Il corpo come spazio e la pratica della scrittura: Die Weiber (1987) di Wolfgang Hilbig

Abstract

The article aims to demonstrate the concept of Zwischenraum behind Wolfgang Hilbig’s short story Die Weiber (1987). The setting is to be identified with the social space of the DDR, structured not only through the panoptic control of the Stasi, but also according to rigid ideological norms that polarize the cultural field and produce a spatial gap, as understood by Henri Lefebvre. The search for an interstitial space, capable of problematizing reality, is expressed metaphorically through the women’s disappearance: the correspondence between the polarized social space of the DDR and the gender division allows the centrality of the body and the interval of desire to emerge, in order to rhizomatically reconfigure the existing. In Die Weiber, this search is channeled through writing: according to Michel de Certeau, such practice can generate and appropriate new social space – a space in which, in Hilbig’s view, the culturally repressed can be revealed and the relationship with the deliberately forgotten German history can be re-established.

Keywords

• Body. Desire. Identity. Practice. Shoah. Space. Wolfgang Hilbig