June 2024
Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings: Nostalgic for a different future
Brigitte Reimann’s 1963 novel Siblings, translated last year with verve and lyricism by Lucy Jones, offers up something like a fun-house mirror to Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, using the dynamics of a tightknit family to explore the confrontations young people were having in ‘the other Germany’.
For a long time, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader was the one German novel many British people had read. (One publisher described Carol Brown Janeway’s translation to me as better than the original, insisting Oprah would never have selected the novel had she read it in German). It was certainly the first German novel I read. Set largely between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, the novel examines West Germany’s attempts to confront its past through the lens of a personal relationship, namely the affair between the young Michael—a stand-in for Germany’s post-war generation—and the older Hanna, who Michael is horrified to later encounter on trial for war crimes.
Brigitte Reimann’s 1963 novel Siblings, translated last year with verve and lyricism by Lucy Jones, offers up something like a fun-house mirror to The Reader, using the dynamics of a tightknit family to explore the confrontations young people were having in ‘the other Germany’. Elisabeth and her brother Uli also accuse their parents of—at best—complicity through political apathy, but more urgently, they find themselves negotiating their relationship with the conflicting ideals and reality of the young German Democratic Republic.
When I first read Reimann’s breathless novel, I was reminded of a Christa Wolf quote: ‘At least once in your life, at the right time, you should have believed in the impossible.’ Elisabeth fervently believes in the impossible. Having been a child in the ruins of Nazi Germany, she is determined to help build a brighter future. She lives as an artist-in-residence at a factory compound where she runs art classes for the workers, and I can’t help feeling almost nostalgic for the future she believes in, one in which everyone receives not only bread but also roses. Even after a run-in with a local Party bigwig who reports her to the Stasi, Elisabeth maintains her faith in the system, convinced that this is the case of one bad apple.
Reimann’s genius is that Elisabeth’s intellectual sparring partner isn’t a convinced capitalist or anti-communist. Instead, it is her beloved brother Uli, who shares her values but not her belief in the state that is meant to deliver them. Embittered and clear-eyed after being blacklisted for his association with a defector, Uli nonetheless insists that he’ll stand up for the public ownership of industry in the western shipyard where he’s been promised a job: ‘I’m giving up on our people,’ he tells his sister, ‘but not our cause. I’ve never doubted, even in my darkest moments, that the future will be communist.’ Of course, giving Uli this conviction may have been a necessary ploy to get the novel’s manuscript through the East German censors, but it opens up space for a far more interesting argument than that of capitalism vs socialism: how do we react when the organisations we put our faith in betray their ideals? Is it better to try to change the system from within or without?
Both Schlink and Reimann unabashedly use fiction to dissect political concepts, and at points this can get tiring—some of Elisabeth’s and Uli’s more earnest discussions reminded me of what I don’t miss about student house parties (namely, discussions with earnest young men who fancy themselves communists). Nonetheless, Reimann’s examination of hope, faith and the ability to imagine different futures continue to be thought-provoking and necessary today.
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