What I Am Reading: "Old Rendering Plant" by Wolfgang Hilbig

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really “get” this book. I first saw it a month ago when I was browsing at The Strand in NYC (name drop), and I was intrigued by its presentation and its subject matter. I am, after all, a sucker for any book about abandoned buildings.

It turned out to be a dreamlike, meandering story, almost like a long prose poem, about a boy growing up in a remote East German town that lives in the shadow of a ruined rendering plant. The narrator makes frequent trips to the ruin, despite his family warning him off, and comes to be obsessed with it as his alienation from society grows. At some point in his past or something he finds that the facility is still being used to butcher live animals, or possibly he is viscerally living through a memory of the facility’s former use?Anyway, there are some fun passages, and undoubtedly a lot of symbolism that I didn’t understand. One theme is “vanished people,” by which I believe he means those who have escaped to the West; another is a considerable focus on body horror, as the smell and the essence of the rendering plant has suffused the surrounding landscape. He also speaks of being an outcast from society, such as in the below passage, one of many that ramble between topics and wed different themes:

The vegetation was typical for the area, thriving on leached-out slag and crumbling scrap metal; neither useful not beautiful, it seemed to have sprung up only to cover the wounds of the terrain…or only […] to knit over the fact that my strange interest in bad places was unacknowledged, unclear interest in our origins…because I had not actually experienced the affronts that went with the soil we had spring from. - On reflection, we were actually exiles. Of course only in the indefinite way in which all our names were sheer hubris…all our names, titles, and nouns. So we were not exiles based on some neat, solid idea, but exiles out of instability…out of ineptitude, ignorance, antisocial tendencies; we hadn’t been torn from our roots, we hadn’t lost our rights, we were in exile because we’d never had roots or rights; we’d never even sought to find them, perhaps we constantly sought the world’s most noxious regions in order to rest in our rootlessness; like grey vegetation, feeding on the ground’s nutrients but giving nothing back, we settled in the desolate provinces that were the strongholds of evil, we settled between slag and scrap where we could run riot, rank and uncontested. We had always sought the places of darkness - always the smoke, as others seek the first bright happy memory of childhood - always sought the shunting shadows of transition, ever wary of being recognized, for our lives were but a semilegal affair…and we sought out the most wretched work, in cellars, cesspits, and shafts, lowly nocturnal tasks; we cleansed the blemishes, we scrubbed the slaughterhouses, we licked clean the word of mouth, and with the looks of thieves we pocketed our wages. (p. 57-59)

The whole book is like that.