Brigitte Reimann

Reimann, Brigitte (Burg nr. Magdeburg, 1933-1973, (East) Berlin), taught for two years, then after a variety of jobs settled as a writer in Neubrandenburg in 1966.

The bulk of her fiction is concerned with the task of reconstruction and personal adjustment in the young DDR. Titles include Die Frau am Pranger, Kinder von Hellas (both 1956), Das Geständnis (1960), Ankunft im Alltag (1961), and Die Geschwister (1963). In 1960 she wrote (in collaboration with S. Pitschmann) the radio plays Ein Mann steht vor der Tür and Sieben Scheffel Salz. In 1961 and again in 1962 the Freie Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund awarded her its prize for literature and in 1965 she received the Heinrich Mann Prize. In the same year Das grüne Licht der Steppen was published, the last work to appear during her lifetime.

The term Ankunftsliteratur, applied to literature representing the early Bitterfeld guidelines for writers (see Sozialistischer Realismus), originates from Ankunft im Alltag. Brigitte Reimann was herself for a time associated with the Kombinat Hoyerswerda, at which the young woman of the story undergoes her successful training. In 1963 Reimann began work on a novel, Franziska Linkerhand, which continued until shortly before her death from cancer. The substantial, unrevised fragment was published posthumously in 1974. After the initial, but quickly abandoned attempt to model her work on Zola, progress in the early years was slow. In the end, a Zeitroman emerged, covering the period of German defeat in 1945 until the emergence of the first teething troubles of the new socialist state (Aufbauperiode); of these Franziska, daughter of a publisher who leaves her the Cotta edition of Goethe's works as a parting present before reluctantly moving to the West, becomes increasingly aware in her career as an architect. Brigitte Reimann in ihren Briefen und Tagebüchern, ed. E. Elten-Krause and W. Lewerenz, published in 1983 (DDR) and, as Die geliebte, die verfluchte Hoffnung. Tagebücher und Briefe 1948 bis 1973, in 1984 (BRD), is a chronologically arranged selection; though the addressees' names are omitted from the letters (for reasons indicated in the Preface), the volume's three sections (Burg, Hoyerswerda, and Neubrandenburg) are an interesting documentation of a hard-working writer's life in the DDR and of her irrepressible individualism.

Christa Wolf's correspondence with her appeared as Sei gegrüßt und lebe. Eine Freundschaft in Briefen 1964-1973, ed. A. Drescher, in 1993, the volume Aber wir schaffen es, verlaß Dich drauf! Briefe an eine Freundin im Westen in 1995.