When Wolfgang Hilbig died on 2 June 2007, German-language literature lost a unique voice. To the very end, he wrote poems of dark and dreamlike beauty – the alpha and the omega of his writing. Even in his great novels, the lyrical tone was ever-present. Indebted to the traditions of romanticism, symbolism and expressionism and marked by the everyday experiences of a workingman’s life in East Germany, he created his own language: passionate and full of burning desire, elegiac, brooding, tender. This is the voice of an objector and a sufferer, a ‘man lost in dreams, a banished paradise walker’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung) – the voice of a poet and a man.
