In our March Book Club selection, the sharp and passionate voice of German writer Brigitte Reimann paints a tender portrait of post-war Berlin, when the Wall has yet to go up, but lines have already been drawn, and devotions already divided. In an unflinching autofiction that finally sees an English debut after being long-adored in its original language, Reimann uses the materials from her own life to elucidate the deep ruptures carved into family by politics, the bright, early idealism of socialism in East Germany, and the hope that people hold to amidst the most tumultuous times. In this interview with the translator of Siblings, Lucy Jones, we discuss the storied history of Siblings, the political context necessary to this text, and the meeting-place between art and idealism.
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Samantha Siefert (SS): Lucy, Thank you so much for being here to talk with us about Siblings. Can you tell us a little bit more about the road that led you to translation?
Lucy Jones (LJ): It’s probably not a very conventional one. I graduated in German and in German language and literature, and then I actually didn’t do anything with it for a while; I became a photographer. I did photography for about twelve years, and then I came back to translation just after my daughter was born. This is when I went back to the roots of what I started out doing at university.
I started by pairing up with a good friend who translates in the other direction; together, we’re Transfiction. She translates from English to German, and I translate from German to English, and we’ve been going since about 2008.
SS: You’re known for being a huge advocate for Brigitte Reimann’s work. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with her work in particular, how you came to advocate for her, and eventually translate her?
LJ: Translators often do work as literary scouts or something in-between, and I came across Reimann because I was in a seminar for translators in Berlin. There is quite a good infrastructure here, and in that seminar we were visiting different publishing houses. During one visit, I was given a pile of her work, and it was really warmly recommended to me. When I started reading, I realized—especially when I came across her fiction—that it could have been written now as an historical novel. You didn’t have that kind of patina from, you know, a novel from the past. It was more modern, as though it just happened to be set in the past. I found that really striking.
SS: A lot of authors say that it takes a lot of time to gain that perspective, to be able to write about things in the past in that way. Siblings was originally published in 1963, but it’s set in 1960, and her work has been continuously in print, continuously read in Germany. Can you tell us a little bit about how it’s received in Germany today?
LJ: I mean, it depends very much on which part of Germany. There is a huge a gap between her profile in West Germany and the former East Germany—where people mostly know of her. She was kind of a cult author who you were likely to have read at a certain age; lots of mothers gave their daughters books by her. They held a view of the East that was not too highbrow, not too overly intellectual, and with lots of punchy dialogue. A friend of mine said that when she read it as a teenager, she found it really exciting, because that kind of voice was really hard to come by.
Siblings was never out of print during that time, and eventually in the West, people got wind of the novel, and they started to read Siblings to understand what life was actually like behind the wall. It gave them a sort of on-the-ground, documentary feel, with plenty of dialogue about how it was to live in the GDR.
Then the actual translation of Siblings has led to a kind of revival in both the West and the East—or let me put it this way: a revival in the East, and also a renewed recognition of her talent in the West. It’s very interesting. Reviews of the book appeared in several newspapers abroad, and then the German press started to take notice of her. They were like: well, if The Guardian‘s writing about it, or the New Yorker is running content on it, we should cover it in our newspapers. There is a somewhat problematic tension between the press in the East and the West—not just about literature, but about many different subjects. So this was an interesting thing to see happening.
SS: I think that Siblings has also had a bit of a storied history because of censorship and the publication of different manuscripts; the uncensored Siblings manuscript was actually found by construction workers in one of the homes where Brigitte Reimann previously lived. Do you know the story?
LJ: There is quite a convoluted and difficult explanation, but to pare it down to the simplest version of what happened: Reimann wrote Siblings in 1963, and it was then published in a censored version. After the Wall came down, Aufbau, her German publisher, published the uncensored version, putting those scenes back in. Then last year, they found a manuscript where she had done handwritten edits to the typescript, which had never been seen before. So you could say there are three German versions: one that was published under the GDR, one that was published post-GDR, and one that has just now been published, which is a kind of amalgamation of those later stylistic improvements and the censored passages
The version that we translated was the one published in the nineties: with the censored passages restored, but without the small stylistic changes. It was a terrible shock when this happened, that just at the moment we’re about to bring out this book, the news came of this manuscript. But then, during the editing process. I realized that quite a lot of the changes Reimann had later made were also made in our translation. You know, the translation is always another chance to improve a piece of writing stylistically, to make it really sing, and I realized that quite a lot of the pages had actually also been edited during our process, so it wasn’t quite as devastating as I first thought.
SS: It’s interesting that books can have so many different lives—and it would have been the original censored version that achieved that cult following when it was originally published, so even that version had a spark that connected with people.
I wanted to ask about the construction of the story itself, because East Germany had a program called the Bitterfeld Way, which was a sort of cultural initiative to inspire people to make art and culture that would represent this new country they’re trying to create. How do you think that initiative plays on the art of the novel?
LJ: Yeah, the Bitterfeld Way was an initiative for writers to leave the ivory tower and inspire the working classes who were—according to the GDR—the actual heroes of the GDR project, and who should not be denied access to art and literature. The idea was that the initiative would kickstart a cultural movement. It was funded and supported by the state, and writers were implanted in writing groups within factory plants, and so on. I guess you could compare it to something like a huge funding program that went hand in hand with a certain set of rules, and the rules were obviously that you had to present the state in a good light. You couldn’t bite the hand that feeds the the actual program.
But, on the other hand, there were very big loopholes to get around that regulation, so that one could include critical expression, and I think Reimann trod quite a fine line between something like support and her own idealism, which is very palpable in this book. She was a young, idealistic woman who believes that what was going to come is going to be better than what had just happened in Germany—and the State itself had only existed for a few years when she wrote this.
Her idealism was a way to kick back against her parents’ generation, and also to describe a hopeful new beginning, where you could obliterate the past. I think that that actually comes out very genuinely through her writing. It’s not cynical. It’s not an omnipresent, god-like vision of the state. It’s far more. It’s written by somebody who’s involved in the inner workings, and who is coming up against people who are players, who are gatekeepers, who she can’t afford to upset—but at the same time, she wants to try to persuade people of her own political thinking.
SS: The novel was set in 1960, before the Berlin Wall was built. However, there’s a poignant scene in the novel where the protagonist is crossing from one zone to another, and she’s very aware that the divide exists—even though the Wall hasn’t happened yet. The realism that the author portrays of life in East Germany is insightful, and you’ve included several pages of endnotes in the novel to explain the various acronyms and policies mentioned. Could you tell us a little bit about your thought process and how you decided what to include?
LJ: I’ve translated Reimann’s diaries before, and they had included footnotes or endnotes in German, which I didn’t question because they seemed like historical documents that delve into complicated scenarios, which readers may or may not be familiar with. For that translation, I approached it thinking about how I, as a reader, would like to glide through the text. Would I want to have to Google things, or would it be useful to have something at the back to quickly look up? The endnotes were supposed to be concise, nothing too detailed or heavy, but rather a window into a certain sentence or phrase.
I carried that approach over to the translation of the fiction, as I felt that the flow should be smooth, and I didn’t want readers to get lost in rabbit holes trying to figure things out, because it took me quite some time to understand certain contexts, and I did extra research with a separate document open. Then I thought, if I can give readers the benefit of my research in a small, succinct footnote, what could be better than that? I tried to keep them short, and I think there are only thirty in total, none of them longer than two lines. They were a last resort—only included if the translation couldn’t somehow reflect a reality that contemporary readers would understand. Footnotes are quite unusual, but they have had a bit of a revival even in fiction, with both advocates and detractors. However, I think it’s good to help readers understand something in a few words—which might otherwise take them out of the story if they had to look it up—and the good thing about endnotes is that readers can ignore them if they choose to, as they are separate from the text.
SS: It’s interesting that you said that the diaries have footnotes even in the German editions.
LJ: So Angela Drescher, who’s the editor, actually came out of retirement to re-issue the latest found manuscript. She was born in the GDR and she knows a lot of the context, but it’s hard for somebody from the GDR to know what a reader from West Germany or Britain or America won’t understand. Also, there are scholars in all of those places who have specialized in GDR history, so you’ve got to play this kind of guessing game as to who your reader is and who you’re doing this translation for. I tried to find that middle line, and Angela, she was funny, she was like: “Well, what do you mean when you say East Germany? That’s the thing that I don’t understand because when you say East Germany, that’s an image that the West has of us.” So she has this kind of shadow image of what an East German is or what East German literature is.
But it’s important to note that the narrative of this journey has been taken over by the West. So this is perhaps a nice way to introduce an authentic female voice from that time, when things were still fluent and fluid and up in the air.
To go back to your comment about the passage in the novel about the Wall: what I find really interesting about that particular passage is basically, there’s a date we know in history books when the Wall went up, and it’s always fascinated me that there’s an actual night before and after the Wall went up. Literally, you could go out into the street, and suddenly there it would be, and you could no longer pass it. But the realization of what that meant for people took a long time to trickle into their consciousness. So even when she was writing this in ’63, who knows? They might have taken the Wall down again. It was a barbed wire fence for quite a while before it became a concrete Wall, and there was a very small and less documented migration from the West to the East.
SS: Regarding Reimann’s diaries, which are published under the title I Have No Regrets, I’m curious if you see any other overlap between them and Siblings, particularly with our main character Elisabeth?
LJ: think there’s definitely an autobiographical aspect to Siblings—maybe not 100%, but close. In the diary, she writes about her brother defecting with his wife, just like it happens in the book; so this actually happened, one of her brothers defected, and she had a long-standing grudge against him. They exchanged lots of letters, which she writes about in the diaries, commenting that it’s great material for a novel. And then she proceeds to write the novel and sends it to him to see his reaction. They had a bit of a family dispute, but eventually, it blew over and they started corresponding again, and actually made up before she died. So, you can read this as a thinly veiled biography, and the people she describes in the factory plant are figures she actually met.
SS: On that note, there’s an unusual layer to the novel where she’s having this heated debate with her brother, but the descriptions of him, especially in contrast with the descriptions of her fiancé, are almost romantic, right? She describes him as very attractive and compelling, whereas her fiancé is just mute and staid. What do you make of that?
LJ: It’s an interesting aspect. It has been discussed quite a lot, and some parts of the world pick up on this, while others don’t. I spoke to an East German actress who played the role of Elisabeth on stage, and her husband played Uli; so in real life, they were husband and wife, but on stage, they were playing brother and sister. She was completely surprised when people said there were incestuous overtones, which she didn’t pick up until they was mentioned to her. She felt instead that it was a true reflection of the kind of closeness you might find towards someone who is your true ally in the GDR.
If you have a true ally who is not a party member, like her fiancé, but someone who is a free spirit and the last surviving brother in the East with you, you stick to him. So, for me, it became a plausible explanation that he was her protector, and she needed protection. Her behavior was risky in many ways, and she navigated her life impulsively at times. I think she implicitly and completely trusted this person in her life.
It’s a bit of a shame that it gets so much attention in the wrong sense. The etiquette surrounding interpersonal intimacy and relationships is extremely different in different parts of the world, and I don’t think she intended to imply anything other than her closeness to this person in her life. But there’s definitely a lot you could explore on that subject; another aspect is his incredible paternalistic attitude towards her, which, in a sense, is even more surprising considering her autonomy and outspokenness in other situations. Her submission to her brother’s whims regarding who she is or is not allowed to see is a kind of ambivalence that comes through. It makes me wonder what’s going on, and it’s not really a question that gets answered within the narrative, but the question is definitely there.
SS: I think there’s room for a lot of ambiguity as her work evolves, or as her person evolves. Since you’re familiar with her corpus beyond this novel, so there anything that you can share with us about her idealism? And where that goes in the future?
LJ: Sure. By the end of her life, she was thoroughly disillusioned by the practices she saw going on in the GDR. I think she was particularly affected by it because she approached it at the beginning with such emotional openness and passion. You can imagine that someone who might have been more cautious and observant at the beginning would have had less at stake, but she had everything at stake. So in a sense, the fall from idealism to disillusionment was very harsh for her emotionally.
If you look at someone like Christa Wolf, who was convinced by the idea of fascism as a young girl: she was in the League of German Girls, an equivalent to the Nazi Hitler Youth, until 1914, and then after the war, she reprogrammed herself politically. This was not something that Brigitte Reimann went through. Then, Christa Wolf went through another reprogramming, realizing that the project of the GDR was not what they thought it was; she recognized the bureaucracy, spying, surveillance, torture, all the things that happened in the name of the State.
Losing faith in one’s first major idealistic and political stake was something that really affected many writers. Writing was a form of inner exile, a way to travel in a place that you couldn’t physically travel to, and I think it cut Reimann very deeply, like a psychological wound. Her last book, Franziska Linkerhand, is all about an architect who goes to construct a new town, and she begins that book in a far more overtly critical voice about what she’s seeing. So you can see quite a jump or change in development between these two texts in terms of her political outlook, which I find really interesting.
SS: She died in ’73 quite young, aged thirty-nine, and yet she accomplished this impressive literary body of work. But she was also quite a character, right? She was married four times, and she had a big personality. If she were alive today, what do you think her place would be like in the literary world?
LJ: It’s a good question. I really hope she would still be quite outspoken, and that she wouldn’t be rubbed raw or depressed by what’s going on. To be honest with you, sometimes this translation has helped me through this critical era that we’re in, where you see so much apathy and despair. You need young idealistic people to throw all their energy at finding a solution, and I really hope that if she were alive today, she would have some insight into the reasons and the possible steps that could be taken now. I can imagine her pointing out the fault lines in history that were already there, saying that’s why we’ve ended up where we are, and nobody should be surprised. But hopefully, she’d be writing books too.
Lucy Jones grew up in the United Kingdom and studied German at the University of East Anglia with W.G. Sebald. She translates fiction from German, including works by Anke Stelling, Theresia Enzensberger, and Silke Scheuermann, for a variety of international publishers such as John Murray, Scribe, Seagull, and Dialogue Books. She is the founder of Transfiction, a translators’ collective based in Berlin, where she also lives. She has had her work published in SAND, Pigeon Papers NYC, Litro, and 3:AM Magazine.
Samantha Siefert is a Spanish to English translator based in Austin, Texas. She studied Spanish and Translation at the University of Hawai’i and has lived in Buenos Aires, Vigo, and Bilbao. In addition to her translation work, she also teaches classes in English as a Second Language. Samantha is a marketing manager for Asymptote and helps organize the Asymptote Book Club.
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