Siblings, the first English translation of a novel by German writer Brigitte Reimann, opens with a bang, an argument – “I’ll never forgive you” – and the fear of violence: “When we’d argued in the past, he’d thrown shoes at me and once even a vase.”
It’s a splendid opening for a story of what happens when the tense bonds of family are stretched to snapping point by the politics of a divided nation. The rest of the novel builds up to the argument, which is between brother and sister Uli and Elisabeth Arendt, residents of Germany in 1960 – East Germany, that is; the socialist utopia separated from the freer, more affluent west. Uli wants to defect, go over the border – “I’m not going to the South Pole,” he pleads. “Just from one Germany to another.”
Elisabeth, our narrator, finds the fight with Uli particularly painful. First because they are close in age and spirit: they love each other, do everything together. She seems to adore him more than she does her own fiance, Joachim, and tells her friends that Uli is “the handsomest boy I know… much cleverer than me”. But it is also difficult because the family has already lost older brother Konrad to the west; Konrad who was “clever, talented at maths and gravely polite, a quality that later only scantily concealed his ruthlessness”. The family’s dinner-table disputes are given added piquancy as the children see their parents as responsible for Germany’s shame. “You voted for Hitler. You’re to blame.”
And so Uli and Elisabeth go to war over their respective ideologies. She taunts him about the truth of the west – “the overpowering smell of blood behind the scent of Virginia tobacco and oranges and Lux soap” – and, perhaps optimistically, takes him to see a state-owned shoe factory.
Elisabeth really believes in East Germany, and in “the austere beauty of industrial landscapes”, though she knows little of the west: the hills over the Rhine and the port of Hamburg are “just pictures on postcards”. Siblings is not a denunciation of the East German regime, but a reflection of opposing forces: the horrors of dictatorship against the loyalty to one’s home. Elisabeth, a painter, herself feels the sharp end of the system in lively scenes where her art is denounced by the Stasi as “anti-realist… dabbling in abstract aesthetics”. She has to decide: is it possible to be egalitarian and love the “elite” arts?
This vivid and intriguing novel, published in 1963, is a largely autobiographical story by an author who had a short, eventful life, marrying four times and declaring her intent to live “30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones”. She made it to 39, dying in 1973 from cancer believed to have been caused by inhalation of pollutants in her role as a state-sponsored artist at an industrial plant.
Siblings is given new life in this translation by Lucy Jones, who also provides useful context-setting endnotes. And when the final pages of the book circle back to the opening scene (“I’ll never forgive you”), there’s another unexpected development in store, which reminds us that, east or west, there is nothing so strange or surprising as families.
Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (translated by Lucy Jones) is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
