Siblings

"Siblings is a mind-blowing novel first published in German in 1963. It has recently been translated into English by Lucy Jones, who is a phenomenal translator. It has everything you want from a book, and a bonus is – it’s short. It’s about siblings living in East Germany. While the brother decides to flee across the border into West Germany, the sister is convinced that the world they live in is great. The book is narrated by the sister, an artist who paints for the Party. The novel questions the meaning of art and whether art can still be considered art when it is controlled by someone other than the artist. Reimann, who was herself a state-sponsored artist living in the GDR, had grappled with the same questions about whether to leave or to stay. Her protagonist realizes that in a life that does not have peaks and troughs and which simply ticks along, there’s a sense of contentment to be found. When the Wall came down, it came as a shock to the East Germans for many reasons. One of these reasons is that life had become so comfortable. There’s a brilliant book by Katja Hoyer called Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, which analyses the impression that the West has of East Germans at that time. They were viewed as being miserable and desperate, and wanting to flee. Both Siblings and Beyond the Wall depict the East Germans in a more nuanced manner. The GDR was the reality in which they were born, got married, and died. They had hook-ups and rubbish jobs. These books reframe the way we understand how these people lived their lives under this regime. It’s about accepting the boundaries that are put in place. Again, I’m not suggesting we simply accept them; we need to revolt, but we need to understand the framework to target our frustrations and anger successfully. If you dissect your everyday life, you will start to wonder: Why am I working nine to five? Why do I work during daylight hours? If you start to question everything too much, it can psychologically grind you down. Both these books examine how people cope while living in a framework that some of us would describe as oppressive. Other people would describe it as being somewhat liberating because it allows you to be creative in other ways. Society teaches us that if you simply tick all the boxes, you will be successful. Social media plays a huge part in this. The measure of success is predetermined by society. It is defined by the value of your house, the size of your car, and the number of offspring you produce with your perfect partner. This image of success can be harmful, especially for those of us who don’t happen to fall into that bracket. Capitalist ideals can be equally as damaging as the ‘oppressive’ social structures that Brigitte Reimann was talking about in her book. They’re not oppressive, because they don’t have to be. Likewise, capitalism’s framework and structures can seem oppressive on paper, but they don’t have to be, because we tend to make the best of things. It’s human nature to have hope and to make the best of things. That’s what Reimann so accurately depicts in Siblings . In our society, one form of escapism is looking at social media. We look at an influencer and we think, She lives just down the road. She filmed a video of her cat and now she’s earning millions of pounds. Why can’t I achieve that? We are expected to constantly be hustling and trying to better ourselves. A dominant narrative in politics is that we should pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We feel pressured to always be switched on. There are times when you need to spend the afternoon in bed or enjoy a cup of tea, but this is frowned upon in our culture. Growing up, I was told that as long as I did everything right, I would be successful. And I would be happy because success always equates with happiness. I strongly disagree with that now. One of the reasons I wrote this book was that I experienced a mental breakdown. I was working on several projects at once, and I felt I wasn’t progressing as quickly as I felt I should. I was frustrated by this. I was haunted by pace. I pushed myself to breaking point. I was exhausted, and my brain was not functioning well. I slowly ground to a halt. I could no longer access my creativity, and I could no longer connect to other people. I realised how confined I was by the structure of the society in which I grew up. I realized this was not a sustainable way to live. I have recovered, after a lot of self-reflection. I had to reconfigure my understanding of the words success , progress , and growth , and to redefine them in terms of what they mean to me. Was I moving in the right direction? I realized that I don’t want the form of success that is defined by society. That’s not for me. I think we are minnows at the bottom of a garden pond, swimming toward the light. Once we reach the surface, we are eaten by a fish or caught by a child with a fishing rod. Maybe we shouldn’t be so eager to follow the light. The light isn’t always our friend."