‘Das Schreiende Amt’: The ‘Bourgeois’ Tradition and the Problem of ‘Objectivity’ in Wolfgang Hilbig’s Abwesenheit

Abstract

The following article examines the text abwesenheit (1979), the East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig’s first collection of poetry. Specifically, the article explores Hil-big’s appropriation of literary modernism in this work, a tradition which was condemned as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘formalist’ by the cultural authorities in the East. Tak-ing the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Georg Heym as paradigms for his engagement with this tradition, the article shows how the vision of these poets becomes a point of contact for Hilbig with a world outside the stifling East German socialist collective. Through their world-view he attempts to gain a degree of distance from his life as a member of the working-class masses, in order to be better able to objectify this experience and give expression to a more individual sense of identity. The article goes on to suggest, however, that ultimately he cannot gain any degree of objectivity. Indeed, his poetry merely confirms the fact that he is locked at the centre of the oppressive world he describes. Nevertheless, although he fails to find a sense of identity which is not limited by the state, the article argues that the act of failure itself gives the poet a validity. He takes over what he terms ‘das schreiende amt’, and in so doing refuses silent capitulation to the SED dictatorship. Instead, he holds his individual sense of crisis up as testimony to the larger crisis at the heart of his society.