Shuffling from East to West

Shuffling from East to West: A review of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings

by Matthew Jakubowski

What kind of people are we indeed?

A review of Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones. Transit Books, March 2023, 192 pages, $16.95. ISBN 978-1-945492-66-2

Celebrated East German author Brigitte Reimann died 50 years ago this year and we finally have one of her novels available in English, an absorbing, fluid translation by Lucy Jones of Die Geschwister (Siblings), which examines the personal and political forces motivating a young woman’s effort to prevent her brother from abandoning the struggles of the German Democratic Republic. 

Reimann was born in Burg in 1933 and died from cancer at age 39 in 1973. Two volumes of diaries she kept from 1955 to 1970 have been translated into English, I Have No Regrets, translated by Jones, and It All Tastes of Farewell, translated by Steph Morris. Her personal life was marked by difficulties and loss, including four marriages and a miscarriage that almost led to her suicide. Following the Bitterfelder Weg initiative, which placed artists at industrial plants to expose them and workers to each other’s way of life, Reimann moved in 1960 to a brown coal plant in Hoyerswerda. She stayed until 1968 when she was diagnosed with cancer. Siblings won the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1965. Her other novels include The Confession, Arrival in Everyday Life, and Franziska Linkerhand, an unfinished novel considered to be her masterwork, which Jones has told The Guardian UK she also intends to translate. 

Siblings is set in 1960, eleven years after the GDR was established. Reimann begins the novel with a betrayal, a quiet explosion of shock and immediate tension—a flashback to the moment when the narrator, Elisabeth Arendt, has ratted on her older brother, Ulrich, called Uli, two days after he admits he plans to leave for West Germany. Their neighbor, a successful young Party member (who’s also Elisabeth’s boyfriend) has calmly confronted Uli. Uli is stunned, but so is Elisabeth; she can hardly believe she actually turned her brother in as she watches him react: “He said, ‘I won’t forget this.’ He was standing very straight and not moving in the middle of the room. He said in a cold, dry voice, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’” (3)

Reimann constructs the rest of the novel, grounded in one family’s story, as a journey through the history of this moment between brother and sister as Elisabeth waits to see if Uli will be arrested. Reimann uses the early chapters of the novel to show the enormous hardships these very close siblings have endured. The latter half concerns Elisabeth’s experiences as a young female artist assigned to a local factory. Beneath these larger movements Reimann describes a web of traumas for every major and minor character in the novel, underlying the enormous pain behind Elisabeth’s choice to betray Uli. Elisabeth believes it’s an act of love, but in this environment and these circumstances such an act can only destroy their love, giving the novel the feel of an inevitable tragedy. 

Reimann’s success in making these aspects resonate is derived from meticulous craft honed to deliver a detailed, honest, and uniquely powerful portrait of life in East Germany, and an important piece of literary history.

Family history

The portrait of the Arendt family is heavily shadowed by the pain of war and death, as well as the absence of the siblings’ older brother, Konrad, who has already left for West Germany, and the difficulties of life in the GDR, advancing away from its promises toward socialist dictatorship.

Reimann portrays Uli and Elisabeth as hardworking twentysomethings finding their way in the world. They’re full of idealism and some anger, like most young adults, determined to avoid fates like their parents, whom they live with. Elisabeth calls Uli “my protector, easy-going, strong and steady, someone who was good at seeing off the cheeky boys next door, and dangerous black dogs, and nightmares” (129). Reimann places them slightly apart from the rest of the family, less wounded by the effects of the war and the fallen Reich. As we get to see them grow up together, from early childhood to their mid-twenties, the echo of the betrayal in the opening scene becomes more and more poignant. 

The intensity of their confrontation is fueled by the pain of the past. “My mother is the daughter of a shoe manufacturer. She frequented the homes of rich Jewish families in our town, even during the Nazi era, even when the factories of those families were ‘Aryanized,’ and it was scandalous to set foot in the flat of a Jew. My mother was completely apolitical. My father, too, but he stopped visiting Jewish friends; he detested the Nazis and called Hitler an upstart, but he was a careful man, a family man.” (7) The children eventually see their Jewish neighbors “dispatched,” and say good-bye to their father at the train station.

Elisabeth, her two older brothers, and her mother remain behind. “Russian officers are garrisoned in our house. Konrad stalks around the house, mute and glowering. Mother sleeps with us in our room. The officers stay for weeks, months, half a year…” (8). The family often goes hungry and can’t get milk even when they have money. When their father returns, the children, now teenagers, don’t recognize him, and scoff at his stories of hard years spent in the Soviet Union, berating him and his entire generation for the horrors of the Holocaust. The layers of trauma touch everyone in the neighborhood. Their quiet neighbor, named Steinbrink, who is Joachim’s father, “was beaten up in a Gestapo cellar, having joined the KPD [German Communist Party] in 1928. He has a white scar on his mouth. Once he told us, ‘They ripped my mouth at the corners. That was during the first interrogation. After that, there was an interrogation every night. They made me mop up my blood afterwards.’” (65) 

The eldest child, Konrad, five years older than Elisabeth, “had to wear the brown shirt of the Hitler youth on Wednesdays and Sundays when he went to do his ‘service,” (7) and later “buried a dagger in the garden engraved with the words ‘Blood and Honour” (8). Konrad left the family and the country for the West two years prior, with his wife. Elisabeth views him as a traitor, a shallow person dazzled by the pursuit of brand-name things. Their father also hates Konrad for leaving; when he receives a photo of Konrad and his wife in a transit camp, he tears it up. 

What happened to Konrad is key to the desperation behind Elisabeth’s effort to keep Uli from leaving the East. Elisabeth also relates a terrible visit she and her mother had with Konrad in the West at a chic café called Kempinski’s. Their mother watches helplessly in tears as the conversation turns into a fight about politics. “We’re not drowning in bureaucracy because we don’t have material shortages,” Konrad says (44). As Konrad speaks, Reimann shows Elisabeth thinking of her life in the East. She’s an artist, a painter assigned to lead a circle of worker painters at her industrial plant. When she tells Konrad about a successful exhibition she organized, he mocks her enthusiasm. Their mother sits by heartbroken, “pale and unhappy” (52).

Normality in a dictatorship

Reimann wrote from personal experience, and the details of Elisabeth’s fictional life as an artist in a factory reflect a collective experience, as documented in historian Jeannette Madarász’s book, Working in East Germany: Normality in a Socialist Dictatorship, 1961 – 1979. Madarász was raised in East Germany and researched the history of five East German factories to capture a broad cross-section of workers’ experiences in rural and urban factories as they tried to raise families, have fulfilling lives, and develop their skills and careers amid the complex dynamics of a fledgling communist state.

As the East German economy suffered in the 1960s, the government took measures to encourage women to join the workforce. In Siblings, Elisabeth is portrayed as being mostly politically ambivalent—she believes in the socialist cause, if not the ruling party. But Reimann shows how entwined the Party is in everyone’s daily life by making the love of Elisabeth’s life, her neighbor Joachim, a Party member. Whether or not Elisabeth believes in the Party or its methods, she takes the calling to collective work and collective responsibility seriously. Reimann doesn’t cast Elisabeth as a fervent communist or a political reformer, but she admires hard-working people like her brother and Joachim. This characterization of women in the workforce at the time aligns with much of Madarász’s research; many workers rose up in the ranks at factories across East Germany but never joined the Party. “Routine led to internalization,” Madarász writes, “not only for young people who knew no other socio-political environment but, to some extent, for everybody prepared to build a home under the very difficult political circumstances of life in a socialist dictatorship.” (38)

Reimann doesn’t depict Elizabeth as being subsumed into a collective socialist experience; she is wholly herself. This may surprise any readers expecting a dry, socialist realist novel filled with stock characters, slogans, and Marxist philosophy. Reimann makes Elisabeth’s emotional, artistic, and intellectual experience paramount. And as Madarász makes clear, the overall worker experience that Reimann depicts can be seen emerging from a broader moment in the social and political history of East Germany: 

(From) the late 1960s onwards, growing standardization and institutionalization had created more rigid structures in and around people’s lives. Young people and women, who saw their lives mapped out in detail and restrained by the needs of the state, were particularly affected. During this period both social groups were disadvantaged in their search for self-realization; this was in contrast to the 1950s and 1960s when social advancement had flourished and women had been encouraged into full-time employment and further education. … At least some of these women and young people expressed their concerns in literature or political groups, often by joining subcultures, moving into alternative lifestyles or subversive activities. These initiatives faced repression. However, a strong concern for Western financial credits prevented a return to the open terror of the 1950s. (6)

Uli’s plight

After Uli tells Elisabeth he plans to go, she presses him to stay, but he insists. “I’m a wreck. I’m sick and tired of everything…just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere…I find life in general repulsive.” (77) Elisabeth dreads being the only remaining sibling, as well as the increased scrutiny and suspicion she and her parents will likely suffer. It’s here Reimann makes the impossibility of their situation apparent. Elisabeth’s love for Uli is all-consuming, not patient or kind, but a deadlocked battle of a brother’s pride versus a sister’s pain. No one can win. When Uli insists he’ll never ask the Party for help—“I’m not getting down on my knees” (98)—Elisabeth then tells him of her clash with Ohm Heiners, an older painter and Party member at the industrial plant where she works.  

What begins as an artistic tiff exacerbated by their difference in age and gender escalates into a vengeful, misogynistic campaign soon after Elisabeth finds out Heiners is selling paintings to the plant at exorbitant prices. She calls out Heiners at the next purchasing committee meeting. He retaliates by spreading rumors about Elisabeth, which leads to Elisabeth being groped by another artist—and a visit from State Security. 

Reimann adds humor to the scene when the young Stasi officer peruses her studio. “I started thinking about any crimes I might have committed. It’s probably a natural reaction, even from a respectable rule-abiding German citizen like me, who still has Prussian respect for police and uniforms.” But she finds the nerve to ask point-blank, “Why is the Stasi interested in my paintings?” and he tells her someone said she had started a “bourgeoise faction” in her circle of artists at the factory. He assures her she’s in no trouble, just wanted to have a “cosy chat,” and Elisabeth thinks, “This is the least cosy quarter of an hour I have ever spent in a young man’s company.” (126) The humor here is notable. On one hand Reimann could have intended to make this a portrait of courage—a young female artist unafraid of the Stasi. On the other it casts the visit from the Stasi as merely an unsettling inconvenience, not a matter of life and death, if one has nothing to hide. Yet Reimann also ends the scene with Elisabeth feeling shock and anger, calling Heiners a pig.  

An echo beyond the page

As we know from the novel’s opening scene, Elisabeth fails to convince Uli to stay and resolve his troubles, and she sees no other choice than to literally run across the street to tell Joachim.

Reimann then returns to the moment she began the novel with, as Uli stands stunned before Elisabeth and Joachim, with the full weight of the GDR upon him. “He looked very small, far away and unreal, as if he’d stepped out of a mirror at the end of that dark, mile-long corridor, a tunnel I sometimes ran through in dreams.” (157)

Reimann gives the novel’s final words to the would-be traitor, Uli, who asks his sister and her boyfriend, the Party functionary, “What kind of people are you anyway?” This simple question is phrased with a sort of casual brutality in Jones’s translation, that “anyway” sending ripples back through the novel and the reading experience. For those inclined to formulate a personal answer for themselves, the question forces a reckoning with the meaning of one’s life, one’s nation, and its history, if one has the heart to face all the facts laid bare.

In the novel’s final pages Uli also asks, “What kind of state are we living in where a sister denounces her own brother?” These words trigger a vision in Elisabeth, but not of Uli and his future. Instead, she sees their older brother Konrad again, a symbol of the glamor of the West founded on genocide: 

And I felt something tighten in my chest—tender, firm flesh, strained to the point of pain—and over Uli’s shoulder that I had loved a long, long time ago, I saw Konrad’s dark face, inundated by waves of images crashing into each other: his small, busy handwriting, the shadow of the barracks when he’d lived in the camp growing darker under flashes of neon light and advertising: DEINHARD—THE SPARKLING WINE FOR YOU, and, alien and numb, the stars above the Hilton and Bankhaus and Woolworths, and the weeping Jewish woman on the stairs, ‘dispatched’ to the incinerators of Auschwitz; Konrad’s small, smooth, greedy hands on the white tablecloth and the feisty laughter of the Race Law commentators, swastikas on the wall of a synagogue (didn’t the paint drip down the masonry like blood?), deserted friends dancing around a Gold-Plated Calf, whose name was profit or company shares, or Mercedes, YOUR GUIDING LIGHT ON EVERY STREET; the cobblestones of a suffocatingly normal street between one sector sign and another, and faces, neither sad nor angry, nomads shuffling from East to West . . . (162)

Reimann’s choice to place this vision so near the end of the book, after presenting the catalogue of trauma within this family caused by the war and mass death, makes the impossibility of innocence and love for these two people resonate deeply. And it is due to Jones’s immense talents as a translator that these siblings’ humanity is rendered so fully in English, offering a clear view of their lives from Elisabeth’s perspective, as she gains a greater understanding of the chapter of her country’s history that she inhabits. 

What kind of people are we indeed? In America, Congress recently passed a clickbait resolution to denounce the horrors of socialism. Meanwhile our nation suffers from racially motivated police killings, mass murders of school children, open anti-Semitism in mass media, climate change indifference, a flood of anti-LGBTQ legislation, brutally xenophobic immigration policies, disregard at the highest level for the basic human right to reproductive health care, rampant inflation and bank bailouts, and that’s just in the past year. Yet we live on amidst this, sated somehow, with plenty of entertainment options, raising children, caring for our elders, losing neighbors and friends to intolerable conditions, hoping we are somehow the kind of people we wanted to be anyway.

Matthew Jakubowski is a fiction writer and literary critic based in Philadelphia. He has served as a fiction panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships and the Best Translated Book Award, and edited the interviews section for the translation journal Asymptote. His criticism appears in Music and Literature and The Kenyon Review Online and since 2014 he has reviewed fiction in translation for Kirkus Reviews.

Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, July 4, 2023