...Gillian Pye This article looks at the interplay between material authenticity, waste, decay, loss, and forgetting in Wolfgang Hilbig's prose texts Die Kunde von den Bäumen ( The Lore of the Trees , 1992) and Alte Abdeckerei ( Old Knackers Yard , 1991). It argues that the thrown-away, the ruined...

... peopled by nonselves. In this way both narratives chal- lenge the post-1990 historical narrative of a national homecoming. Pye’s read- ing of waste images in Wolfgang Hilbig’s work underlines the spectral pre- occupation of much contemporary German literature. In Die Kunde von den Bäumen (The Lore...