Brigitte Reimann

In 1974 three important (East) German 'women's novels' appeared at the same time, one of which was Brigitte Reimann's large-scale, unfinished (she was just able to make a start on the final 15th chapter), unpublished work centred on the architect Franziska Linkerhand. It was written between 1963 and 1973, when the author was living on borrowed time due to cancer, yet the book is bursting with life: as if Reimann were trying to make up for the years denied her (and the unwritten books), with her last strength of will she mobilises enormous resources of sensibility, imagination and constructive intelligence in order to make tangible the difficult construction of GDR society (it is no coincidence that the main character is an architect) through the fate of one individual in a kind of halting Entwicklungsroman showing the character's psychological development.

The driving force throughout is the tension which arises from the discrepancy between the image/utopia of a human world (put concretely, the concept of the need for human-scale urban development) and the undeniable economic and bureaucratic realities - a force which agitates Franziska particularly. Multi- layered existential drives and questions, telling experiences and personal happiness are slotted into this large framework. An outstanding narrator, Reimann skilfully controls the linear flow of narration, so the fullness and inconsistencies of the life she depicts are not sacrificed for the sake of the story; she shows that life in all its fullness, comprehending it through reflection. In a variation on The Quest for ..., Franziska writes a 600 page letter of farewell to the man she loves though he does not match up to her ideals. To explain why she has to leave him she tells him her life-story, at times distanced as author, at others commenting on the story directly from the first-person perspective, switching the time-lines. She creates an artistic authenticity which knows no taboos and allows the self-realisation of a woman as a woman to become a literary fact.