Situation by Helmut Heissenbuttel

Situation (this is a machine translation by Deepl. Situation was translated in the late 1970s by Michael Hamburger and is available in TEXTS, Helmet Heissenbuttel for comparison. 0714525901)

Standing upright without memory in complete darkness. The ground is wet and slippery. When you lean forward you feel the coldness of the ground as of stone or steel. You can only move forward slowly. When you move forward you feel that the ground consists of large irregular plates separated by narrow but deep grooves.

Suppose you move forward. Suppose the only thing you have with you is a box of matches with, say, ten matches. When you light one of these matches, you see nothing more than the small vault in the darkness that this weak light is able to fill. You can’t even see exactly what the floor is really like. If you are willing to move forward, you will light the second match. Will you slide forward over the slippery ground, lighting match after match. Forward? Do you know that it is forward?

Suppose you get somewhere. Assuming that you bump into something and that you still have one or two matches (there won’t be more in any case), you will put them out now without hesitation and with a certain carelessness. When one has lit the last match, one will at best see a stake or (perhaps and in the most extreme case) a row of stakes.

No one will be able to reach the end of the row of stakes by the light of a match. But there is a legend that one or the other (or only once one) 87 crawled blindly to the end. What one has to imagine, however, is the absolute end behind this preliminary end of the row of piles. That means if one has come so far one will still come a little further (more or less far that doesn’t matter there anymore). Then the ground will be finished and whoever has crawled or slid until then will feel the equally smooth and cold vertical underneath him.

Stretched out he will then perhaps lie at the abyss the head stretched into the emptiness. He listens. And when he listens, he will hear a distant sound that swells up and down. But this sound will be full of attraction. Not so much that one wants to throw oneself down. But so much that one is held there. And if one nonsensically perhaps (and in the extreme case) even up to here has not yet given up the foolish hope that it will still become light, one forgets it here. And the only thing you may think is that it will come closer.