Eberhard Hilscher (1927–2005)

Eberhard Hilscher grew up in Schwiebus (now Świebodzin), about 150 km east of Berlin. He was known mostly as the author of a string of literary biographies and critical studies of figures like Thomas Mann, Arnold Zweig and Gerhard Hauptmann; he also wrote some successful collections of historical sketches in the tradition of Stefan Zweig's Sternstunden. In the course of this work he exchanged correspondence with a large selection of celebrated geniuses around the world. His more experimental fiction, however, didn't fit into the official mould of the DDR and seems to have been little read, except by the Stasi.

Weltzeituhr, Hilscher's main original work of fiction, appeared in a heavily-censored version in the DDR in 1983 and an only slightly less chopped-about version in the West in 1985. This belated reconstruction of the text as Hilscher originally intended it, brought out by Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle in 2017, seems to have been made largely on the initiative of his widow.

The novel follows the career of its hero, Guido Möglich (a name we're meant to decode as "possible guide"), from his birth on the 29th of February, 1928, through his childhood in the provincial town of Paradies during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, his military service as a teenager in the occupying army in Denmark, and his return to Berlin to work as a rubble-clearer, black-market trader, and eventually proprietor of a bookshop in the Friedrichstraße, up to his mysterious disappearance in 1962. The straightforward narrative chapters about Guido's life are alternated with annual chronicles of selected news stories from around the world and with letters between Guido and his schoolfriend Jab, who settles into the life of a market-gardener in the West. Apparently at random, we also get interpolated vignettes of geniuses in action — Albert Schweitzer in Congo; Bohr and Einstein in Copenhagen and Manhattan; August Piccard in his balloon and Jacques Piccard in his bathyscaphe; Picasso in Paris; Tenzing and Hillary on Everest; Thomas Mann in California; Brecht in Berlin, etc. Some of the geniuses appear under their own names, others anonymously or under more-or-less transparent disguises.

The resulting narrative chaos is mitigated by a forceful imposition of chronological discipline. With a handful of telling exceptions, like Kierkegaard popping up on a visit to Berlin ninety years after his death, or a mention of the World-clock on the Alexanderplatz some twenty years before it was erected, everything appears organised very strictly by year, so we get a kind of multi-dimensional view of world history, with a focus on Germany, as though we were looking at the world-clock.

Rather like Oskar in the Tin drum, Guido is a gifted figure damaged by the times he is living in. He's beautiful, clever, and endowed with apparently limitless sexual energy and technique, able to see through political hypocrisy and bullshit at a glance, but totally lacking in human empathy. He leads us through the disasters of the rise of Hitler and the war, the optimistic creation of the new Workers' and Peasants' State, the realisation in June 1953 that the government had lost touch with the people and with socialism, re-militarisation and the Cold War, and finally the ultimate disaster that seals the fate of the DDR — and destroys Guido's only chance of redemption-through-love — the Berlin Wall.

An interesting quirk is the way Hilscher introduces dolphin-symbolism repeatedly as we go through the story (the spermatozoon on the first page of the book is already making a "dolphin-like" progress towards its destination). Dolphins stand in a very Douglas Adams way for rational, peaceful, playful existence without weapons or frontiers. Hilscher apparently put a lot of time and effort into researching dolphins when he was writing the book, even getting permission to swim with the dolphins in Duisburg Zoo on a rare trip to the West. It does make you wonder whether the H2G2 obsession might already have reached East Berlin by 1980. Probably not, but you never know!

It's an enjoyable read. There's a lot of entertaining detail and some clever satire (Walter Ulbricht appearing in a dream disguised as a wall-building emperor of China), and there are some telling insights along the way, but this isn't a book you could really class as a "lost" counterpart to The Tin Drum, or a continuation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. It's too big and shaggy, the targets it attacks are too broad (Hitler and Stalin and the closed DDR state and militarism and nuclear weapons and blind scientific progress...). It's probably more relevant to see it as in the tradition of Simplicissimus or — as Volker Oesterreicher suggests in his afterword to this edition — Tristram Shandy.… (mehr)