Franziska Linkerhand as a Literary Watershed

WHEN BRIGITTE REIMANN'S Franziska Linkerhand first appeared in print in the GDR in 1974 as an uncompleted posthumous novel, at the height of the “no taboos” cultural liberalization that Erich Honecker initiated after taking office as SED leader, it provoked extraordinary interest throughout the German-speaking world. For readers who had noted the move toward a more subjective and politically critical perspective between her two short novels Ankunft im Alltag (1961) and Die Geschwister (1963), it finally fulfilled the expectation, fueled since the publication of initial extracts from it in 1964–65, that she was capable of producing a significant full-length prosework. It showed that Reimann had managed to rewrite the earlier part of the novel, from which these extracts had been taken, to accommodate at least one radical change of plan, and that she had got tantalizingly close to completing her planned fifteen chapters and more than six hundred pages of text despite the increasingly debilitating effects of her struggle with cancer between 1968 and her death in February 1973.

It was rapidly recognized that the critical picture of GDR society that Franziska Linkerhand presented was as fundamental as anything else that had appeared thus far in a work published there. In Reimann's fictional Neustadt a rapidly growing population starved of amenities was seen to suffer alienation on an alarming scale as reflected in terms of drunkenness, violence, and suicide rates.