Review: "Siblings" by Brigitte Reimann

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann
Translated from the German by Lucy Jones
English translation published March 2023 via Transit Books
★★★

It’s 1960 in East Germany, and Elisabeth is sure she knows what is true and what is right: the East German state. Her brother, Uli, is not so certain—and not long after the book opens, he confesses to Elisabeth that he plans to defect to the West.

This was first published in East Germany in the early 60s, which tells you a few things straight off—that the East German censors approved it, for one, and that it will thus maintain a position that was palatable to those censors. I didn’t read up on the book or the author until after I’d finished reading the book itself, and I have to say that the commentary on the book is perhaps more interesting than the book itself. This vivid and intriguing novel, writes John Self for The Guardian, published in 1963, is a largely autobiographical story by an author who had a short, eventful life, marrying four times and declaring her intent to live “30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones”. She made it to 39, dying in 1973 from cancer believed to have been caused by inhalation of pollutants in her role as a state-sponsored artist at an industrial plant.

The primary relationship of the book, between Elisabeth and Uli, is an odd one, more than a little uncomfortable for its not-quite-incestuous undertones. Elisabeth loves her brother above all other men and defers to his judgement when seeking out new conquests; they take it in turns to be jealous over each other’s relationships and to make odd comments about, e.g., how good people of the other sex smell. I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed their relationship, or Elisabeth’s character (she’s a bit shouty), but I’m fascinated by a representation of East Germany in which the narrator believes (or wants to believe) in the state and does not want to leave.

How much of this is autobiographical requires some guesswork, of course, but it’s not hard to think that Elisabeth is a fairly close stand-in for Reimann. She began writing the book after her brother defected—in the early days of East Germany, when the Berlin Wall was yet more a concept than a fact—and so too does Elisabeth face a factory job and a brother (two, actually) who thinks there is a better future to be found elsewhere. Elisabeth, who is something of an artist in residence at a small-town factory, clearly thinks herself one of the proletariat but is still perhaps too bourgeois for the state. (It does not, perhaps, occur to her that as an artist in residence she is in a very different position than, say, the workers who have been assigned to do backbreaking manual labour at this factory.) And yet that never bothers Elisabeth: she is perfectly ready to shout at her bosses (they are in the Communist Party; Elisabeth was not, and nor was Reimann) when she thinks they are in the wrong, and she has a pretty rosy view of what taking her concerns to higher-ups will lead to. And, of course: because this is a book written by a staunch supporter of East Germany and approved by the East German state, she finds that she is more or less in the right.

Joanna Biggs notes in a New Yorker article that this translation was done after the uncensored manuscript was found by chance last spring [in 2022], which does make me wonder how much this version differs with the German version published in the 1960s. I have to wonder, too, how differently Reimann might have ended up viewing things had she written this later, after the physical Berlin Wall went up and separation was starker, and/or had she not died so young. Would she still have been championing the East German state had she written this in, say, the early 1980s? It’s impossible to know. I imagine, though, that her choice to give her narrator two brothers—one lost to the materialism of West Germany, one yet redeemable in Elisabeth’s socialist eyes—is reflective of how Reimann viewed the reality of her own brother’s choice versus what could have been.

I’m now curious about Franziska Linkerhand, which was written later and might answer some of my questions, but I don’t think it’s been translated, and realistically…I’m not curious enough to struggle through 600+ pages in German, lazy member of the bourgeoisie that I am.