SIBLINGS by Brigitte Reimann

Translated by Lucy Jones

Other than being arrested and strip searched at the airport after Love Parade, my strongest memory of Berlin is the pronounced divide between “East” and “West” that remained some twenty years after the wall came down. In this classic of GDR literature, Brigitte Reimann explores that divide in real time (Siblings was first published in 1963) through the fate of one family.

Elizabeth is an idealistic artist who, because… well… Communism, works at a local coal factory. Her brother, Konrad, has already defected to the west and, we soon learn, her other brother, Uli, is planning to follow suit. Betsy believes in the Socialist cause, despite being screwed over by the artistic myopia endemic to the party and its apparatchiks. She also cannot escape her bourgeois family history - her grandfather was an industrialist whose factory was expropriated - and suffers its long-reaching consequences. Somehow, she remains a believer and, over the course of three days, tries to convince Uli to stay.

In sharp, lively prose, Reimann wrestles with a system she was desperate to love but with which she was increasingly disillusioned. Much like my own experience in Berlin, Siblings is an uncomfortable excavation of some deep, dark recesses.

#WomenInTranslationMonth

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (Tr. Lucy Jones)
Penguin Classics, 2023 (First pub. 1963)
129 pages