Die Geschwister - Brigitte Reimann

Brigitte Reimann

For the German speakers, here is a podcast episode put out by the ARD with interviews of Reimann's Brother and other friends and colleagues.

...and for the non-German speakers, here's an interview with the English translator of The Siblings

The Kombinat Schwarze Pumpe.

OK, I’m sorry about this, but there is no way around Franziska Linkerhand which is not yet translated into English. Here is a German podcast which discuses the novel in a very direct and serious way.

…and here is a trailer for the 1981 DDR film, re-titled Our Short Life.

Culture in the DDR

A 40 minute long German documentary about literature in the DDR.

Here's an article from 1979, published by the Index On Censorship which gives a good over-view of the situation.

Miscellaneous

There is a reference in the text to Radio Yerevan, which was an in-joke inside the Comecon countries. Tom found this thread which lists some of these jokes

Germans LOVE their acronyms, although the West Germans never reached the sheer virtuosity of the DDR (obviously, itself an acronym!) they did set them to music.

Come to think of it, a lot of the DDR technical terms and acronyms were quite daunting ,even for West German readers. Here is a helpful glossary of some of them, translated into English.

We mentioned a couple of other books in the course of the conversation. Here's a link to a short article about Wolfgang Koeppen in general and The Hothouse in particular

Once again, sorry this is in German, but Moritz von Uslar's Deutschboden is extremely entertaining and often insightful .

Small town continental motorcycle culture

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