In a time of deepening divisions, when the bipartisan nature of contemporary politics feels increasingly intimate and personal, Brigitte Reimann’s lauded autobiographical novel, Siblings, hits close to home. In a vivid and passionate depiction of a family torn apart in the division of 1960s Germany, Reimann writes with profound emotion about the brutal lines drawn by ideology, the inner turmoil of living under orthodoxy, and still—the bright ideals of socialism’s promises. As our Book Club selection for March, Siblings is a bold assertion of unities and divisions from one of East Germany’s best writers—a boundless voice speaking to the limits of individual perspective.
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Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones, Transit Books, 2023
Much of translated literature focuses on fresh, contemporary voices, but projects that arrive after a long simmer hold the special promise of an enduring story, one that has earned its place in the cultural conversation; the work of Brigitte Reimann triumphantly takes this route towards English-language readers. Prolific and storied in the German sphere—where her work has never gone out of print, Reimann is a cornerstone writer of social realism and the German Democratic Republic. Born in 1933, she wrote prolifically from a young age, racking up literary awards from her school days until her untimely death from cancer in 1973, with her 1976 posthumous novel going on to become a bestseller and new, uncensored versions of her work continuing to attract new readerships. Siblings, winner of the 1965 Heinrich Mann Prize, is her first novel to be translated into English, following the 2019 publication of her diaries under the title I Have No Regrets—both translated by her persistent advocate, Lucy Jones.
Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream. Formulated as an impassioned political debate, the novel follows young artist Elisabeth Arendt’s pro-socialist bent in a familial battle of virtues—East versus West—with her titular siblings. Her older brother, Konrad, has already defected. A former member of the Hitler Youth and an “elbow-man” who is used to getting his way, Konrad’s fate is of little consequence to Elisabeth: “I had nothing else to do than come to terms with the idea that I’d lost my brother (and lost meant permanently, for ever); a brother who was alive and well, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth a few streets from where I was, who would fly back to Hamburg the following morning, build tankers, save up for a Mercedes, sleep with his beautiful wife, go to the cinema, and carry on with his life.” Instead, her passion is directed towards her other brother, Uli, closer to her in both age and ideology, who has announced that he too will defect the following day: “I can’t stay here, I can’t breathe . . . I feel like a prisoner trapped behind bars, just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere.” Set in 1960 before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, defecting was not the daring escape it later became: at the time, when a person could simply walk from one side of the city to the other, weight of this journey fell firmly on moralistic grounds.
Elisabeth spares no conviction in arguing for the socialist dream. She is young and idealistic and works as a painter, charged with documenting the spirit of the factory worker through art. She herself lives and works at the factory, as was customary through a program known as the “Bitterfelder Weg,” designed to foster relationships between artists and workers and foment equality. The program’s ambition offers some of the most compelling writing in the novel, as Elisabeth shares her own revelation that the “production plant like any other, barren, flat land, milling with a few thousand workers building chimneys, halls and roofs, functional buildings made of glass or cold, dead concrete” may indeed be worth loving and fighting for.
Just as contemporary readers can search Elisabeth’s idealism to contemplate the arc of the German Democratic Republic, Elisabeth looks inwards to understand her own family’s place in history. She was young during the war, and remembers it mostly as a time of hunger and austerity, with “the dull drone of bombers swarming overhead, and white searchlights in the night sky.” She and her siblings fault their parents: “You voted for Hitler. You’re to blame.” As to their grandfather, they thought little of it as children, but he was a capitalist whose prized possession was a photo of the last Kaiser—owner of the shoe factory that is now in the public sector. Does her brother resent the loss of this inheritance as birthright? Does she? In the shadow of Elisabeth’s optimism, we hear the whispers of corruption and condemnation, Party favoritism and oppression. Even in her most heated arguments, it is never absolutely clear that Elisabeth has convinced herself that the path they have chosen is the correct one.
Most ambiguous is the passion Elisabeth demonstrates for her brother Uli himself. His girlfriends stir her to jealousy: “I’d always managed to avoid picturing my brother kissing or embracing another girl. I loathed the photos of pretty girls he sometimes showed me and was ruthless in finding flaws in their smooth foreheads or painted lips.” And his looks arouse her: “Although muscular men do nothing for me, my brother moved me with the pride I feel in seeing perfection, whether in nature or art.” These feelings and persistent flowery details are notably absent in descriptions of Elisabeth’s fiancé, Joachim, but what that might amount to is for the reader to decide. Perhaps there is a scholarly argument to be made, a comparison between her lackluster Party-member boyfriend and her doubting but captivating brother; or a feminist argument, surveying Elisabeth’s relationship to different kinds of men in a male-dominated world. One might even consider an autobiographical argument, as Reimann’s own brother Ludwig notably defected from the GDR one year before she began writing Siblings.
That Elisabeth is some sort of stand-in for Reimann feels undeniable. Reimann spent six years in the Bitterfelder Weg working at a factory as a writer, just as Elisabeth did as an artist. Elisabeth’s questioning, her hypocrisies, her fighting spirit, her sense of humor—they bring a magnetic sincerity to the page. It is easy to guess why Siblings attracted an audience among young East Germans in 1963, who were likely excited to discover the work of a woman who drank and wore bright lipstick just like her character, who was navigating the shifting social landscapes just like they were. “We were ridiculously young and ridiculously passionate and ridiculously ignorant. We believed everything they told us at school and in the clubs,” Uli told Elisabeth. If Brigitte Reimann were alive today, she would be ninety years old, finding herself in a world where young people look to her work from a different side of the same question. Since the days of Siblings, the Berlin Wall has gone up and come down, and Brigitte Reimann shares the humanity of that story. It was the mission of the Bitterfelder Weg to create an East German cultural identity, and Reimann seized that charge with gusto.
Samantha Siefert is a Spanish to English translator based in Austin, Texas. She studied Spanish and Translation at the University of Hawai’i and has lived in Buenos Aires, Vigo, and Bilbao. In addition to her translation work, she also teaches classes in English as a Second Language. Samantha is a marketing manager for Asymptote and helps organize the Asymptote Book Club.
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