Urban planning and social issues

It’s a hot Sunday afternoon and Dynamo Dresden has won 3:1 against Eintracht. As my train pulls in, one stop before Hoyerswerda (Saxony), I see a throng of five men all in yellow football shirts with at least two crates of beer standing on the platform. The door opens and the sunburnt lads pile in, their yells and chants deafening. In the carriage, everyone tenses and waits, holding their breath to see what happens. Judging from the panicked expressions, we all expect trouble – a fight, drunken hostility, something of that kind. That’s what happens in these parts, right? But, just like that, as the group heads off down the aisles, they lower their voices to a whisper like obedient schoolboys. The hush after they leave behind is eerie as if a black hole has swallowed them up.

In Hoyerswerda, I’m taking part in a walking tour of the places where writer Brigitte Reimann lived from 1960 to 1968. It’s also where most of her novel Franziska Linkerhand (published in the GDR in 1974, reissued by Aufbau in 2009 and 2023) is set, which I am currently translating for Penguin Modern Classics. Visual input is always useful for translation, but in the case of Franziska Linkerhand, filled with descriptions of Wohnkomplexe and Plattenbauten, getting a close-up look at Hoyerswerda is essential. The novel’s eponymous protagonist Franziska is a young socialist architect sent to Neustadt (literally ‘New Town’) to develop housing for workers flocking to jobs at the open-face lignite mine which fuelled the construction of the fledgling socialist state. Reimann modelled her fictional town on Hoyerswerda, whose population expanded from 9,000 in the 1950s to 70,000 by 1981 due to work migrants. Franziska is an architect fresh out of college, full of ideas about how her designs will provide more than just housing cells where people sleep after a hard day’s work. She envisions a place where a new society of contented people will be forged, and where families will live, work and play, and enjoy culture and nature.

Hoyerswerda is just a two-and-a-half-hour train ride south of Berlin, and the lush Lusatian landscape is breathtaking; as the Schwarze Pumpe coal plant was the region’s main employer, I had imagined heavy industrialisation would have transformed this agricultural region for good. But that’s not the only reason I’ve never considered coming here before: my feelings towards this area have been shaped by a great deal of negative press – the xenophobic attacks by a lynch mob in the early 1990s on migrant workers; then, in more recent years, the rise of the AfD, whose manifesto I’ve read on the train, and whose populist rhetoric is unambiguously racist, homophobic and sexist.

It’s not news that East Germany has an image problem, to the extent that it often feels as if West Germany has written it off. In his book, Der Osten ist eine Westdeutsche Erfindung (‘The East is a West German Invention’, Ullstein, 2023) writer Dirk Oschmann has described the ‘problem’ of the East as a list of ‘prejudices, stereotypes (and) resentments’ imposed on it by the West. If anything bad happens in a place like Hoy, it confirms these low expectations from the West. Mistrust and resentment work in both directions. The entrenched positions have steadily hardened over the past fifty years, making it very difficult for either side to move in a more reconciliatory direction. This stifles progress and leads to political stagnation. Although many societies around the world have some kind of divide along the lines of wealth and class, and the opportunities it affords, the situation in Germany is different, perhaps unique. For one, an entire generation of East Germans was not able to play much part in how their lives played out after the Wall fell. After much hugging, the BRD and the former GDR have turned their backs on each other. In Hoyerswerda, I am hoping to see beyond this binary tale of East versus West. Because it’s the either-or-ness about discussions that bother me: this on-off, loud-quiet, serious-fun, good-bad division that is endlessly played out in news articles and on literary podiums.

I’ve become especially interested in these issues while translating Reimann’s work; perhaps I’ve started to look at the West through her eyes. Reimann’s characters, of which Franziska Linkerhand is a perfect example, inhabit a mindset where contradictions abound: there’s no either-or-ness about her, and that is what makes her so compelling. She is flesh and blood, not a pawn moved around by a regime. Franziska soon runs into difficulties in Neustadt, where apparatchiks grind down her dreams and her working-class lover, Trojanowicz, antagonises her for being a bourgeois snob. But she stays and fights. In the 1960s Reimann herself disliked the look of Hoyerswerda when she moved there with her husband Siegfried Pitschmann as part of the Bitterfelder Weg, a cultural project to send artists into the factories and form workers’ writing circles, and a call by the Party for artists to ‘leave their ivory towers’ and do their part in building the new socialist state. However, she too chose to stay and fight rather than leave, seeing the potential of a new kind of society there. Her often-strident criticisms of the GDR do not match the commonly held Western view that East Germany was so oppressive that writers couldn’t raise their voices. There is a difference between being prohibited by the state from doing something and doing it anyway, I guess. Reimann also made fun of the ludicrous prejudices on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In her diaries, she even made fun of Western journalists who believed she and her colleagues were gagged and routinely censored:

‘(W)e didn’t get a proper discussion going because everyone wasted the time expressing their utter amazement that we are so “liberal”, that we can write so “freely”. (. . .) And there were half a dozen microphones, and the photographers were intrusive, fiddling with their cameras under my nose (“smile please”) and the journalists made me wary. They don’t like us, and it’s better if I don’t read their articles. There were a couple of thoroughly idiotic questions about Franziska’s development; does she remain sceptical or start to tow the party line? And the like. Strange ideas about “the party life” and “political beings.” But at least we can actually talk to each other; we are meeting, listening to each other.  And there really was disbelief when I said I was speaking here just as I would over at home. Manfred was surprised at the way I write. They think we are intellectually crippled (. . .)¹’

By now we’ve pulled into Hoyerswerda station and the yellow football shirts disperse in various directions. For the first time, I’m in the town I’ve walked through in my head many times since translating Reimann’s diaries and Siblings, and it’s quite different from how I imagined.

We get out and a bus takes us to the town centre, which is as deserted as a ghost town on this extremely hot, sunny day. The concrete reflects the sun and the first thing I do is try to find some shade under the trees lining the main street. In Franziska Linkerhand, the main street (Magistrale) I am walking along is described thus:

I write ‘street’ and, on top of images of a hundred streets that spring to my mind in a flash, overlapping and nesting inside one another, as if my memory has snapped it more sharply, appears the image of the street you walked along towards me: the main street, an apartment block, ox-blood red, in front of it the usual lawn with an unusual border of pansies. At the side of the street, the yellow bus stop sign (the pansies, I realise, are yellow, rapeseed yellow, sunflower yellow), the wide street, a concrete river, overly wide because it was empty of people. Hiding or avoiding you was not an option. The only thing to save me was the timetable, which was missing behind a shattered glass pane. I read the empty sign, even tracing it with a finger to seem busy, in a rush, and not in the mood for a chat (. . .)²

At last, I have a visual of the Magistrale, the road in Neustadt that Reimann’s characters walk up and down. The grandness of the German word, which is sometimes translated as ‘boulevard’, conjures up the Champs Elysees in my mind, a tree-lined place for flaneurs where walking is not the purpose of its architecture, but distraction and beauty instead. I now see that this street is exposed to the elements – in this case the relentless sun – as are her two main characters, estranged lovers, walking towards each other, with no trees or other natural obstacles to hide behind. Franziska’s alienated feelings are highlighted by the road’s straightness and inevitability. And so, I make a visual note: it is an artery connecting workers’ homes to bus stops. The main street; a utilitarian road for buses to take people from A to B, not a place to linger.

The Magistrale (main street) in Hoyerswerda ©private

 The saplings planted in Reimann’s day have now grown, but still, as I walk around looking for a place to eat, or just a cluster of amenities, I feel very exposed. No one is foreign in this part of town. None of the few people I have seen at a distance is dark-skinned; it’s enough to attract attention if you don’t look as if you are ‘from around these parts’ and I regret wearing my lavender-coloured pants. Everyone studiously avoids eye contact with me – the woman in pink leggings, the man with tattoos, the teen sullenly traipsing by. I get a few curious looks from the elderly people on their balconies. I keep Google Maps open and my eyes glued to the little blue dot because I don’t want to ask anyone the way. The emptiness of the town makes it feel as if it has been dropped into the fields, and the jagged, hot air among concrete housing is something I remember from childhood days in summer. When I see a group of kids on bikes playing a game on their bikes that involves riding through a large pool of rainwater, I have a sudden flashback: in a shady spot under the tree on the pavement, they’re making stripes with their wet tyres on the concrete. I too grew up in a new town on the outskirts of London that didn’t grow naturally and where natural meeting spaces were man-made; as children, we too played games like these kids, preferring our own improvised pavements to the purpose-built playgrounds where we were meant to play. And like Hoyerswerda, districts in the banlieue of Paris and commuter belt of London have similar demographics and structures: large migrant and poor populations during the boom years, followed by large-scale unemployment and decline. The kinds of frustrations I grew up around led to outbreaks of violence similar to the fight that is described in the bar where Franziska’s boss takes her in Neustadt. Chief architect Schafheutlin, thinks he knows the cause of these regular fights:

‘Always the same candidates – border crossers, work-shy riffraff we were saddled with after 13 August. Re-education through work is all well and good, I’ve nothing against it – it’s a useful measure. But what do those wise guys from the housing administration do? They stick all these . . . criminal elements in the same housing block, and types who have never been in a gang before club together (. . .)’³

It is typical of Reimann that her sharp, fast dialogue references the kinds of things she would have heard people saying in pubs when she moved to Hoyerswerda in the 1960s. Her readers would have recognized the significance of the date immediately. How many readers living outside of Germany will know that 13 August was the date when the Wall went up? Do I add a stealth gloss? And what about ‘Grenzgänger’ or ‘border crosser’? Is it clear that she means a person who took economic advantage of the socialist state before the Wall was built by earning in the West and living in the East? I have dozens of comments in my translation that flag up these issues, to be decided during a further edit. Words like ‘antifaschistische Schutzwall’, which every East German reader would know, but with a faithful translation of ‘anti-fascist defence barrier’ sounds cumbersome and doesn’t quite get across the full irony of the East German moniker and what it says about the character using it. These phrases have to be translated in a fast, punchy way, and be as obvious to English-language readers as they were to Reimann’s readers.

I find a kebab shop – the only place that seems to be serving food – run by a Turkish man in his thirties. As I order, I try to draw him into conversation: how does he find living here? What are the pros and cons? ‘It’s very easy to save money,’ he says, ‘because there is nothing to do at night. It’s a pensioner’s town, no bars, no nothing.’ How did he end up here? He took the shop over from his father; it’s a family business. I immediately feel as if the man on the pinball machine whose hair is very short and whose tattoos are in Frakturschrift is listening to us. I guess he too must be around thirty – so not even born when the Wall fell. It doesn’t feel like a good idea to put the shop owner on the spot.

The theme of the outsider is omnipresent in Franziska Linkerhand. Reimann herself was one. She wore overalls and lipstick, her head bound up in a scarf like a woman on the Rosie the Riveter poster. She lived in a top-corner flat on Liselotte-Hermann-Strasse where our walking tour starts. A group of around ten people are gathered on this hot Sunday, most of whom belong to a cultural circle of artists, writers and Reimann fans who work with scarce funding to keep her memory alive. The tour leader also informs our group that it wasn’t just ideology that brought Reimann here – she was also delighted to be offered a flat with an indoor toilet and running water, still a luxury in the 1950s and a far cry from the deprived housing conditions people endured in larger cities like Berlin.

All the street signs are in German and Sorbian. The GDR reinstated the Sorbs as a recognised ethnic minority after this status was taken away by the Nazi regime. The Sorbs, or Wends, were the only ethnic minority recognised by the GDR and were native to this region.

Bilingual sign in Hoyerswerda ©private

On a crossroads, we hear a reading from Franziska Linkerhand: Franziska is taking the shift bus along with the other workers to the plant in the early morning and is overcome by the ‘hellish stench’ the factory gives off, a mixture of ‘sulphur and rotten eggs.’ Noticing that she’s ‘not from around these parts’, a (Sorb) farmer on the bus immediately takes the opportunity to give a tirade about newcomers. ‘Hordes of outsiders. . . they churned up the earth blindly and stupidly and drove us out of house and home.’ Franziska retorts that they were surely paid a handsome sum for their land. He replies grudgingly that money doesn’t compensate for anything. ‘We,’ he says, using the pronoun twice, just to emphasize how she does not belong to his clan, ‘we have owned our farm for over a hundred years.’

But Franziska thinks he’s hopelessly old-fashioned for clinging to his patch of land. Her mission is to build apartments for these factory newcomers, who will ‘churn up earth’ at the local coal plant. As the farmer talks, she’s already designing houses and a town centre for the socialist state in her mind.

When I translated this section, I was struck by the irony: the Sorbs didn’t want these factory newcomers, and historically, some of those newcomers eventually expelled guest workers from Mozambique and Vietnam when the Wall fell by setting their housing on fire as the police stood by. After several days, the guest workers were evacuated and bundled onto planes ‘home’ after decades of work, often without pay or pensions. The fate of the GDR’s guestworker population was suddenly no one’s responsibility.⁴

Getting one’s bearing in Hoyerswerda isn’t easy for outsiders: there isn’t much of an overarching urban design to the city and I’m glad I’m being shepherded around in a group. We walk from Reimann’s house down various smaller streets off the Magistrale to the old town, a chocolate box hamlet with a market square and a castle. By contrast, the quickly erected new town sprung up in the late 1950s with three-to-five-storey blocks of flats built from pre-fab concrete. There is a shopping precinct with a fountain at the centre, beyond which is a rewilded park that gradually leads pedestrians to the old town. This area forms a gradual transition from old to new. As we retrace our steps through the park towards the Magistrale again, we eventually arrive at the new town square, where not a sliver of shade offers a space to read a book or have a coffee. The cinema seems to double up as a theatre. This was an issue that Reimann tackled in her usual style – that is, head-on.

Brigitte Reimann statue, The Reclining Woman, in a park in Hoyerswerda ©private

In August 1963, she wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Lausitzer Rundschau, with the title: ‘Kann man in Hoyerswerda küssen?’ (Can you kiss in Hoyerswerda?) She was criticising the lack of intimacy in public spaces, a welcoming place to read a book – or even kiss. Fast forward to 2023: the same paper has just quoted Reimann’s question to its readers, appealing to residents to design a ‘Kusskarte’ or ‘kissing map’ where they feel comfortable and at ease.⁵ Nowadays, whether you might feel comfortable showing affection in public in Hoy (as opposed to, say, Berlin) would surely depend on factors like your sexual orientation or the colour of your skin rather than the design of the city.

Descriptions of people are very succinct in Franziska Linkerhand: a barfly and rabble-rouser is kellerbleich on page 152 – literally ‘cellar pale’. Although this adjective is not a Reimann neologism (I found descriptions of the effects of Goth makeup on Instagram described in this way), it is certainly not a common German adjective. Also, cellars aren’t pale, people are. Does this man look like he spends all his time in one? So, is he sun-deprived? The shadowy, damp underworld contained in the word ‘cellar’ has something sinister to it. I am toying with: ‘as pale as a vampire’. It is this kind of throwaway description that is possible in German but which requires more unpacking in English. And Reimann’s fondness for inventing highly visual and evocative words is partly what makes her writing so pleasurable to translate.

Her syntax, too, is very idiosyncratic. In one of her diary entries, she wrote that her husband Siegfried Pitschmann described her sentences as ‘barbed wire’. Another description would be ‘modernist’, I suppose, or ‘influenced by Rousseau’. Such as this typical construction which is light on punctuation but heavy on stream-of-consciousness:

Hinter seinem Rücken sagte jemand leise und deutlich: »Wir rechnen noch ab, du Kopfjäger.« Das war nicht mehr Thekenblödelei, nicht die freigesetzte Aggressivität Betrunkener, und lächerlich nicht einmal der Western-Jargon der leisen, gemeinen Stimme, wir rechnen noch ab, das hieß Hinterhalt, Cliquenkampf, drei gegen einen, an einer dunklen Straßenecke, und Schafheutlin drehte den kurzen Hals, er suchte nach einer gewissen Ganovenfresse, und in seinen grauen, etwas vorstehenden Augen flackerten Haß und Angst, ja, er hatte Angst, aber er verriet sich nicht, er stemmte die Fersen gegen den Boden, entschlossen, sich hier und sofort zu stellen.⁶

In my translation in progress:

Behind his back, someone said quietly and clearly, ‘We’ll settle our score yet, you bounty hunter.’ This was no longer bar oafishness, not the unleashed aggression of a drunkard; and not even the Western jargon, spoken in a low, mean-sounding voice, was ridiculous. ‘We’ll settle our score yet’ was a threat, gang warfare, three against one on a dark street corner. Schafheutlin craned his short neck, looking for a particular hoodlum’s mug, and in his grey, slightly bulging eyes, flickered hatred and fear – yes, he was afraid, but he didn’t let it show. He planted his heels in the ground, determined to face it, here and now.

Here, I try to balance the need for the sentence to make sense in the translation without losing the urgency and breathlessness of the original. How to punctuate without making the English too formal? And how to keep the intention in the original that we enter Schafheutlin’s thoughts?

Central to Franziska Linkerhand (and based on her experiences in Hoyerswerda) is Reimann’s belief that when urban planners omit to factor in places for people to meet (or even kiss), social problems will soon crop up. These problems might be domestic abuse, violence, alcoholism, drug use, even suicide and assault. Reimann was deeply concerned about these issues and transgressed the censor to include depictions of these problems in her fictional Neustadt. One character, for example, is so isolated that she commits suicide; in another scene, a girl is raped on a lonely building site and no one seems to bat an eyelid. With idealistic zeal, Franziska enters a competition to design a new centre – people must be able to go to the cinema and theatre together! People need to gather and socialise around culture if a society is to function! Architects mustn’t think of towns as places where people simply work – workers have to live in them too. However, when her superior, Schafheutlin, explains that the idea of the WK – Wohnkomplex or ‘housing complex’ – is at the heart of their work, she realizes that her appeal to build a cultural centre is falling on deaf ears. Each WK, he explains, is a mini-town unto itself with a community centre, a kindergarten, shops and other facilities, like little satellites that orbit around each other in a decentralised way. But in truth, he has none of her idealism: his aim is simply to maximise the number of workers in the smallest space possible. Build ’em cheap, build ’em high. The GDR house-building programme is portrayed as one that focuses on numbers, not people.

Many of the old community centres or bars in the WKs in Hoyerswerda have since been bulldozed or boarded up, including the Freundschaft, which features in Franziska Linkerhand. One person in our walking group points out a good feature of decentralised town districts: low fuel use – there’s no need to ferry children to school in cars when each community has its own school. But like Franziska, I find myself wondering whether not being given the opportunity to meet people from outside your bubble might be part of the problem for inner cities all over Europe, not just here. If we never venture out, we never encounter other opinions. Reimann’s thoughts are on the social aspect of urban planning are still highly relevant; a supportive, thriving community life cannot flourish where architecture designates space only to work and sees expenditure on culture as an unnecessary luxury. (The current Berlin government has fallen into a similar trap, equating culture with expendable luxury, not a firewall against a right-wing resurgence.) Taken in by its own ideals of state output and efficiency, Neustadt’s leaders treat their workers as a faceless mass, not humans with individual needs.

WKS or housing complexes in Hoyerswerda ©private

Housing that is the same for everyone creates a symbol of the power of industry, emphasising not the individual but the collective workforce. However, those who flocked to Hoy did not come because they believed in the ideology of the East German state. They came for the rewards of a decent wage packet, an indoor toilet and central heating. In her diary on 12 March 1962, Reimann complained that the GDR had ‘fostered a consumer ideology (. . .). Socialism is a standard of living: a TV, a fridge and, to top it all, a Trabant.’⁷ Activists in the plant, she moaned, turned into slipper-wearing couch potatoes. No matter if houses all looked the same, the differences in who could afford what and who belonged to which class were clear to those who lived in them.

Neustadt becomes a kind of Unheimat in Franziska’s eyes because of the indiscriminate use of readymade housing without an overall urban concept; this term is coined by architectural historian Ed Taverne in his essay ‘Rise and fall of the second socialist city: Hoyerswerda-Neustadt’.⁸ He too argues that the design of living space Neustadt/Hoyerswerda was deliberate: privacy was subordinated to the mobilisation of all available production forces. People were highly aware of their neighbours’ lives; and this led to a collective disapproval of ostentatiousness, as well as, paradoxically, people comparing their lifestyles with others. This transparency was both metaphorical or literal: for example, the sameness of housing was supposed to be a symbol of the egalitarian nature of the state; but, more concretely, bad soundproofing and cramped conditions resulted in neighbours being too aware of each other. Whether metaphorical/ideological or real, two quite different forces were at play in the public and private spheres: in the former, an ideal of a community was upheld in which everyone was supposedly striving for the same goal while in the latter, differences in individual taste or class were present and caused friction.

Reimann turns these ambiguities into a productive conflict in her novel: Trojanowicz, whom Franziska meets at a dance in Neustadt, is a truck driver and automatically a member of the proletariat. Whereas she is a member of the intelligentsia. To her, he is a closed book; she can’t understand him, and this seems to part of his attraction for her. As Franziska slowly realizes that the town administration is not interested in her utopian visions of an urban centre, it is an echo of her disenchantment with Trojanowicz and belief that they can bridge their differences.

Part of the socialist dream was that culture would be accessible to all; that crane drivers would be given the chance to try their hand at creative writing and read Tolstoy, while writers would change into overalls and work with heavy machinery to experience what it was like to work at a grassroots level. Trojanowicz brings Franziska down to earth from her lofty heights by telling her that the town is: ‘A settlement of television caves, a missed opportunity, a town planning disaster . . .) because it fails in its function, preventing rather than promoting communication, separating rather than mixing the lives and activities of its inhabitants (. . .) An amputated town!’⁹ He blames people like Franziska for this disaster and at this point, her idealistic notion of Ben clashes with the reality of the man, much like the conflict between architectural idealism and the reality of living in Neustadt.

The friction between Trojanowicz and Franziska lies, therefore, in their class differences, belying the notion that the GDR was supposedly a state without class. Reimann herself was from a family that was considered bourgeois and had access to a large library at home – her father was an art book publisher. She was a huge admirer of French and Russian classics but also read works by James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Natalia Ginzburg and Hemingway, all of which were published in translation in the early GDR.¹⁰ This contrast between the lofty intelligentsia and the hard-boiled working classes is echoed too in the attitudes expressed by Reger, Franziska’s architectural professor, an old romantic, and Schafheutlin, her pragmatic boss in Neustadt. In this way, the novel explores the search for a new identity in the ‘blank slate’ town where class differences are to some extent blurred. But Franziska keeps coming up against the limitations of wishing away her roots in favour of taking on a new kind of identity. Is it even possible to wish away your roots, to reinvent yourself? This question runs throughout the book.

To get a sense of the scale of building projects in the GDR, around 4 million flats were built, around 90% of which were made of prefab concrete. Nearly half of all East Germans lived in a Plattenbau at some point in their lives.¹¹ Richard Paulick, who was responsible for designing many of them, worked in Walter Gropius’ office at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the late 1920s. Along with Hermann Henselmann, Paulick designed Karl-Marx-Allee (which is now in the process of being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site¹²), then called Stalinallee. And to prove how difficult it was to put the notion of equality into practice in real-life socialism, Richard Paulick built himself a large penthouse on Stalinallee, while publicly fulfilling a role as the architect of ‘housing for the ordinary people’.

The character of Prof. Reger in Franziska Linkerhand is based on Henselmann, a close friend of Reimann’s, and with whom she exchanged frequent letters to discuss architecture while writing her novel.¹³ In one letter, she writes: ‘I almost feel a physical unease when I walk through the city with its depressing main street.’ Later, when I talk to other Reimann experts, they believe that she came to Hoy too early (i.e. new trees take a while to grow) and was too impatient. In the same letter, she complains about ‘Typenläden, Typenhäuser und Typenlokale’ (standard-built shops, standard-built houses and standard-built pubs). When writing Franziska Linkerhand, she subscribed to the architects’ magazine, Deutsche Architektur and stayed abreast of debates in the field. She also kept Henselmann up to date with her progress on the novel, saying ‘I’m still moving about in the story as if in a dark room (. . .) soon I might be able to tell you how the interior looks and perhaps I’ll even have found the light switch.’ In return, Henselmann discusses with her how the concept of a ‘star architect’ doesn’t exist in the GDR, like Mies van der Rohe in the West – that, after all, like other artists, architects require talent and not just the ability to carry out instructions. How indeed does a socialist state accommodate the concept of the talented individual and censure the freedom required to unfold that talent? And for those who want to fight the cause, how can they be integrated if they are perceived as lofty snobs by the ordinary workers?

As I continue walking down the main street, I try to see the WKs in Hoy through the eyes of an East German – as a modern, warm, comfortable place to live. Why aren’t these flats accorded the same prestige as, say the Corbusier high rises in Berlin’s Tiergarten which were built for the Interbau in the 1950s, and are now a UNESCO World Heritage site? After all, both types of blocks were built according to similar principles of serial production, to maximise living space for a large number of people. ‘In the West,’ argues Regina Behrendt, ‘the prefab high-rise is regarded as the last stop on the line. It’s for those on social benefits, for immigrants, families with a large number of children and other people whose “social problems” mean that they have few or no more opportunities in the labour and housing markets.’¹⁴ Corbusier aside, in the banlieues of Paris, London’s inner city – I immediately think of Grenfell Tower – and elsewhere, conditions in high-rises have long been stigmatised. Media images, films and books set on these estates highlight the poor living conditions of the inhabitants, a group that Western society has forgotten. But unlike London, Paris or elsewhere, high-rise flats in the GDR vastly improved living conditions from the bombed-out old buildings in big cities. In Grit Lemke’s Kinder von Hoy (Suhrkamp Insel, 2021) people who lived there describe a community where neighbours looked out for each other’s children and supported each other for the most part. And then the Wall fell. The Western press saw apartment blocks on fire and assumed it was seeing a reflection of its own written-off social underclass. The act of firebombs thrown through the windows of asylum homes in Hoy was directly linked to living conditions in a Plattenbau. In Franziska Linkerhand, Reimann prefigures these issues. She explores them in all their complexity: how to house people in better living conditions, and what happens if urban planners omit places of community. When I grew up in a new town myself, children and teens especially tended not to go to the places earmarked for them to socialise, but improvised their own, like the kids earlier on their bikes cycling through the puddle.

At the end of the tour, I leave Hoy by walking back to the station through the beautiful old town streets, across the market square and past the castle with its very educational and well-researched Reimann exhibition.

Aboard the train in the direction of Leipzig, I feel as if I’ve been to a foreign country for a day, a different kind of Germany with a different atmosphere to the one I’m used to in Berlin. What stays with me is the impression of space and emptiness, so different from the overcrowded districts of Berlin where a housing deficit and greed for profit has led to absurd rent prices. I think of how the WKs in Hoy are the polar opposite of high-rise projects on the outskirts of Western European cities: they are full of pensioners and white people, not fully occupied since there has been a steady drain of people towards the West; and that in similar places around large western cities, high-rises are synonymous with poor, even dangerous living conditions, with non-white residents, and people who have to work hard to make ends meet. In a second article published in the Lausitzer Rundschau written in 1963, in response to the furore caused by her question about whether people could kiss in Hoyerswerda, Reimann made the following observation: ‘A town made up of standard-built housing can also turn into a problem because our surroundings, its architecture, affects people’s quality of life in the same way as literature, painting, music, production processes, physics and automatization. Life does not only consist of eight hours of work.’¹⁵

My internal map of Hoyerswerda will serve me well as I sit back down at my desk in Berlin, in my Altbau flat in the former East, in a gentrified district that makes it hard to imagine that people fled poverty here to live in Hoyerswerda. The discussions with Reimann experts and architects and the insights into the Sorb population have been invaluable for my translation of Franziska Linkerhand. When I see the word WK on the page, I now see the rows of Plattenbauten in my mind’s eye.  But I think what will stay with me most is the image of the long, hot main street, like a concrete river, empty of people except for a couple of kids making wet tyre marks with their bikes through a puddle. With all the town planning in the world, people end up using urban space in their own way.

Footnote: Why has there been so much interest in GDR literature from abroad in recent years?

This is a question I have been asked many times since my translation of Siblings came out in 2023. I’m not sure I know the answer, or even whether it is wise to reduce a body of literature that encompasses a broad range of genres, approaches, styles and viewpoints to a single label – the nationality of its writers. Reductive labels seldom apply – just think about labelling all writing from the BRD post-1945 as ‘West German’ and the outcry there would be. However, I will attempt to answer as best I can.

Firstly, I think that the tug-of-war between East and West German literature is a domestic conflict. When you take literature abroad through translation and open it up to other views, you invite other people to voice their opinions. Of course, the themes that are raised in books like Siblings and Franziska Linkerhand are especially easy for foreign readers to classify as ‘East German’. They feature recognisable figures, like Stasi men and overalled proletariat, although none of them fit the clichés. Reimann wrote these books – as can be traced in her diaries, which Seagull Books were trailblazers to publish back in 2008 before the current trend towards GDR literature – to work through her personal experiences in the GDR. I believe, as I can gather from reading groups and other responses to Siblings, that English-language readers are delighted to get a feel for what life might have been like behind the Iron Curtain, and to find it brought to life so vividly and humorously in Reimann’s prose.

But who decides to publish East German literature in the first place? Foreign publishing houses are increasingly managed by professionals who have their own experiences of the Iron Curtain – alone at Penguin Modern Classics, the first conversation I had was with a publicist with Romanian roots, for example. The editors at Seagull, who have championed GDR writers such as Hilbig and Reimann, are likely to view world literature from a more distant vantage point than, say, European publishing houses. In a recent article in Der Tagesspiegel, Julia Schoch, a best-selling German writer, proved that this view can also be found at home:

The Potsdam writer, who was born in 1974 in Bad Saarow, has roots in the East, but looks at it from [...] the perspective of great historical movements, as she calls it. Egyptians, Romans and Vikings were all connected by similar patterns, by “waves” of violence and downfall, she says. “And seen this way, the GDR is merely a footnote,” she says. “The blink of an eye.”’

Here is a round-up of links that might also provide insight into the process of translating Siblings and its reception:

– Interview together with Jenny Erpenbeck on BBC 4 (25 June 2023)

– Interview on Monocle Radio (17 February 2023)

– Der Freitag interview (3 February 2023)

– Süddeutsche review (31 March 2023)

– TV programme Titel Thesen Temperamente (9 July 2023)

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the DÜF for a research grant that made it possible for me to travel to Hoyerswerda, Burg and the Reimann archive in Neubrandenburg in the summer of 2023. Thank you also to Galina Green for reading the first draft and making excellent suggestions.