I Have No Regrets

Diaries, 1955–1963

Brigitte Reimann

Translated by Lucy Jones

 

6 x 9 inches, 452pp April 2019

ISBN : 9780857426680

Rs  799.00 (HB)
$27.50 (HB)
£15.00 (HB)

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I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I’ve liked too many men.

 

Like the heroines in her stories, celebrated East German Brigritte Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed by the communist regime. She followed the state’s call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers.

Available for the first time in English, this first part of Reiman's diaries contains detailed accounts of her love affairs, daily life, writing and reflections. Up-tempo and amusing in tone, frank and refreshing, the diaries and letters provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany and present a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching and bitter—but above all life-affirming—they offer a chance to understand how it felt to live in the first decades of socialism in the heart of Europe, and bear testimony to the resilience of the human spirit under totalitarianism.

 

 

Brigitte Reimann (1933–73) was an East German writer best known for her posthumously published novel Franziska Linkerhand (1974). Her novel Ankunft im Alltag (1961) is regarded as a masterpiece of socialist realism. She received the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1964. 

 

Lucy Jones is a co-founder of Transfiction GbR and has translated works by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Ronald Schernikau and Brigitte Reimann, among others.

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