Revisiting the avant-garde: book covers for Wolfgang Hilbig’s poetry and prose

Abstract

Wolfgang Hilbig rose from East Germany’s alternative literary scene in the 1970s and 1980s to become, with the publication of his novel “Ich” (“I”) in 1993, one of the newly united Germany’s most celebrated writers. The book covers designed for his works between 1978 and 1998 used the visual vocabularies of different avant-garde art movements including Surrealism, Expressionism, and Dada to connect Hilbig’s linguistically experimental representations of industrial decay to early twentieth-century attempts to create innovative, politically critical art. Yet the cover designers, who included significant East German graphic artists like Horst Hussel and West German ones like Gunter Rambow, imagined the political value of their own and Hilbig’s work in ways that went beyond the dualistic terms of the avant-garde debates in art and literary criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. This essay reveals, through the untold stories of the Hilbig covers in their symbiosis with Hilbig’s poetry and prose, how the writer and his visual respondents located the political meanings of words and images in the layered affective stances present in the irresolvable tensions of formal structures like line, composition, and diction rather than in dualistic understandings of conformity with or resistance to monolithically imagined “capitalism” or vaguely defined “market forces.” The covers, along with Hilbig’s own ruminations on the role of language, thus anticipated art historian Benjamin Buchloh’s and Germanist Carsten Strathausen’s recent calls for readings of the political value of art, literature, and theory that acknowledge the inherently non-rational character of political action and the necessity of developing theoretical frameworks that can account for the politics of aesthetic gestures in all their formal complexity.