5 Works of German Existentialism from the Archives
In celebration of the latest Two Lines Press release Under the Neomoon by Wolfgang Hilbig, we’ve gathered 5 works of German existentialism from our Two Lines Journal archives. Dig in!
Two Lines Press is proud to celebrate the English-language translation of another Wolfgang Hilbig publication—with the wordsmithing of Isabel Fargo Cole herself. In keeping with the book’s themes of German existentialism, we wanted to share with you a collated list of 5 works from the Two Lines Journal archives that we feel are just so Hilbig. And so different. And also—so worth your while. Read the first few lines of each piece, and click the title to read the work in its entirety!
If you’re curious about this curation, keep its inspiration in mind: Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate to the West. The author of more than twenty books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor.
- the blue-collar love of my friend q. by Lea Schneider (Translated from German by Bradley Schmidt)
- so collect everything, record it, turn it around, use it, because everything. everything will disappear, and everything that you don’t use will be used against you: the tiled walls, the tiled high-rises, the tiled sidewalks, as if the city were a swimming pool, an operating room, or another kind of space where it’s important that the walls perspire; that liquid can roll off them…
- The Hussies by Özlem Özgül Dündar (Translated from German by Neil Blackadder)
- We follow her and find out where she lives. Child’s play. We wait one more day. We take turns keeping watch so we know when she’s not at home. She has a husband too. When they’ve both left the house, we go through the gate into the yard. We kick the patio chairs over and dismantle the table. We trample the flowers and pull down the ivy. We spray-paint three crosses on the door. That’s our sign. That’s our revenge. For what she did at school. For Seta. We find a window left slightly open and one after another we climb through, landing in the kitchen. We scarf down everything edible, and all the stuff we don’t want to eat we smear on the furniture. Everything that’s not nailed down, we tip over. We drag all the clothes out of the closets and let the water in the bathtub overflow.
- Grammar of a Departure by Peter Bichsel (Translated from German by Madeleine LaRue)
- The train leaves at 4:03. The beginning of the journey depends on how far her room is from the train station, and also perhaps on how far the ticket counter is from the platform, and whether she passes the ticket counter on her way to the platform, or passes the platform first, goes to the counter to buy her tickets, then backtracks to the platform. In any case, it’s possible to depict the process with some complexity. It must also be mentioned how often she looked at her watch to check the time since two o’clock, must be mentioned that the frequency of time-checking increased.
- The Developing Tray by David Wagner (Translated from German by Gerald Chapple)
- She says her brother went to the garage three or four days before he died to pick up the towrope in the trunk of his car, it was in with engine trouble. He drove my mother’s car, his stepmother’s, she says, who’s never crocheted since and never worn silk scarves and never a scarf in winter, only loafers. And never tied a shoelace again. He had copies made of the keys to his father’s office, she says, where the secretary found him the next morning, they found the receipt for eighty-one thousand lire, the knot’s tightening—everything comes back to her now...
- Among countless reasons the best by Felix Philipp Ingold (Translated from German by Anatoly Kudryavitsky & Yulia Kudryavitskaya)
- Among countless reasons the best
is the last. Were there other habitable worlds,
everything there would still be the same—because
each possible world is the only real one. It’s the reality
in which we live...
- Among countless reasons the best
An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig’s dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising assessment of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig’s persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig’s longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams. An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of the importance of storytelling from down below, where the workers toil.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
