There was no state to be made with Wolfgang Hilbig.

And it could not be used in the media either.

It was almost impossible to bring the apparently down-to-earth, a warm Saxon intonation and reserved man together with the eloquent, intoxicating texts that he had written.

It was not a result of any strategy that Hilbig said little publicly about his texts. He has often described how from an early age he existed only through literature, reading, and writing. When he learned to be a boring mill lathe operator at the end of the fifties, he bought a complete edition of the romantic poet ETA Hoffmann, who liked to work with grotesque distortions, with his first apprenticeship salary. That corresponded most closely to the young Wolfgang Hilbig's attitude towards life and the world.

He had inevitably been born to a worker in Meuselwitz, Thuringia, and industrial open-cast lignite mining dominated everyday life. The tension between the proletarian existence, which in the GDR was colored by the socialist exaggeration of the worker, and the reading of writers from a seemingly timeless past defined his person from the beginning. Then there was the atmosphere in his family. Hilbig's grandfather Kasimir Startek, who came from eastern Poland, spoke poor German and thought reading and writing were useless. In relation to this grandfather - the father had been missing since the war - the poet was constantly under pressure to justify himself. In the late novel “Das Provisorium” (2000), Hilbig writes: “The hell of this childhood was wordless, mute, its characteristic was silence.And I began to fill this silent hell with words ... with a tiny teaspoon, the little spoon of children's dishes, half the size of normal, I began to shovel words into an immense empty hall of silence. "

“Shoveling”, this verb is no accident.

For Hilbig it has an existential dimension, it is the activity of the lignite worker and stoker - both professions that he carried out himself.

With this shoveling he creates a seemingly impossible connection between the underlying feeling of guilt and shame towards his grandfather and the literature that seems to guarantee his survival.

In many passages of his work, Hilbig suggestively describes how he dreamily shovels the often hard-to-get hold of precious reading material in mostly yellowed copies in the same way as he shoveled the coals into the ovens in his work as a stoker in the industrial combine.