“NOW, IN THE ERA of unabashed and unprecedented mass surveillance, is the time to read East German literature.”
“New translations in 2015 brought us two extraordinary books by East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, the story collection The Sleep of the Righteous and his novel about a Stasi informant, ‘I’. Hilbig’s brooding, lyrical prose brings the pettiness and squalor of the security state to life.”
“Hilbig gives objects clamorous voices that clang over partial and imprecise bits of human speech.”
“The vicious physicality of things continues throughout the adult stories.”
“In these stories and even more so in ‘I’, Hilbig’s sentences wrench themselves along with the aid of dashes and ellipses. Never quite finishing but soldered to each other with intrusive punctuation, disjointed clauses coagulate into paragraphs.”
“The sentences seem to sprout and branch, copulating like the nefarious bottles. In service of a landscape or a character sketch, the language collects its fragments with a layered complexity.”
“These stuttering, throttled, circular sentences take us through explicit arguments and positions on the surveillance the narrator of ‘I’ is forced into.”
“Here Hilbig’s labyrinthine syntax embodies the ambiguity of the collaborator’s situation. The narrator begins in first person, randomly switches to third, then back to first.”
“The brilliance of ‘I’ lies in more than its rendering of the instability and corrosiveness of domestic surveillance. The novel lays out a complex, even cluttered analogy between the writer who comes up with convincing details for his fiction and the spy who similarly composes reports for his supervisors. This analogy is not just implied — it is directly discussed by the narrator and Feuerbach, and many scenes explicitly conflate the act of peering in windows and that of the writer sitting at his desk. The Stasi handler actively facilitates his informant’s literary career, making sure his poetry gets published, and advising him on style and work habits as well as finding him a place to live and otherwise smoothing his path. The correlation between writer and “unofficial collaborator” is laid out over and over again, while the handler, like a chummy literary agent, spouts Beckett and laughs at the pompous title of one of the official workers’ literary organs.”
“The dehumanized and dehumanizing environments Hilbig describes, where bottles and ash have more say than mothers or schoolboys, result from passivity and self-absorption, a failure to see the lives of others as more than observable surfaces.”
“Hilbig excludes or downplays the human, which is a pity, since it’s the capacity to see others as real, whole, and suffering that can transform his bleak terrain, a capacity Hilbig represents only in its absence.”
“We are living today in a world where our own National Security Agency collects, stores, and analyzes all our phone calls and emails. We don’t suspect this but know this, due to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013. The information our government collects about us dwarfs the Stasi’s files.”
“In Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour, Snowden blandly explains the extent of the NSA’s technical capabilities, to turn phones on in our pockets and record conversations, to almost instantly track not only one person but a host of their associates, feats that would have required an army of “unofficial collaborators” back in the old days behind the Wall. And yet we have not mounted any significant protest. Our government’s massive surveillance continues to seem abstract unless we can be moved by it viscerally. To the writer at her desk, who leads a dull, middle-class life, it’s hard to imagine any harm resulting from the minutest reckoning of her phone calls. East Germany not only seems quaint, but almost romantic from our vantage point. Imagine someone actually following a poet down the street!”
“What the blameless poet may fail to see is how today’s mass surveillance impacts those already criminalized, for their poverty, skin color, or creed. As surveillance technology works into everyday policing, a seemingly innocuous traffic stop connects a license plate number to hordes of other records — unpaid fines, outstanding warrants, unverified “suspicious activity reports.””
“As Malkia Amala Cyril writes in The Progressive, “indiscriminate data collection […] drives discriminatory policing practices.””
“If we continue to see surveillance as an issue of privacy rights, the injury seems mostly theoretical. Taken as an ever-tighter hold on those already oppressed, we might begin to count the bodies.”
“Hilbig remains cynical about the ability of writers to rally solidarity. Yet the emotional resonance that literature offers might be one way we can be jarred out of the complacency that has so far greeted our surveillance state.”