Alte Abdeckerei

Wolfgang Hilbig's story "Old Covering" draws the reader into a mysterious district located on the borderline between literary imagination and political reality: "Beyond the coal railway line, southeast of a half-deserted village, deep in the overgrown hollow, right by the dilapidated fence began the area that was the East, and one did not venture into this region without consequences." Hilbig's youthful hero explores this realm filled with ruins, exhausted fields, and industrial sites on extensive expeditions, even though he is repeatedly warned by adults: People have disappeared there, he is told, about whom no one is allowed to speak anymore, yet they cannot be erased from memory.