Brigitte Reimann

Brigitte Reimann was the daughter of Willi Reimann (1904–1990) and Elisabeth (1905–1992) and the oldest of four children. Her father was a bank clerk from a family of Cologne burghers.[1]

She decided to become a writer at the age of 14, when she was recovering from polio.[2] She wrote her first amateur play at the age of fifteen. Her first book of plays was published when she was 17.[3]

In 1950 she was awarded the first prize in an amateur drama competition by the Berlin theater Volksbühne.[4] After graduating with the Abitur, Reimann worked as teacher, bookseller and reporter.[5] She married a machine fitter when she was 20.[6] Following a miscarriage in 1954, Reimann attempted suicide. In 1960 she started to work at the brown coal mine Schwarze Pumpe, where she and her second husband Siegfried Pitschmann headed a circle of writing workers.[5] There, she wrote the narrative Ankunft im Alltag, which is regarded as a masterpiece of socialist realism.[7] She received the Heinrich Mann prize in 1964.

Reimann never joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and was critical of the East German state's involvement in the country's literary movement.[8] She wrote in her diary that there were 'Opportunists and numbskulls everywhere. The only subject worth discussing in a novel, it seems, is the need to increase work productivity ... Human problems are not in vogue'.[9]

When troops of the Warsaw Pact states invaded the ČSSR on 20 August 1968 as a reaction to liberalisations during the Prague Spring, Reimann refused to sign the declaration by the East German Writers' Association (DSV) approving of the measure.

On 22 February 1973, Brigitte Reimann died of cancer at the age of 39.

Reimann's diaries are well-regarded in Germany 'for their clear-eyed account of life in the GDR.'[10] In 2023, her diaries were reissued in Germany.[11]

Her 1963 novel, Siblings (Die Geschwister), was first published in Italian translation in 2013 (by Monica Pesetti for Voland)[12] and in English in February 2023 for Penguin.[13]

• Katja. Eine Liebesgeschichte aus unseren Tagen (1953)
• Der Legionär (1955)
• Zwei schreiben eine Geschichte (1955)
• Die Frau am Pranger (1956)
• Die Kinder von Hellas (1956)
• Das Geständnis (1960)
• Ein Mann steht vor der Tür (1960)
• Ankunft im Alltag (1961)
• Sieben Scheffel Salz (1961)
• Im Kombinat (1963)
• Die Geschwister (1963)
• Das grüne Licht der Steppen (1965)
• Sonntag, den ... (1970)
• Franziska Linkerhand (incomplete novel, 1974)
• Das Mädchen auf der Lotosblume (incomplete novels, 2005)
• I Have No Regrets — Diaries, 1955–1963, translated by Lucy Jones[14]

• Gravesite where Riemann was reburied in 2019
• Brigitte Reimann Foundation