Recent Reading: Siblings

[rocky41_7]

This review will be briefer than I wish, because I’ve got two fingers taped up (injury) and it makes typing a pain. This morning I finished book #12 from the “Women in Translation” rec list, which was Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from German by Lucy Renner Jones.

This book was published in 1963, just two years after the Berlin Wall went up, but takes place in 1960, before the Wall. It’s a book about three siblings, but really it’s a book about Germany’s future. The core of the novel is the relationship between the protagonist, Elisabeth (“Lise”) and her brother, Uli; and their views on the German state.

Lise is an adamant supporter of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; aka communist East Germany) and communism as a whole. She views it as her generation’s chance to right the injustices of a capitalistic world. Uli, on the other hand, while supportive of communism, resents the GDR for what he views as a lack of opportunity and its petty politics. At the start of the novel, Uli has decided to defect to the west, and Lise and her partner Joachim are trying to convince him to stay.

Throughout these efforts, the shadow of their eldest brother Konrad hangs over them—Konrad has already defected, years earlier, and is firmly settled in West Germany, though not without struggle.

This book is very politically philosophical. As mentioned, it’s about Uli and Lise (and Konrad), but it’s really about the future of Germany. Not yet 20 years out from the end of WWII, this is not an easy question (and there is a lot of finger-pointing to go around about who did what for the Nazis while they were in power). The book definitely leans in favor of supporting the GDR. While Uli and Konrad have their gripes about it, these are generally cast, through Lise’s viewpoint, as self-centered, or fig leaves for their real issue, which is that they cannot let go of a capitalist ownership mindset. Even where she acknowledges their complaints as valid—such as Uli’s frustration at the stunted opportunities for anyone who is not a Party member—her attitude is essentially that they need to tough it out for the sake of making the communist experiment work, or that it’s a reasonable trade off to avoid what she sees as the cruelties of capitalist West Germany.

It's the closest I’ve ever come to reading a pro-communism book (even Soviet authors I’ve read have been pretty staunchly against the Party, a la Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna), which made it interesting in that respect, as well as in how it addresses the ways the split of Germany affected individual Germans and German families.

However, the prose is very “tell not show” and this, combined with the highly philosophical nature of it, kept me at arm’s length from the characters and their lives.

Nevertheless, it’s fascinating from a historical perspective.

Comments

[feuervogel]

This sounds really interesting! If I ever get around to reading it (my TBR is scary), I'll read it in German. I also want to find some literary critique, because the GDR had restrictions on what could be published (nothing subversive), and given the time period and the very brief biography on English Wikipedia, anything too strongly anti-Party would probably not have made it out. I'd also like to read her diaries. I bet my library has them.

The SED (Party) encouraged people to write (they had writing circles in various factories and even in the Stasi, but the writers were still restricted in what they could say. Check out The Stasi Poetry Circle if you want to know more. (Riemann belonged to a workers' writing circle.)

[rocky41_7]

Oh certainly, I'm sure this passed muster because the protagonist is so pro-Party (and generally cast as the moral heart between the three siblings). The author herself is interesting; based on the blurb about her in the back, I imagine she identified somewhat with Lise, who is a state-sponsored artist paid to make paintings of the local factories.

"Stasi Poetry Circle" sounds interesting, I'll have to check that out!