«Als ich noch Schriftsteller war». Ripensare Hildesheimer a partire dalla fine

The ending builds up the premise of the Hildesheimer’s literary and essayistic production. As already pointed out by W. G. Sebald in reference to Tynset, Hildesheimer’s work originates from mourning and melancholy. These two aspects are nevertheless combined with peculiar literary forms of irony, directed both toward a world which is still not aware of its antiquity and emptiness, and toward the self. The study shows how this idea of ending derives from the experience of violence and murder and not from a generic sense of death. The analysis highlights the radicalness of the Hildesheimer’s position and how it undermines not only the idea of future, but also the contemporary subjectivity that succumbs under the law of reality and underlies its own transformation into a purely fictive dimension. In this way, Hildesheimer delivers to his contemporaries the important literary consciousness of the crucial passage from modernism to postmodernism. At the same time, his work and his thought show the difficulty of an alternative literary way in absence of a possible difference between the self and the world.