Siblings – Brigitte Reimann (1963, transl. Lucy Jones 2023) 129 pages

Summarising Siblings makes it sound incredibly clunky. A brother and sister living in the GDR find themselves separated ideologically as one of them wants to leave for the West. However, Brigitte Reimann’s writing is so skilled that the relationship between the siblings is rounded. The novella never feels like a construct in order to explore two forms of government in opposition to one another.

We know from the start that there has been some sort of significant betrayal. It opens:

“As I walked to the door, everything in me was spinning.

He said, ‘I won’t forget this.’ He was standing very straight and not moving in the middle of the room. He said in a cold, dry voice, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’”

The story is told from the point of view of Elisabeth (Betsy/Lise) and each chapter opens with the current situation (1960, prior to the Berlin Wall being built) before looking back in time. We learn of her close relationship with her brother Uli.

“I trusted him in every way and was vain enough to think I knew everything or almost everything he thought and planned. But in truth, back then, which was only the day before yesterday, I didn’t have a clue about the person closest to me.”

They are young people from a previously privileged family (who voted for Hitler), although they no longer have access to their industrialist family’s assets or wealth. Elisabeth is an artist and has a job working in an industrial plant painting the workers and teaching, which she enjoys despite the frustrations of dealing with colleagues and pressures from the Stasi.

“As soon as I’ve warmed myself in the lap of my family for a few days, I feel homesick for its adventurous, daring atmosphere; and for the sight of the huge, white and yellow excavators; for the mountains of sand blown haphazardly by the wind, under which lies the dark brown, damp coal seam; and for the drivers up in their peaceful cabins, shields lowered, patiently shovelling tonnes of earth…”

Uli is an engineer but he is unable to get a job due to being blacklisted by association with a professor who defected, despite him knowing nothing about the defection. Unlike Elisabeth and her boyfriend Joachim who works for the Party, Uli struggles with the immense bureaucracy and lack of choices he has in the GDR.

The siblings’ brother Konrad went to the West with his wife, and Elisabeth sees this as a huge betrayal, despising the materialism she feels drove the decision.  He was part of Hitler Youth, while Elisabeth and Uli were both small children during the war. Hence her feelings about the West and her immediate family are bound up with and complicated by Germany’s recent past.

A further complication is that Elisabeth and Uli have stayed close throughout their lives and she describes Uli romantically, dwelling on his handsomeness and appealing qualities more than on those of Joachim. I found her response in this way to her brother odd and unnerving, but I don’t know if that is a cultural difference or a deliberate decision by Reimann to make the siblings’ bond overly intense.

Uli tries to explain to Elisabeth the difference between him and Konrad; why he needs to leave, despite still believing in socialism:

“‘Before I’m ground to pieces here,’ he added, not quite as loudly, not quite as confidently. ‘I’ll always stand up for the public ownership of industry over there.’

‘Even in your shipyard?’

‘Even in my shipyard.’ He paused then smiled uncertainly.

‘How come your shipyard?’ I said quickly. ‘You’ll have to stop using communist phrases, you know.’”

Having Uli still believe in the system of government but finding himself unable to live under it complicates the opposing views of the siblings and exposes the layers of experiences which can lead to vastly different life decisions.

Another clever decision is to not paint the GDR as a bleak wasteland. As well as Elisabeth’s romantic view of the plant, the natural environment is beautifully evoked:

“The morning sun had moved on, and the sky stood flat and pale blue above the trees lining the avenue; from the kitchen window, above the cottages, I could see stables and small courtyards nestling closely together in this bucolic area of town. Raindrops sparkled on the walnut tree branches and the tips of its leaves in the slanting sunshine.”

The narrative circles back to end where it began, perhaps indicating the circular nature of the political arguments that neither Uli or Elisabeth will win. By the time we return, the reader is fully aware of the various ambivalent, contradictory bonds which tie Elisabeth and Uli. Siblings is a heartbreaking portrait of how wider political pressures can fracture the closest of relationships, irretrievably.

“‘I can’t explain anything to you,’ he said after a while. ‘Because our views on freedom, among other things, are too far apart.’”