The Interim Quotes

“Before leaving town he might pass up one or two trains just to linger a bit longer in the station. The city, its centers and its sights, didn’t interest him; he’d never really get to know a city, but he knew the stations, he recognized the stations in the most obscure places, even if he’d last roamed them a year or two before. – Once the bookstores had still enticed him, the used book dealers around the station; soon he preferred to stand at the window of a fast-food restaurant on the edge of the station building and watch the world go by, gazing out from inside this refuge that was not entirely part of that world, though it was usually located on a central square around which the city’s activity gathered in an arc. That activity was closely tied to the station, but he himself had already broken away; in the station he didn’t stand out with his particular form of restlessness; on the contrary, here he found composure, here all he had to signify was flight and transience. Perhaps most of the people here, those who’d taken flight into the fortress of the station, were perpetually searching for an alibi to cling to some illusory notion of life. Someday they’d change their ways—they constantly told themselves—but it’s virtually impossible to change your ways in a train station. In the arrival and departure halls change was constantly being projected, yet everything always stayed the same, the minute in which everything would suddenly be different kept receding before your eyes. The plethora of orientation devices, clocks, information from loudspeakers, electronic departure boards, the perpetual semblance of reliability only anchored in the mind the provisional and fragmentary nature of human existence.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Interim

“Mona’s reply was perceptive: Letters that aren’t out for a clear reply are really love letters in disguise…answer them just as cagily, or not at all…”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Interim

“C. was reminded of another little significant-seeming episode: Once he’d had to spend a night in jail in A.—the main town of the district he came from—and realized right away that he’d never get a single minute’s sleep in the hole they’d locked him up in. His cell was probably used as a drunk tank; traces of the catastrophes attendant to the drying-out process were visible all around… In the GDR, thought C., succumbing to alcohol still made for indelible images, so it was not entirely unreasonable for writers and artists to spend their time drinking. The cell whose door slammed behind him consisted of several cubic yards of bad smells, and contained a cot, a broken-down chair, and a cracked toilet that wouldn’t stop running and stood in a puddle of sludge. On the wall behind the cot, a broad swath of vomit trailed down, already dried; the dim light of a 25 watt bulb showed the walls covered from top to bottom with unidentifiable filth—possibly human excrement—spatters of blood, and countless inscriptions: scratched messages and addresses. It was enough reading material to last him all night. One of the first slogans he read stated straight out: Long live capitalism.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Interim