In Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” Marxism is demonstrated with a plastic-wrapped sandwich in a corner shop. In Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Mandarins,” it is used by argumentative newspaper editors at a Christmas party. But in Brigitte Reimann’s 1963 novel “Siblings” (Transit Books), newly translated into English by Lucy Jones after the uncensored manuscript was found by chance last spring, it is done in the coffee room of a coal briquette factory. In 1959, the ruling Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic announced that its writers were to follow the “Bitterfeld Way,” and spend time in industrial plants—to rub off their élitism, while bringing culture to the working man. “Grab your pen, comrade, the German socialist national culture needs you!” the not-so-snappy slogan went.
Reimann, the daughter of a bank clerk from a family of Cologne burghers, had decided to become a writer at the age of fourteen, when she was recovering from polio. At seventeen, she published her first book of plays; at twenty, she married a machine fitter, gave birth to a child who died the same day, and attempted suicide not long afterward. By the age of twenty-seven, she’d been a member of the G.D.R. writers’ union for four years and had written some promising novellas while teaching to make ends meet. In 1960, she heeded the Party’s call. Having divorced her husband (the first of four), she moved to a remote town in Saxony in order to work at a coal-production plant. There, with her lover, a fellow writer, she both worked on the factory floor and organized a cultural brigade among the other laborers, reading them her stories and teaching them to write their own. That was the Bitterfeld Way.
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Denne historien er fra April 03, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
