Arrival in everyday life

Arrival in everyday life is a story by Brigitte Reimann from 1961. Before starting their studies, three high school graduates voluntarily complete a practical year in the “most modern briquette shop in all of Europe”. In the text, the author paints a close picture of the first two months of this strange excursion by the three inexperienced budding intellectuals into the rough world of work. In 1962 Brigitte Reimann received the FDGB art prize for the text .

After Wiesener, Brigitte Reimann wrote a piece of autobiography. Because the author - as well as the high school graduate Recha - temporarily worked with the pipe layers there near Hoyerswerda .

content

After graduating from high school, Curt Schelle, the 17-year-old “ half-Jewish ” Recha Heine and the 18-year-old Nikolaus Sparschuh meet on the trip to the combine . This is a major construction site on the F97 . The withdrawn Nicholas soon recognizes Curt as the vain talker. Fun becomes serious. The three FDJ members find accommodation in Hoyerswerda and become the youngest members of the “ May 8th ” brigade . The reader encounters the roughly twenty pipelayers and welders mostly as repair and intervention troops in the most diverse operational accidents in the largest lignite refining plant in the world: pulverized coal dryers fail and even burn, water hammer in the drying service shreds a thick pipe, and a mine train derails.

Recha has to grind valves. The diamond dust stings your fingers and your wrists hurt. Nikolaus has to work with a taciturn old welder. The boy is hammering bright red-hot steel with far too much effort. Nikolaus wants to study painting at the art college in Weißensee . His foreman attributes painting to the artless arts. Work colleagues become the first critics of his attempts at painting. Recha secretly writes little stories in her diary. She doesn't know what to study. Should it be medicine or architecture modeled on the unloved father? In the automotive industry, Curt would like to become chief designer. Then he would like to marry Recha. But first of all he successfully shuts himself off from work. In the master, Comrade Hamann, an anti-fascist, he has found an incorruptible observer. For Hamann, the daily hard work is not enough. The three new ones are supposed to liven up the FDJ group after work. When Curt hears something like that, he gets pissed off. Being the handyman every day - that's enough for him. Curt, who gets money from his father and looks after his facade, befriends Recha. The fun-loving girl, who has just escaped the regulations in a boarding school, wants to have fun. It is true that she is torn between Curt and Nikolaus, but the cumbersome, hard-working Nikolaus is left behind. Recha calls the vain Curt a “real parasite”, but she cannot withstand his entertaining and boozy leisure activities. The clumsy Nikolaus makes Recha a declaration of love. She longed for this, also recognizes Nikolaus' character qualities and goes back to Curt when he calls. Flickering as Recha is, she feels comfortable in the love triangle. The cheeky, childlike girl has fun when she can lure the portly Santa Claus out of the reserve. She is only satisfied when he finally shows jealousy. In contrast to Curt, who really does everything wrong, Nikolaus does not make any mistakes. It is also he who is the first of the three interns in the brigade to feel “really belonging”. It doesn't stop there with black and white painting. Curt, with a destructive disposition and despising uneducated workers, is the only one of the three high school graduates who makes no secret of his criticism of socialism on all possible occasions . Such things as brigade, collective, youth group, assembly or even sayings about morality and ethics are deeply repugnant to him. Curt confesses his love to Recha in the forest. In search of the two runaways, Nikolaus thwarted what it seems to be a rape attempt in the bushes at the last second. He beats up Curt. Recha's reaction highlights her character. She mocks her savior. Nikolaus, who had wondered why Recha hadn't screamed under Curt in the forest, swallows this insult too; how he accepts everything at all. In addition, he takes care of the rival, who has been personally beaten to hospital maturity. This behavior almost seems idiot.

After all, Curt wants to be a good person. In the attempt, which is praiseworthy in itself, he causes material damage due to a lack of expertise. Temporary worker Curt destroys a huge engine, temporarily left to his own devices during the repair work. Hamann, who usually cracks jokes, loses his composure for the first and only time in the story. In the case of offenses, he has always been in a lovable and mocking tone, he suddenly whispers to Curt: “You dirty little parasite” and throws him out. Curt fled the factory out of sheer fear. On the train ride to his parents, it dawns on him that his father won't help him either. So he turns back. Curt wants to face the relentlessly tough collective. He wonders what to say at the brigade meeting that evening.

Quote

• “We have turned the country inside out. We have turned ourselves inside out. "

Parental homes

From the extensive ensemble of figures, the reader will primarily remember the three interns and master Hamann after reading it.

• Recha is persecuted by the Nazi regime . The mother Deborah Heine came to Ravensbrück and was gassed . Her father, an architect, had divorced his non-Aryan wife in 1941, threatened by the Nazi authorities .
• Nikolaus' father had been a social democrat before 1933, kept quiet during the Nazi era and joined the SED after the war .
• As a young textile worker, Curt's father was beaten by the SA while marching behind the red flag . He had become a battalion propagandist in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he became a graduate engineer. Now he runs a large textile factory. Curt says of his father's hard life: Unlike him, the father never evaded difficulties.
• Hamann's father, a left-wing Social Democrat, had worked as a car mechanic in a major Silesian city ​​and had been unemployed for a long time. He died when Hamann was only fifteen years old. His mother had then got by as a laundress.

reception

• The model is the literature by Bredel and Mundstock from the early 1950s. The building of socialism will be discussed, as propagated at the 5th party congress of the SED .
• Master Hamann is the "mouthpiece of the state party" and educates young people. After all, Recha makes attempts to be properly guided by Hamann and Nikolaus. By learning to draw from Nikolaus, however, she neglects her talent for writing. As an ideology critic, Recha - in contrast to Curt - did not emerge. In material terms, Recha and Nikolaus are poor and Curt is rich.

literature

Text output

First edition

• Arrival in everyday life. Narrative. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1961. Linen. Dust jacket illustrated by Renate Jessel

Used edition

• Arrival in everyday life. Narrative. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1962 (2nd edition). 282 pages

Secondary literature

• Wilfried Barner (ed.): History of German literature. Volume 12: History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1
• Barbara Wiesener: About the pale princess who kidnapped a purple horse across the sky - the utopian in Brigitte Reimann's work. Univ. Diss. Dr. phil., Potsdam 2003, 236 pages

annotation

1. ↑ Brigitte Reimann glosses over the real conditions. At the end of the 1950s, at some faculties in the GDR, one year of work (sometimes in shifts) in production or two years of service with the NVA were prerequisites for enrollment.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edition used, p. 141, 13. Zvu
2. ↑ Edition used, p. 226, 1. Zvu
3. ↑ Edition used, p. 264, 14. Zvo
4. ↑ Wiesener, p. 117, 15. Zvo
5. ↑ Wiesener, p. 117, 4. Zvo
6. ↑ Edition used, p. 172, 14. Zvo
7. ↑ Edition used, p. 78, 1. Zvo
8. ↑ Edition used, p. 59, 15. Zvo
9. ↑ Wiesener, p. 111, 14. Zvo
10. ↑ Edition used, p. 258, 10th Zvu
11. ↑ Edition used, p. 250, 9. Zvo
12. ↑ Edition used, p. 251, 10th Zvu
13. ↑ Edition used, p. 271, 18. Zvo
14. ↑ Edition used, p. 84, 1. Zvu
15. ↑ Edition used, p. 14, 1. Zvo
16. ↑ Barner et al., P. 517, 9. Zvu
17. ↑ Wiesener, p. 114, 7th Zvu
18. ↑ Wiesener, p. 115, 14. Zvo
19. ↑ Wiesener, p. 118, 14th Zvu
20. ↑ Wiesener, p. 116, 3rd Zvo and 9th Zvu
21. ↑ Wiesener, p. 115, 1st Zvu
22. ↑ Wiesener, p. 116, 7. Zvo
23. ↑ The edition used is not free from printing errors - see for example p. 215, 20. Zvo