapped, running around after people who don’t really matter and drinking himself to sleep each night.

As you’d expect from a book called Ich, the story is largely concerned with the narrator.  Initially, he’s a rather pathetic figure, harassed by his superior, yet the more we read, the more we realise that there’s a need to be wary:

Und er hatte sich nicht gewundert, denn seit er in dieser Wohnung war, lebte er ständig in dem Gefühl, es sei um alle seine Dinge ein lückenloses Netz aus fremden Wissen gelegt, und er selbst sei engewebt in ein System einander ergänzender Informationen, wenn er darin auch nur ein winziges Segment war … und es gab an der Oberfläche, die er überblicke, keine Möglichkeit, sich diesem Netz zu entziehen.
p.187 (Fischer Verlag, 2012)

And it hadn’t surprised him, for ever since moving into the apartment, he lived with a constant sense that a seamless net of strange knowledge had been cast around all his things, and he himself was enmeshed in a system of complementary information, even if he was merely a tiny portion of it … and on the surface, as far as he could see, there was no possibility of extracting himself from this net.
*** (my translation)

It’s a story, his story, and while he does his best to make us think he’s just fallen into this life without any real decision on his part, that’s not exactly true.  Buttered up by Stasi officers who admire his work, he moves towards the new life one step at a time, and even if he may make himself seem a bumbling, useless figure, reading between the lines, we can discern his commitment to the work, which (of course) could eventually lead to someone else’s suffering.

The title, an intriguing one, hints at a major theme of the novel.  It starts out in the first person, yet before long there’s a sudden, disorientating shift from Ich (‘I’) to Er (‘he’).  This can be taken as representing a loss of identity, and this develops later with further shifts to W. (the fictional writer’s initial), C. (the initial of his codename) and eventually IM, or inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborator), a label used for those who do the legwork for the Stasi.  Towards the end, these labels become jumbled, as the writer’s identity becomes blurred, with the writer jumping from third- to first person, and from initial to initial, often on the same page.

There are several other familiar Hilbig tropes to be found in Ich including, as always, glimpses of a rather strained and unhealthy relationship with the writer’s mother, and his issues with women closer to his own age.  His interest in a young woman he knows from all the literary meetings borders on the unhealthy, and even stalking, but (unsurprisingly) all it takes is for her to turn around and face him for the not-so-super spy to turn to jelly.  The one woman he does manage to become involved with is his landlady, a woman in her fifties, which suggests that you can run away from home, but you can’t always leave mother behind.

Another Hilbigian obsession is with hanging out in lonely, dirty places.  I have vivid memories of the rubbish tip of Die Kunde von den Bäumen (The Tidings of the Trees), the polluted streams of Alte Abdeckerei (Old Rendering Plant) and the writer hiding behind the bins in Die Weiber (The Females).  This time the focus is on life underground, with many important scenes set in the cold basement he rents from Frau Falbe, or the café he spends much of his time in, below pavement level, hidden from those he watches go by.  Much of the first part of the novel is spent in his subterranean hidey-hole beneath the big city, sitting alone for hours in a spot against a wall cutting the tunnel off from the West:

Eine Zeitlang war er der Patriarch der Unterwelt hier unten, der Alleinherscher über ein unbekanntes halbdunkles Reich, unangefochten ruhte er, und alle Gedanken waren so ferne, ermüdende Gründe für das Leben oberhalb, daß er sie, kaum daß sie ihn berührten, leicht wieder fallenlassen konnte. (p.71)

For a short time he was the lord of the underworld down here, the sole ruler over an unknown, shadowy realm, he rested here unassailable, and all thoughts were such distant, exhausting reasons for life above ground, that he was easily able to let them, scarcely had they touched him, fall back to the ground. ***

Again, this dark, dingy haven is  a symbol of the decay of the country he lives in, and yet it’s one he’s somehow strangely at home in.

Of course, as much as the book is about the writer and his identity, Ich is a novel that examines the final years of the GDR.  Much is left to the reader’s imagination, but there are frequent mentions of die Firma (‘the Company’), a pseudonym for the state department that controls people’s behaviour and has eyes and ears everywhere.  The shadowy Stasi is mainly represented here by Feuerbach, the narrator’s superior and mentor, a man who disappears for months at a time, popping up again just when he’s least expected, often in the writer’s apartment.

Throughout their time together, Feuerbach repeatedly admonishes Cambert, who’s always trying to puzzle out the meaning behind his assignments, to focus on the path, not the destination.  Above all, he’s not to be hasty:

Wissen Sie, Sie sind wie die meisten Leute, Sie sind wie ein Leser, der das beängstigende Gefühl hat, ein Buch nicht verstehen zu können.  Andauernd ist dieser Mensch dabei, vor- und zurückzublättern, noch mal nachzulesen, weiter vorneweg zu lesen, mehrmals wieder anzufangen … anstatt sich darauf zu verlassen, daß sich die Sache Stück für Stück ganz von selbst erschließt. (p.157)

You know, you’re like most people, you’re like a reader who has the alarming sensation of not understanding a book.  This person is constantly flicking back and forth, rereading, reading ahead, starting over and over again … instead of trusting that everything will come together by itself, piece by piece. ***

One of Feuerbach’s favourite mottos is that there’s no need to rush.  We’re in control, we have all the time we need…

…and yet that’s exactly what they don’t have.  Time only exists in Ich as months, and the writer himself is never completely sure what year it is, yet as we learn of protests at embassies, candlelight vigils and the ambivalent attitude of the writers towards the Stasi, it’s clear that we’re gradually approaching the end of the state’s existence.  Even Feuerbach begins to sense the changes:

So geht das nicht, sagte Feuerbach.  Die haben wohl überhaupt keinen Respekt mehr.  Entweder man übertritt die Gesetze, oder man steht hinter ihnen.  Aber man kann nicht so tun, als wäre die Staatsmacht … oder als wären wir gar micht mehr vorhanden. (p.205)

That’s not on, said Feuerbach.  They have absolutely no respect anymore.  Either you break the rules, or you stand behind them.  But you can’t just act as if the state … or as if we simply weren’t there anymore. ***

There’s definitely something in the air, with everything about to come crashing down, and I half-expected these months slowly passing by (April, May, June) to culminate in a dramatic November for our friends.  Hilbig’s not one to take the easy way out, though, instead leaving everyone stuck in the drab, disintegrating country, with the reader speculating as to what might become of them all when the wall finally falls.

As always, Hilbig’s writing is excellent, and while Ich might seem rather rambling and confused at times, it’s all deliberate and part of the charm.  It’s the story of a man lured into a fairly nasty profession, using his literary ambitions as an excuse for his behaviour, and also a look at a country on its last legs, on the verge of fading into oblivion.  If that all sounds like your cup of tea, I have good news.  The English version, I, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, is available from Seagull Books – a perfect book for wherever you like to do your reading, whether overground or underground…