The Sleep of the Righteous

2015 | Fiction & Poetry

Doppelgängers, a murderer’s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances—these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic, utterly personal account of the century-defining nation’s postwar struggles. In the words of 2015 International Man Booker Prize recipient László Krasznahorkai, Hilbig “described a world which is distasteful not only to the Germans but actually horrific for all of us.”





From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and anyone who has become ensnared in the tug-of-war between East and West. With an obsessive, impressionistic prose and an innovative approach to storytelling, Hilbig evokes the eerie, allegorical bleakness of films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker while creating an original, visionary statement on the ravages that history can wreak on the human mind.

Wolfgang Hilbig (Author)