Literary Explorations: Brigitte Reimann and Burg bei Magdeburg, Germany

Burg b. Magdeburg is not only the city of birth of the famous military strateg Von Clausewitz, but also the birthplace of the relatively unknown - at least outside Germany - writer Brigitte Reimann. 

A multi-awarded author for her short stories, many of them with a socialist-communist topic in the former GDR, Reimann's name was given to the local library and to a promenade. Willi Reimann, her father was in the Soviet prisons after the war and upon return worked at a local bank. 

Her premature death at 40 due to cancer didn't give her the chance to finish her only novel Franziska Linkerhand, published posthumously many years after her death in 1973. Besides being a writer and teacher, she followed the spirit of the time and also worked for a while in Hoyerswerda in a factory, for a better grasp into the world of the working class. She also lived in Neubrandenburg where the local literature center was named after her. Fragments of her diaries and letters offering outstanding insights about the literary life in the 1950s and 1960s in the communist Germany were published in the last years, and hopefully I would be able to have a look at her writings soon.

In 2004, a movie about her life - Hunger auf Leben (Hunger for Life) - was aired. 

Reimann was the witness of a different post-war generation of German writers, together with Christa Wolf or Reiner Kunze. Her way of representing the world was at a great extent the result of her ideological beliefs. I am curious to see how she succeded to maintain the literary quality.  

What's in a Name: Curry by Naben Ruthnum

I love to read and taste food stories because of the hidden promise of more than a combination of various ingredients. If you know how to read correctly a recipe, you can create incredible stories. Think only about the stories of how different ingredients were introduced into various geographical spaces and the full history of their appropriation by different cultures. 

In his collection of essays about 'Eating, Reading and Race', Naben Ruthnum analysed the case of 'curry' which he proclaims: '(...) isn't real. Its range of differentiations, edible and otherwise, rob it of a stable existence. Curry is a leaf, a process, a certain kind of gravy with uncertain ingredients surrounding a starring meat or vegetable. It's an elevating crust baked around previously bland food stuff, but it's also an Indian fairy tale composed by cooks, Indians, emigres, colonists, eaters, readers and writers'. I personally haven't cooked curry - yet - and I have a very limited taste experience therefore I can hardly go to far when it comes to the eating part of the stories. 

However, I can trace various interpretations and contextualizations acquired through the literary representations. Ruthnum outlines the requested literary conundrum assigned to the novels by and about that part of the world. 'Food and literature are the most definint elements of the Indian diaspora on the small world I've built around myself as a brown adult in the West. Curry's the vehicle I use to look at how we eat, read and think of ourselves as a miniature mass-culture within the greater West. Curry's just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity'. 

The book is a collection of essays, with interesting references of authors exploring the limits of food and identity and the pressure to find yourself outside those limitations of the 'India's of the mind'. 'South Asian Writers is an identity, not just a pair of adjectives and a noun, and it's an identity that establishes a tacit promise to an audience that is seeking it, whether the author intended it or not'. 

It is almost impossible to think that this mindset will change any time soon, but the efforts to deconstruct this reality are small breaks into the wall of imposed creativity. Think about how much potential there is when the challenge of offering different streams of identity is really taken, word by word.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review