Stay living in East Germany

When, in a country under tension, ideological oppositions are going through a family, the crisis is not simply political but emotional, especially when the disagreements oppose a brother and a sister who believed themselves inseparable. This is what A siblingspartly autobiographical novel published in 1963 by one of the most playful and fierce authors that has known East Germany (RDA, 1949-1990). So do not trust the gray cover representing a young woman in the air, because nothing is boring or gray in this exciting story, very well translated by Françoise Toraille.

Brigitte Reimann was born in 1933 near Magdeburg. She published her first texts at 22 years old and first followed the “Voie Bitterfeld”named after the congress where a new cultural policy in the GDR was announced in 1959, aimed at overcoming “The alienation between the artist and the people”. It urged, among other things, artists and writers to work in factories and support workers. This is what Reimann does in 1960. But she wasted no time in distance, as shown A siblingspublished here in its initial form, after the discovery of the original manuscript in 2021.

Defection

Elisabeth is 24 years old. She is only a year old’s younger, her beloved brother. They have always shared the same tastes, the same passions and aversions. They are less close to their older brother, Konrad, a naval engineer who decided in the 1950s to go to the west. This brother’s defection brings Elisabeth and Uli closer closer. She is a painter and follows the “Bitterfeld way” by working in a factory. He is an engineer, like his brother, but although having done brilliant studies, he does not get the expected post because he does not have his card of the ruling party, the SED. Disillusionment begins to undermine his political convictions, and when he entrusts his sister his project to go to the west too, she decides to do everything to prevent it.

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