It must have been so-called reading workers who, while renovating a block of houses in Hoyerswerda, found a bundle of papers under the stairs and realized what a treasure they were holding in their hands: between snow shovels and street brooms was a school exercise book with the first five chapters of an early work by Brigitte Reimann. “The Siblings” was published in 1963 in the GDR. The manuscript was considered lost until it turned up again at Liselotte-Herrmann-Strasse 20 last spring. Today it lies under glass in the city museum with other documents from the “Hoyerswerda find”, between letters, newspaper clippings and a typescript with corrections to the novel.
The reading and writing worker was also Brigitte Reimann’s ideal of the proletarian in socialism. In 1959 the conference on the “Bitterfelder Weg” met in the Bitterfeld Palace of Culture. In 1960, the young writer from a middle-class family followed the slogan “Grab your pen, buddy!” She moved into a new Q3A building in order to provide literary support for the development of her state and to head the “circle of writing workers” in the lignite combine. Brigitte Reimann received plenty of commissions: she wrote radio plays and the young adult book “Ankunft im Jeder” (Arrival in Everyday Life). She wrote “The Siblings” in between and on the side, but with a stronger will to work and following the words that Anna Seghers had given her ten years earlier: “Only write what you really think and experience!”
Now Aufbau, the publishing house of Anna Seghers and Brigitte Reimann, is re-launching “The Siblings” based on the sources from Hoyerswerda. It was only in the manuscript that it became apparent where the editor was also the censor. Brigitte Reimann has not been alive for 50 years. She died of cancer on February 20, 1973 in Berlin at the age of 39. “The Siblings” was her most popular book during her lifetime in the East, her legacy was her unfinished novel “Franziska Linkerhand”, which was published a year after her death. The heroine, a young architect, is involved in the construction of the new town in the lignite mining area, rubbing shoulders with the party and her own utopias. The last sentence of the first uncensored edition from 1998 reads: “Fr. had lost the duel before she even started it.”
“The Siblings” from 2023 is amazing for connoisseurs of the literary canon of the GDR because the 1963 edition was always considered a prime example of the “Green Elephants”: authors wrote extra bad things to keep their censors busy and about the nicer, more subtle and real to divert attention from subversive agencies. However, the novel about a planned escape from the republic was only marginally censored. It’s a miracle it was printed at all. As the first-person narrator, Brigitte Reimann transforms into Elisabeth “Betsy” Arendt, a youthful, naïve artist who works one day a week in a brigade and otherwise draws and paints everyday operations in a factory shack. She has two brothers, both of whom work as shipbuilders . One, Konrad, has already left the country and set foot in the West. The other, Ulrich, is at odds with his homeland and is preparing to move there. The wall has not yet been built, but it is already hovering over the two German nations like a portent.
Not only Ulrich grumbles about the GDR, its party and the system: “Socialism is a beautiful thing as long as you don’t have it in your own country.” He is a “prisoner behind a lattice of stupidity and bureaucracy”, he feels abused , he says: “Most of all, I hate you for leaving with a bad conscience!” But his sister, who feeds this conscience with her feelings, is not free from doubts either. “Why are you always making trouble for us?” her party secretary asks. Elisabeth sees the party as a “bunch of black men”.
She doesn’t think much of the painting worker either: “There were a few people who brought nothing with them except their passion and love for painting, and a few far too skilful dilettantes who copied the tearful-violet heathland and idyllic fisherman’s cottages.” It’s bleak, 1960 in the DDR. Germany, which is better in party speeches and in plenary sessions, seems too small for big words like freedom and happiness.
In the summer of 1962, Brigitte Reimann wrote in her diary: “Terrific excitement about the ‘siblings’. The manuscript with the proposed changes has been returned, the Stasi scene has been deleted, the art discussion has been deleted; everything that touches on feeling or even – horrible dictu! – reminded of bed, has been deleted, and now my beautiful story can confidently be interpreted in every Catholic girls’ boarding school. If the publisher remains rigid, I’ll go to another one.” He didn’t remain rigid. Only things that could have bothered overly simple-minded SED philistines were erased. From small car supply shortages to a comment about Betsy’s big waist.
In 1968, Reimann revised the style of “The Siblings”. It was the time of the Prague Spring and the flowering of self-doubt. The new edition is a distillation of everything she left behind in writing. A good three decades after the fall of the GDR and a West German literary debate about “attitude kitsch” in the novels by Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf and others, “The Siblings” is published with a glossary that marks milestones such as “XX. Party Congress” and words like “Kombinat” explained, from a key work of the GDR simply to a work of German post-war prose. Without east before german.
