Franziska Linkerhand

Adaption by Daniela Löffner

Bold, courageous and edgy Franziska Linkerhand is a talented and idealistic young architect when she decides at the beginning of the 1960s to throw her plans overboard. Divorced and independent, she moves to provincial Neustadt (a synonym for Hoyerswerda and the housing estates for the Schwarze Pumpe power-plant workers), where she wants to build houses with an aura of dignity and freedom. And there she starts an affair with a complex married man, Ben, who reminds her so much of her brother Wilhelm. But her visionary projects are dashed by a rigid system, and her utopian dream of loving Ben is not reciprocated: her wishful thinking fails to survive the disillusionment of reality. Nevertheless, Franziska remains anarchic and self-assertive – and her dreams live on.

When Brigitte Reimann’s last, unfinished work was published posthumously in the GDR in 1974, it broke so many taboos that her heroine became a figure with which a whole generation of women identified. Initially conceived as a coming-of-age novel about a bourgeois girl, Reimann worked for ten years on this critical examination of socialist society that is closely linked to her own life story. Viewed by the Ministry of Culture as a "productive provocation", the narrative has become a piece of East German history. Thirty years after the fall of the Wall, it is high time to (re)discover this great narrative.