Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 1974/1998
Franziska Linkerhand is narrated with a penetrating intensity by the eponymous narrator, the voice shifting constantly and easily back and forth between the first person and the third, as Franziska Linkerhand writes both deeply personally (in the first person) and also from a more distant and coolly analytic perspective (in the third person) -- an effective technique. The shifts in voice are not systematic -- chapter by chapter or anything like that -- but rather flow back and forth into each other; the same goes for time, as the novel is presented roughly chronologically but also shifts back and forth, past mixing in constantly with present-day (as well as a dose of looking ahead: "Ich sehe sie nur unscharf, die sieben oder zehn Jahre ältere Frau, die meinen Namen trägt, aber ich kann sie als stumme Figur einsetzen und mitspielen lassen" ('I see her only indistinctly, that woman, seven or ten years older, who bears my name, but I can bring her in to play along as a silent figure') she imagines at one point, already anticipatorily: 'curious, what she experienced in those seven or ten years'). Her boss observes (or complains) -- accurately --: "Sie wollen alles, und Sie wollen alles sofort" ('You want everything, and you want everything immediately') and this attribute also colors the entire narrative, which seems, at every turn, to want to capture and convey everything at once, constantly (yes, giving it a somewhat exhausting quality).
Franziska Linkerhand is autobiographically-tinged, with Franziska slightly younger than the author, and dedicating herself to architecture rather than writing (although Reimann's own self comes through so strongly that Franziska too can't keep herself from trying to write as well). Franziska grows up in a genteel upper middle-class household, her father a publisher and she very bookish from a young age. The novel begins with a young Franziska and the collapse of Germany at the end of the Second World War; among the memorable experiences are those of a neighbor family's murder-suicide as the Russians close in -- Franziska remembering seeing the bodies lying there (and later uncertain whether she had actually glimpsed them (before being pulled away by her much older brother), or just imagined seeing them from the accounts she picked up around her).
The family manages reasonably well in the early days of the German Democratic Republic -- with infusions from holdings in the other Germany -- but her parents struggle with the collapse of the world as they know it; eventually they flee to the west, unable and uninterested in the building of a new society -- a programme Franziska, on the other hand, can believe in. Though the parents are largely distant figures, they certainly shaped Franziska; while always strong-willed, she was nevertheless formed under her mother's very strong hand -- and received a strong grounding in European culture, especially music and literature, in growing up in that environment. So also, for example, in later years, as the political divide increases, her father doesn't talk politics with her, but rather 'only about books, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Saint-Beuve'.
Franziska marries very young -- an escape, too, from the in many ways stifling home atmosphere --, but the marriage doesn't stand a chance, the class differences between her and Wolfgang simply too great. He's never even read a book, and admits that when he tries to, as a favor to her, he falls asleep after two pages; the chasm between intellectual Franziska and worker Wolfgang is too deep to ever be bridged.
Franziska studies architecture, her mentor the highly regarded Reger, who takes her under his wing -- but she insists on going her own way. She chooses not to continue assisting with the prestigious commissions Reger is involved with and instead takes a posting in the appropriately named Neustadt ('New City'), a new city being built from the ground up, a grand, large-scale urban-planning project. (Neustadt is a thinly-veiled Hoyerswerda, where Reimann also went to work.) She is met there by another representative of the old-style guard -- but it turns out it is his last day there; the new boss is the young father of four Schafheutlin, temperamentally ill-suited for a leadership position. Typically, too, despite the nature of the project he heads, he does not live on-site, but rather in a house an hour away (for the kids' sake, of course ...).
Schafheutlin isn't happy to have to deal with a (prize) student of the legendary Reger's -- his own experiences with the master were not the best, either -- but Franziska immerses herself with a passion in her work. She is completely on board with the programme, wanting the project to succeed -- though it does wear on her that she is given tasks that could easily be accomplished by someone with less training, as her own talents are clearly being wasted here. Nevertheless, she is as pro-active as she can be -- setting up an office to help new tenants furnish their homes, for example -- and a somewhat friendlier relationship with Schafheutlin eventually develops.
Franziska's zest for life is extreme; she is impetuous and passionate, and doesn't hold back, in word or deed. As the novel's opening makes clear, her passion is also very much of the physical sort -- the first sentence of the novel:
Ach Ben, Ben, wo bist du vor einem Jahr gewesen, wo vor drei Jahren ?
[Oh, Ben, Ben, where were you a year ago, three years ago ?]
She is fairly uninhibited, drawn to men -- and almost always full of great longing. Ben, as she calls the man she comes to know in Neustadt, is the ideal she reaches for, but there are other men along the way -- not least her protective brother, a nuclear scientist, who, however, is only an occasional visitor. Ben is, or tries to be, a writer -- writing a novel (or rather: 'what we are calling a novel, provisionally') -- and eventually recounting his prison experiences in the wake of the 1956 events in Hungary, part of the general disillusioning with the system that Franziska encounters.
When originally published in 1974, parts of Franziska Linkerhand were cut and edited -- notably the mentions and discussion of suicide, something that comes to the fore as the story progresses and that troubles Franziska. She learns that there are two suicides or suicide attempts weekly in Neustadt -- a sad reflection on this place that she wants to see as a city of hope and the future. (So too she is shocked when there is a rape in the city, something she had thought (or at least hoped) inconceivable in this new world order.)
Reger's warning words when she announces her plans to work in Neustadt -- "Sie sind erledigt, Dame. Wer sich in die Provinz begibt, kommt darin um" ('You're done for, madam. He who goes into the provinces will perish there') -- come to take on a whole new meaning. Franziska is such a strong and strong-willed character that she can not be crushed by events and experiences, but she sees the heavy toll around her. She is an optimist, who tries to make the best of things and manages mostly very carefreely, but she is also hyperaware of her surroundings and those around her, as Franziska Linkerhand is intensely penetrating, to an almost unbearable degree.
Franziska Linkerhand is a novel one can call staggering, not least in its breadth and depth, weight and range -- and its driven narrator. At one point Franziska admits that:
Mein Bruder sagt, ich bin neugierig wie ein Affe: Lauf und sieh, was es Neues gibt.
[My brother says that I am as curious as a monkey: run and see what's new.]
Franziska is constantly seeking out -- experience and understanding. But there's also an astute constant reckoning, with everything, at every turn. Emotional and even capricious, Franziska is remarkably self-confident; she is aware of her many faults, of character and actions, but she hardly ever harbors any real doubt -- and she always propels herself forward. She's sharply observant and gets to the quick -- not least in her self-examination. It's a remarkable performance - breathless and dense, too, but almost always (and constantly) also deeply engrossing.
Franziska Linkerhand is also an unfinished novel, though not an unpolished one. Arguably, much of it is almost over-polished -- though that also makes the short final chapter all the more melancholily effective, a last breath of sorts, too.
Franziska Linkerhand is one of the highlights of East German fiction -- and all the more powerful in its uncut version, finally published in 1998. And, oh, what an incredible talent Reimann was, a terrible loss to German literature that she died so young. - M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ddr/reimannb_FL.htm
Brigitte Reimann, I Have No Regrets: Diaries,
1955-1963, Trans. by Lucy Jones, Seagull Books,
2019
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I’ve liked too many men.
Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann’s collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author’s love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state’s call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers. Her diaries and letters provide a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching, and bitter—but above all life-affirming—they offer an unparalleled insight into what life was like during the first decades of the GDR.
“Reimann left behind a string of novels and several years’ worth of diaries that shed vivid light on life in East Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s. This volume picks up her story shortly after a suicide attempt following a miscarriage.” - Charlie Connelly
"Her diary entries are interesting reading, not only for those interested in knowing more about Reimann, but as documents of events and personalities involved in the literary history of the first decades of the GDR." - Judith H. Cox
"(A) welcome introduction to Reimann's work. (...) There is passionate self-reflection, political insight and a fierce commitment to the art of fiction on practically every page" - Ian Ellison, Times Literary Supplement
Anna Seghers, already an established writer with an international reputation before the founding of the German Democratic Republic, was very much the grande dame of literature in East Germany, but the generation that followed her included some of the most significant German writers of the second half of the twentieth century, notably the trio of women novelist Christa Wolf (1929-2011), Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), and Brigitte Reimann (1933-1973). Wolf is well-translated into English (and many other languages), and by Morgner we at least have one of the great post-war German novels, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura, but Reimann's fiction remains untranslated into English (and under-translated into most other languages, save Spanish and the languages of the former Communist bloc), despite an impressive body of work that includes one landmark novel (the seminal Ankunft im Alltag (1961; 'Arriving in Everyday Life')) and one masterpiece, the posthumously published Franziska Linkerhand (1974).
With the publication of her diaries and much of her correspondence (including a volume of letters to and from Christa Wolf), Reimann -- a shooting star in the GDR, who enjoyed both critical and popular success there from a young age -- has had somewhat of a renaissance in Germany over the past two decades; it's unclear whether this is the best volume with which to introduce her to English-speaking readers (as opposed to her actual fiction ...), but it does at least give a good sense of the woman, and of the East German situation and conditions in which she worked (and, while often critical of these, it should be noted that she remained generally supportive, working within rather than in opposition to the system, certainly in the years covered here, and did not seriously entertain the thought of, for example, going abroad, to the other Germany (as one close family member, her brother ("a muddle-head") Lutz, did)). These diaries do, however, certainly reveal and display her fundamental forthrightness, which similarly marked her fiction, making for an unvarnished picture of life in the workers' state that, in its focus on the essential-human, nevertheless doesn't neatly fit the picture readers might expect. (Indeed, one (main) reason her work was underestimated in the Federal Republic during her lifetime (and for some time after) surely was because this was an unfamiliar, much more intimate-personal approach to political writing (indeed, an expansion of the concept) than West German readers could conceive of, a different take than the then-(completely-)prevailing intellectualized-theoretical (on the one hand) or (all too explicitly) socialist realist (on the other) ones.)
The diaries cover the years 1955 to 1963. Reimann was still very young when they begin -- she had just turned 22 a bit over a month earlier -- and unfortunately these are the earliest surviving parts of the record: in 1959 (as she notes here) she burnt her diaries from 1947 to 1953 ("all 20 of them [...] I've burnt my childhood, my youth, and all the memories I don't want to recall any more"); briefly she holds back more recent ones:
I've only kept the last ones from '53 on, at least for now. Even though they contain the dirtiest and unhappiest chapters: my doubt and desperation about our cause, my first steps as a writer, my marriage to Günter, objections to his drinking, my adultery and sickening, deceptive maneuverings, decadence and tedium, misplaced illusions, nights spent agonizing over books never published, weeks and months spent in perpetual drunkenness, waking up in strangers' beds -- quandaries, wrong turns, mistakes, cheap ways of getting high ...
The respite is only temporary (albeit also only partial):
I've just decided to throw away the books from '53-'54 after all. Love stories from an overstretched imagination, away with it all !
Still, she held onto four years worth of diaries, from 1955 on to that point -- covering also much of the activity she describes. Gone, however, are also the accounts of important markers left unmentioned in what she is ridding herself of: two years spent as a teacher and -- surely more significantly -- the January 1954 (essentially still)birth of a child, and her subsequent suicide attempt. And while she later does repeatedly long for a child of her own, this past is never delved into at all closely in the pages of the surviving diary (as published) -- a closed book.
The burning of the older diaries leads to the then-still-just-twenty-six-year-old summing up well enough:
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men.
Men do figure prominently, beginning with first husband Günter Domnik; the diaries only cover the period to 1963, but in that period she will already have married her second husband and fallen in love with the man who would go on to be her third. Reimann was quick to fall passionately in love -- an occurrence so frequent that she refers to her: "many three-day loves", raptures that were inevitably reciprocated by the men taken by the apparently completely bewitching beauty. She feels some Catholic guilt, but on the whole can't seem to help herself -- and there seems to be at least a playful note of pride in her observation that: "Wherever I am, I cause disturbance, mayhem and trouble". She claims some shyness -- and occasionally admits to being in overwhelmed awe (such as when she encounters Anna Seghers) -- but clearly can and does effortlessly wrap men around her little finger; we only get her perspective here, but in this like practically all other regards there doesn't seem to be much dissembling.
The opening entry, from August, 1955, marks a small new beginning, Reimann explaining that she and husband Günter have broken up -- and that she has to start a new diary because he took the old one ("He wants to use it against me in the divorce"); although she gets the older diaries back, she does -- as noted -- eventually destroy them all up to this point, so clearly she sees this as turning point. The collapse of her marriage and break from her husband would seem to be an appropriate cæsura -- but in fact it's not quite as hard and complete as initially suggested: the marriage putters on, in some form, for a while: "Günter still comes, and I can't always refuse him", and when he is arrested in late 1957 for "resisting state authority" (he beat up a policeman) and she vows to herself that for the six months he gets sentenced : "I won't cheat on him. I can bear being without a man" (spoiler: she can't). She meets Siegfried Pitschmann -- "one of these people who'll end up committing suicide or going insane, I'm sure. And what a mighty talent !" --, the man who would go on to become her second husband, and it is only after Günter is released from prison that she really breaks from him, some three years into this diary -- though at that point he has some difficulties letting go.
Somewhat confusingly, Reimann generally refers to Siegfried as Daniel (or Dan) -- having decided that: "that awful young hero's name Siegfried doesn't suit this sensitive, tender, almost fragile Daniel at all". He is also a writer, and the two of them live the struggling-artist life together, eventually getting married and moving to the rapidly expanding industrial town of Hoyerswerda, where they both had positions as sorts of writers-in-residence, actively taking part in industrial work, but also providing education for their fellow workers while giving them some time to write.
Reimann and Siegfried/Daniel's relationship is passionate but difficult, as Reimann is easily led to stray. She acknowledges her (flesh-)weakness -- indeed, her diaries get her in trouble again as Siegfried reads them (even after she has said she has gone to pains to hide them ...) -- but also seems sincere about her deep feelings for Siegfried -- and, often, for the others ..... At one point she explains:
I just like being adored, or even loved; I need to feel validated, that's almost all it's about.
But that doesn't seem entirely accurate; validation is important to her -- in her writing, as well -- but she's also very confident, about both her abilities and, generally, herself. Still, she expresses annoyance at being a lust-object:
I'm damned never to find friendship because of my gender; men are incapable of separating body from soul. Not one of them understands that I want to be loved for my intelligence, my talent or, to use that word again, my soul.
The relationships she describes, however, suggest she's wrong: men seem quite obviously attracted to her for those very qualities, and a fierce independent streak. Beyond that, she seems equally incapable of separating body and soul as she falls into one passionate affair after another. One occasion where she turns the man away leads to some introspection, pointing towards some of her confusions:
Kaufmann tried to seduce me (God that makes it sound as if I'm a shocked seventeen-year-old kid). Okay, he wanted to sleep with me. [...] He tried it on and, what the hell, has something to offer -- a man if ever there was one. Now he sits there, shaking his head, looks at me and doesn't understand what's going on. I don't either by the way. It would definitely have been a pleasure with him and it did me good to hear his endearments, and I returned his kisses, but I can't go any further. [...] An aroused man brings on a physical aversion, something close to disgust; I'm turned on, yes, but repelled at the same time, and in a flash I'm sober and very clear-sighted, and then I lash out, and they stand there, troubled and disappointed, and think I'm abnormal and say that I'm not a real woman. The path to these affections that I open up -- not always innocently -- is only ever through a meeting of minds, work, conversation, never just physical attraction.
Interestingly, for someone who sleeps around so much, Reimann doesn't make particularly much out of sex itself; it's only in late 1963, for example, that she specifically mentions a deeper physical pleasure: "I have discovered my body and the bliss of physical love with Jon" (whom she left Siegfried for, and who would become husband number three)
As intense as her relationships -- both the brief and the more extended ones -- are, Reimann throws herself into her work with similar abandon (and at one point insists: "Work is the only thing that counts"). In 1956 already -- she's just twenty-three -- she notes:
On the outside, everything's going as well as it possibly could. I have a good husband, have a book published, have contracts for new books, have money, have a comfy room, and I have the looks (and can dress) that I have men aplenty -- for a day or a week or longer, whatever takes my fancy. But in truth ? My ambition is unstoppable, I want to write good books, have fame -- will I ever have it ? [...] I'm deeply unhappy.
So too, at the beginning of this diary -- and to differentiate it from the earlier ones ? -- she explains:
This diary is not dedicated to my adulterous escapades; it's not about love and liaisons -- I want to record whatever happens to me on my journey to becoming a writer. Yes, I write -- some already refer to me as a writer -- but inside I feel I'm a dead loss, a literary nobody; I want to write good things, to work, to dedicate my whole life to this one aim; to help people through literature, and fulfil my duties, the duties we share towards the rest of humanity.
Reimann does seem to believe in the experiment that the GDR appeared to be, and the role of the artist in it -- even if she is repeatedly disappointed by the prevailing conservatism. When her brother Lutz takes his family to West Germany in 1960 she wonders:
Families torn apart, conflicts between brothers and sister -- what a literary subject ! Why doesn't anyone tackle it, why doesn't anyone write a topical book ? Fear ? Inability ? I don't know.
East Germany took culture and culture-in-the-workplace seriously, and Reimann was active in this both on the local and then national level -- though enthusiasm among writers seems to have sometimes been limited, as she describes when she settled in in Hoyerswerda: "Last week, the worker writers' circle was set up. Of the twenty invited, only four turned up; none with any potential, I imagine". Amusingly -- and demonstrating her sharp eye -- Reimann in this instance doesn't dismiss all the would-be writers that show up after all:
Only little Volker Braun, who got his school-leaving certificate and then worked on the factory floor for four years, seems to be gifted. He reminds me of my Ulli-brother -- in every respect a late developer.
The 'late developer' Braun (Rubble Flora, etc.) would, of course, go on to become one of the leading German poets (and a significant writer of prose as well) -- and is still publishing, almost sixty years (!) after Reimann wrote this. - M.A.Orthofer Read more here
Brigitte Reimann was an East German writer and an avid chronicler of her own life through her diaries. In this new book we follow her as she becomes a successful writer, but at a turbulent time for her and the GDR in the years between 1955 and 1963.
Reimann was like many people in their 20s; too much drink, too many men, and too much doubt about her future as a writer. The diaries are unusual for this period in detailing her affairs with numerous men. It seems a very modern book in that sense – reflecting a present day obsession (now played out in social media) with the importance of self. She says “The diary is not dedicated to my adulterous escapades; it’s not about love and liaisons – I want to record whatever happens to me on my journey to becoming a writer.”
But self and navel gazing was not what was expected of writers by the GDR state. Reimann knew this, and in the diary says, . “I want to dedicate my whole life to this one aim;to help people through literature, and fulfil my duties, the duties we share with humanity”.
Her first two books were rejected by the publishers on the grounds they were counter revolutionary, decadent, morbid, bizarre and this took a toll on Reimann. “It was a damned hard blow, and it took me a long time to recover.”
Reimann was regularly visited by the Stasi. She had spoken up for writers who had been persecuted by the State and was not surprised when they turned up at her door. Forced to sign a statement of secrecy and adopt the code name “Caterine”, she agreed to pass on “legitimate complaints about errors and inadequacies to the Stasi so they can take remedial action.” Reimann refused to name names, but she still believed in the socialist state. “When compared with capitalism, it represents a higher development, a progression of mankind.”
But when her husband is imprisoned she has to call on the Stasi for help, whilst knowing that there will be a price to be paid. It is not clear from the diaries what this is, as she continues to rail against the authorities and is given a job working in a refinery, as well as being a writer in residence.
With her second husband, Daniel, Reimann moves to Hoyerswerda, a new town, to take up their jobs in the refinery. They are expected to work in the laboratory, as well as taking on responsibility for a group of workers in a workers writers’ circle. She says; “The plant is starting to squeeze their money’s worth out of them. We’ve been reading manuscripts, giving receptions for writing workers, having hour long discussions; now we’re style-editing a brochure.” This is on top of working on the shop floor, including grinding valves which seems to bring her more satisfaction. “Felt wonderfully strong in overalls and with dirty hands-a new feeling, slightly exuberant.”
Reimann confesses to being “middle class”, no doubt brought on by working side by side with manual workers. Inspired by her time there she writes a classic of socialist realism Arrival in Everyday Life, the story of three young people who postpone their studies to work in a plant in Hoyerswerda.
But her successful career is dominated by the politics of the Cold War. Her brother escapes the country, the Wall goes up, and the political atmosphere for writers depresses Reimann. The diaries are revealing for her continued affairs with men and her failed marriages – she marries four times – excessive drinking and much personal unhappiness. She died in 1973 of cancer, aged just 40.
My copy of I Have No Regrets did not include an introduction, and so I do not know who agreed to publish the diaries. Maybe they should have been edited as I did feel the reader was given too much information about her love life. I felt sorry for her that she had no close female friend with whom she could have shared the doubts and depressions of her life. Reading the diaries without being able to read Reimann’s novels is also a problem and hopefully the publishers will now consider publishing them. - lipstick socialist
Edith Piaf, whose celebrated anthem the title of this book evokes, died in the same year that Brigitte Reimann’s diaries end. While this of course is coincidental, reading these diaries does leave one with the impression that the singer’s vivacity, passion and pragmatism have been expressed by a writer. Almost every day when Reimann wakes up (often after a night of heavy drinking), when she starts on a new writing project or a new diary entry, or when a new man enters her life, she sweeps away her past. In November 1959, she records how she burnt her earlier diaries, spanning 1947 to 1953. I Have No Regrets contains no mention of the premature birth and death of her child in 1954 or Reimann’s subsequent suicide attempt. It does, on the other hand, contain many fresh starts.
In a letter to Reimann in February 1969, Christa Wolf, approaching her fortieth birthday and wondering whether their generation of East German writers would ever finish the work they set out to do, asks “What have we done by the time we reach forty? My goodness, there’s no sugar-coating it … Who will ask about us later?” Not only is this a tragically prescient question given Reimann’s death from cancer just a few years later, in 1973, at the age of thirty-nine; it also prefigures her relative lack of international renown today. Her work deserves a much wider reading public outside Germany, where she remains best known for her ambiguously autobiographical final novel Franziska Linkerhand. Unfinished on her death, this anarchic and assertive book was nonetheless published in censored form the following year, then in full in 1998. As recently as January 2019 it was newly adapted for the stage at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In spite of Reimann’s early death, she left behind fourteen works that were published between 1953 and 1974 as well as two unfinished novels published in one volume entitled Das Mädchen auf der Lotusblume (“The girl on the lotus flower”) in 2003 (none are currently available in English). The eight years of irregular diary entries that make up I Have No Regrets, edited in German by Angela Drescher and now translated into English by Lucy Jones, are a welcome introduction to Reimann’s work.
We begin with an entry composed in her hometown of Burg bei Magdeburg in the former GDR after the dog days of… - Ian Ellison
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/i-have-no-regrets-brigitte-reimann-review-ian-ellison/
Brigitte Reimann, It All Tastes of Farewell:
Diaries, 1964–1970, Trans. by Steph
Morris, Seagull Books; New ed., 2021
It All Tastes of Farewell is a frank account of one woman’s life and loves in 1960s East Germany. As a writer, Brigitte Reimann could not help but tell a compelling story, and that is born out here in her diaries, which are gripping as any novel. She recorded only what mattered: telling details, emotional truths, and political realities. Never written for publication and first published in full in German only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these diaries offer a unique record of what it felt like to live in a country that no longer exists, was represented for years largely through Cold War propaganda, and is still portrayed in fairy-tale Stasi dramas. Here we get a sense of lived experience, as if Doris Lessing or Edna O’Brien had been allowed in with their notebooks. This volume continues where her earlier book of diaries, I Have No Regrets, left off, in 1964. It sees Reimann grow wistful and at times bitter, as her love life, her professional life, and her health all suffer. Yet throughout she retains a lively appetite for new experiences and a dedication to writing. Finally she finds security in a surprising new love, and although she died soon after this volume ends, the novel she was writing was to become a much-read cult hit after her death.
A remarkable document from a time and place that we still struggle to see clearly, It All Tastes of Farewell is unforgettable, a last gift from an essential writer.
It All Tastes of Farewell is the second volume of Brigitte Reimann's diaries, following on I Have No Regrets and covering the years 1964 to 1970. The focus here is on her slow progress with her novel Franziska Linkerhand -- a novel that was then only published posthumously, in 1974 (and unabridged only in 1998; it has still not been translated into English) -- while her personal life remains tumultuous: another marriage (to Hans Kerschek, called Jon here) goes south here, and by the end of these diaries she is preparing for her fourth marriage, to Dr. Rudolf Burgartz (ten years her junior), and increasingly debilitated by the cancer that would kill her, aged only thirty-nine, in 1973. It is also a time of political change in the German Democratic Republic, any hope for a continuing turn towards liberalization already dim by the mid-1960s and finally completely dashed by the Prague Spring.
Reimann is well-settled in the model city of Hoyerswerda at the beginning of these diaries, but much of the strain on her marriage certainly comes from her husband often having to work elsewhere, while Reimann needs companionship and particularly enjoys male company. (The GDR literary industry, which she was very much part of, was male-dominated, but even beyond this it is noteworthy how few female friends she has (or at least mentions having), and how little time she spends in female company; Christa Wolf is among the few women she feels she can (and does) turn to, but they only rarely actually meet.) These diaries also cover the time of her move to Neubrandenburg, a transition to a somewhat more traditionally metropolitan setting.
Reimann's diaries are an interesting outlet: a record of events along with some reflection, confessional but not a comprehensive outpouring. She mentions that there are things that she can not bring herself to write about, for example, -- though also admits using the diaries as a place to record things she doesn't feel she can write or otherwise share with acquaintances -- but she also only turns to it intermittently, with days and weeks often passing between entries. In 1966 there's a falling-off, months between some of the entries -- even as she notes, in one catch-up post, that life has been particularly eventful; it's well into 1968 before she really picks things up again.
Through it all, there's a surprising evenness to how she relates events. Only very rarely are there any sort of outbursts, and even as she presents herself as a very emotional person, easily carried away, her accounts remain calm, almost neutral. So also major events, such as her receiving the Heinrich Mann Prize, a leading literary prize, are presented with only a bit of reflection -- and, even more remarkably, she deals with her cancer diagnosis simply and matter-of-factly. This consistent approach is all the more striking when compared to how she describes herself: 9 August 1968 she gets the benign results of a medical procedure and admits to incredible worry and now relief -- a rare use of an exclamation point making it all the clearer how great her relief is:
Gott, war ich glücklich ! Monatelang diese Tagsüber verdrängte Angst, ich hätte vielleicht Krebs...
[God, was I happy ! All these months the fear I repressed during the daytime that I might have cancer...]
(Typically, the earlier entries in fact give no hint how much this had been troubling her -- though admittedly this is from a period when she wasn't writing much in her diary (perhaps because of these fears ?).)
As readers familiar with her biography are all too aware, the respite was short-lived: on 11 September she gets the bad news: she has cancer and her right breast has to be removed. It's not even the first thing she mentions in that day's entry, and beyond noting that it came as a 'terrible shock' she only devotes a few lines to it. So also after the operation, she devotes only a few lines to it -- and, beyond the annoyance at the weakness in her arm from the procedure and what they cut away, it barely rates a mention afterwards. Admittedly, again, there are long gaps between entries here, but the impression here and throughout is of a person who just wants to -- and admirably manages to -- move on. (Of course, in some respects, such as her more intimate relationships with men, she moves on almost shockingly easily, or even desperately.)
Illness -- back problems as well as the cancer -- and hospital stays come more to the fore at the later stages, but Reimann doesn't wallow much, complaining mostly about the inconvenience and being kept from writing.
Writing remains central to Reimann, and it is her Franziska Linkerhand-project that consumes her; it is one of the few stable elements in her life -- though also marked by instability as she often struggles with parts of it. The (shifting) political situation complicate matters too, with a constant give and take with the authorities, as also the early chapters of the novel circulate and she gets reactions to them; by 1968 her disillusionment with the system and her annoyance with her own self-censorship have come much more to the fore. She finds her earlier books limited, but also notes that some of what she wants to express is untenable in the society and political system she operates in:
Ich möchte schreiben, nur so kann ich existieren, nur, mein Gott, was ich schreiben möchte ... Ich werde es tun, Arbeit für die Schublade. Das Buch allerdings muß fertig werde, das enthält wenigstens eine Spur dessen, was ich zu sagen habe
[I have to write, that's the only way I can exist, only, my God, what I want to write ... I will do it, works for the drawers. The book, however, has to get done; that at least contains a trace of what I have to say.]
Often emotional, especially in her relationships -- things get way out of hand on a number of occasions --, Reimann nevertheless has her writing to turn back to, the foundation that is ultimately her bedrock even as all else is inconstant. As a melancholy Reimann admits at one point, getting at the crux of her difficulties with men:
Ich sagte: der Schriftsteller is stärker als die traurige Frau. Ja, sagte er, bei dir siegt immer der Schriftsteller.
[I said: the writer is stronger than the sad woman. Yes, he said, it's always the writer in you that comes out on top.]
As to the writing itself, the contrast with Christa Wolf is revealing. As Reimann herself notes, she respects Wolf's style but it isn't for her; she finds Wolf's writing: 'essayistic -- I mean: she does not fabulate' ("sie erzählt nicht"). Or, in blunter terms, as Reimann quotes then-still Aufbau Verlag editor Klaus Gysi about the difference between Reimann and Wolf's books: "Die Reimann weiß wenigstens, wie ein Mann riecht" ('Reimann at least knows what a man smells like'). Reimann obviously quotes the words approvingly -- and even says she's 'touched' by the remark -- and, while a very raw way of putting it, it does indeed peg the two authors perfectly.
Politically active -- in the writers' organizations that played such a significant role in East Germany -- Reimann has increasing difficulties reconciling her fundamental belief in the workers' state with the realities of the regime. In 1965 already she worries about a coming ice-age: "Überall herrscht Konfusion, die Stücke und Bücher werden jetzt en masse sterben" ('There's confusion everywhere, plays and books will die en masse now'), and she is devastated by the events in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. As events unfold in Czechoslovakia, she is is incredibly frustrated:
Ich habe geweint: unseretwegen, über uns, aus Zorn. Zornig auch gegen mich selbst -- Mitmacher, Schweiger.
[I cried: for our sakes, and about us, out of fury. Fury also against myself -- fellow traveler, not speaking up.]
As with everything else, however, she is also able to move on: politics and her disillusionment feature, and there are consequences to her reactions to the Prague Spring, but she does not obssess or indeed let it affect her day-to-day life any more than it must (given the role of the authorities over so many aspects of her life -- from housing to publication). It's not indifference -- Reimann has and continues to express strong opinions -- but, just as with the cancer, she won't let it dominate her life. She manages to compartmentalize this too.
Only men drift constantly into her life, and add to her turmoil. She likes to drink (a lot), and though she often withdraws she also enjoys those long nights in the company of others. And those intimate nights in the company of others. Even she seems bemused by her messy casual relationships -- though admirably there's very little sense of shame here. More problematic are the deeper relationships, such as with husband 'Jon', which of course suffers from their frequent separation and their lust (he too has an affair).
The presentation of the material is well done -- with the one caveat that there are a lot ellipses, material not included because of repetition or for legal reasons. A more than thirty-page chronology of (world and local) events; a summary chronology of Reimann's life; sixty pages of helpful endnotes; as well as a names-index provide most of the supporting material readers need. While much is only addressed fleetingly, the diary does touch on much of the East German cultural activity as well as the politics in these times; if not an ideal primary text on these, the diaries nevertheless are useful complementary material for anyone interested in this period and subject-matter.
Reimann is a fascinating figure -- an obsessed writer, enthusiastic reader ("Wochenlang Thomas Mann gelesen" ('reading Thomas Mann for weeks on end') she notes after finally getting the complete works; "Ich kann über nichts anderes mehr sprechen, das wird schon manisch" ('I can't speak of anything else any more; I'm completely obsessed')) -- even as she worries, late on, briefly about no longer reading as much -- hard drinker (and smoker, which passes almost unnoticed in those times when it was so ubiquitous that it barely rates a mention), phenomenally active and involved. She presents herself as very emotional -- mentioning incredibly heated arguments and long crying-jags -- yet the diary-entries are very controlled: she is almost always able to step back in her accounts, though she also doesn't convey a sense of cold distance in doing so. The absence of self-pity is welcome -- and, given some of what she goes through, quite remarkable. Obviously, the entries only form part of a picture -- but it's a rich part, and there's a great deal of fascinating incidental information to go along with it.
Perhaps difficult to appreciate without at least some sense of East German (literary) life in the 1960s, It All Tastes of Farewell is nevertheless both fascinating and gripping (not least, sadly, in the reader's awareness of what's coming, a life that will be cut short). - M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ddr/reimannb_TB_2.htm
https://www.brigittereimann.de/
Brigitte Reimann, Das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume
Das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume collects two unfinished novels by Brigitte Reimann, Joe und das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume ('The Girl on the Lotus Flower'; written in 1957) and Wenn die Stunde ist, zu sprechen ... ('When it's the hour to speak ...'; 1956). (A more complete variation of the latter has now been published as Die Denunziantin (2022).) They are very different works, the first based closely on personal experience (and written in the first person), the second much more an attempt at engaging with the political situation in an East Germany beginning to try to build a socialist state, but both already show a clearly talented writer at work. Though unfinished, and at times somewhat simplistic, they are by no means unpolished and much of the writing is already very strong.
Echoes of Reimann's early diary, I Have No Regrets can be found throughout Joe und das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume. The young narrator -- just twenty-two -- is named Maria and a painter, though several of the men in her circle are writers (and while she doesn't speak much of her own art-making, she does note that: "Wenn ich Schriftsteller wär wie Joe und Hendrik, mir wär nicht bange um Stoff für Bücher" ('If I were a writer like Joe and Hendrik, I wouldn't worry about finding material for books').) She writes from an artist retreat, where her room is next to that of Joe, a writer more than a decade older than her (and married with two children), whom she has become intimately involved with. (Joe's real name is Walter Z., but she has a habit -- as Reimann herself did -- of giving the men in her life new names, and for her he is Joe, short for Johannes; he in turn calls her Maja (the only one who is allowed to do so).)
Maria receives word that a friend of hers, the sculptor she calls Heiliger Georg ('Holy George') has sustained serious injuries to his eyes, with much of the story then recounting first her time in the atelier she fled for this retreat, where Georg was part of her circle, and then a visit by Georg to the colony, after she summoned him. She also chronicles her complicated relationship with Joe -- all complicated further by the small group of other residents at the retreat.
Joe und das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume is a story of personal passions -- of the kind familiar to readers of Reimann's diaries. Even as she and Joe do become deeply involved and lovers, she recognizes and admits: "Eigentlich passen wir gar nicht zusammen" ('Actually, we don't fit together at all'). She is ardent but impetuous, hard-drinking (as Reimann was) and intense. Typically, too, when she sees a sign saying 'Entry Prohibited' she pushes through: "Ich kann Verboten einfach nicht widerstehen" ('I simply can't resist the forbidden').
It is a somewhat melodramatic story, as Maria tries to navigate the power she has over men and her own strong feelings --much as she does in her diaries, as this novel is in many ways only a lightly fictionalized variation on Reimann's own experiences. Reimann does add some drama -- the injury to Georg; a confrontation with one of the other residents at the retreat, an older female critic -- and a very short second part of the novel suggests a new chapter (as, intriguingly, the first part carries a dedication 'for Joe' while the second has: 'for Hendrik', another writer at the retreat who Maria gets close to). Nevertheless, the novel does remain fragmentary, an interesting example of an author fictionalizing her own experiences, but one she hasn't quite managed to fully shape into a complete novel.
Wenn die Stunde ist, zu sprechen ... centers around high school senior Eva Hennig as she joins a class in her new school in the small city which her mother has just been named mayor of. Stalin's picture is still up on the school walls and the border to the Western occupied zone is still porous. Eva's mother is dedicated to the Communist cause and doesn't take advantage of her position by, for example, claiming large living quarters; she's satisfied with an adequate apartment, near to work. Eva barely sees her, however, since she keeps so busy with her duties.
Eva acknowledges that even otherwise: "Ich bin immer allein" ('I am always alone') -- despite, for example always having had swarms of friends around her: "Aber das war auch bloß äußerlich, verstehst du ?, ganz im Innern war ich doch immer allein" ('But that was only on the outside, you understand ? inside, I was always alone'). She is tasked with promoting the political activity of her class, a group that can seem a bit apathetic. Her privileged status -- not least, as the daughter of such an important figure, which people always take into account when dealing with her -- blinds her some to the issues some of her fellow students face.
Maria's own father was murdered at Buchenwald, while a Jewish classmate is a survivor of Auschwitz (one of four and a half thousand Jewish and half-Jewish children sent to Auschwitz, with only seventy-three surviving when the Russians freed the camp). Reimann weaves in this and other recent history well, including the situation at the school and the compromises made there -- including the 1949 arrest of student Kurt Hansen, just fifteen years old at the time, basically condemned for the sins against the state of his parents -- an event that still haunts the school, limiting the willingness of both the school administration and the students to speak up and out against injustice and the like. Meanwhile, while Eva maintains that joining the FDJ -- the Freie Deutsche Jugend ('Free German Youth') organization -- is purely voluntary, her eyes are opened to the fact that, in fact, the pressure to do so is almost impossible to avoid, students worried they will not get a spot at university if they are not card-carrying members.
Wenn die Stunde ist, zu sprechen ... is of particular interest for the political issues it raises , and its description of East Germany at that time -- presumably around 1953, before the East German uprising (and the crack-down that followed). There's already decent story here, but this too is an unfinished novel. The writing is less sure than in Joe und das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume -- more juvenile too, though given its largely high school setting that doesn't detract as much as it otherwise might; still, it can feel more like a YA novel -- also in its exploration of its themes -- than a fully adult one.
Tucked in all this there is some very fine writing, including a description of the school-building and: "das wunderliche Stilgemisch des alten Gebäudes" ('the fantastical mix of styles of the old building') -- Ionic columns, Corinthian arabesques, a Baroque sweep here, Gothic windows there, suggesting the complex mix found in the school, and this society, itself.
The two pieces in Das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume don't offer the satisfactions of complete works, but they are still of interest and appeal -- fine stories, as far as they go, and showing a variety of interesting approaches to dealing with a variety of themes (very different themes and approaches in the two works). Joe und das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume is also particularly interesting to consider in light of Reimann's diaries, an author trying to create fiction around her own experiences. Meanwhile, Wenn die Stunde ist, zu sprechen ... gives a good picture and impression of a slice of East German life from a time that is too rarely found in fiction (at least in a more realistic way: most East German fiction describing those times tends to present these as 'heroic', focusing on what is seen as the positives in the struggle for a new society to emerge out of the post-Nazi rubble).
This is a solid collection that is worth reading not only for Reimann-completists, suggesting already what a remarkable talent this author was.- M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ddr/reimannb1.htm
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