Ole Bienkopp is said to have been the most-read contemporary novel in the DDR. It's a rural tragi-comedy, set in an East German village in the 1950s, the story of the stubborn small farmer Ole Hansen — called "Bienkopp" (bee-head) because of an incident in his first occupation as an itinerant bee-keeper — who persuades some of his neighbours to pool their land and organise themselves into a collective farm, at a time when the Party was still officially putting all its faith in the individual peasant. His difficulties with the local authorities are exacerbated by opposition from the remaining pre-war landowners in the village, in particular the sawmiller Ramsch, and by the bourgeois aspirations of Ole's wife Annegret, who seems to have an undue fascination with Ramsch's riding boots and duelling scars (to be fair, the author is even more obsessed with these stigmata of social privilege than Annegret is, never missing a chance to mention them).

In Part II of the book, which reads more like a sequel than part of the same novel, we're five or six years further on, collective farms (LPGs in East German jargon) have become the official norm, and Ole is chairman of the flourishing LPG "A blossoming field". But he still has any number of enemies in the village, numerous spinsters and widows are in pursuit of him, the Party is setting targets that take no account of sustainability or the availability of fodder and machinery, and every man in the collective is in love with the new poultry-girl, pigtailed Märtke.

This is propaganda, and quite heavy-handed in places — I was amused to see that a previous owner of my copy had pencilled in an index to the many useful bits of agricultural advice on the flyleaf — we are meant to see that collectivisation is good, private profit is bad, priests are hypocrites, and people who chew gum, use English expressions, or run away to the West invariably come to a bad end. But Strittmatter also wants us to see that management is about more than just meeting targets, that it's bad to follow orders that don't make sense to you, and even worse to pass them on down the line without question. Lazy and self-serving administrators get as hard a time here as capitalist profiteers.

And it's not hard to see why it was such a successful novel in its time: it is full of lively, colourful characters, humorous incidents and informed, down-to-earth views of village life, and it's written in an engaging (but not at all naive) rustic style, with strings of short, punchy sentences, lots of repetition and alliteration giving a ballad or folk-tale feel. Everything is shouting out that this is a book about people "like us". Strittmatter was clearly very good at what he did, and he obviously knew exactly how far he could tease the authorities without actually getting into trouble. Which would have been quite a bit further when this was published in 1963 than it was a couple of years later, after Walter Ulbricht's savage attack on Werner Bräunig and the associated clampdown on the creative freedom of writers.

Very readable and amusing, despite the complete disappearance of the world it's set in, and probably still deserves a place on lists of great agricultural novels. ( )

Ole Bienkopp: een bijnaam die Ole Hanssen kreeg toen hij bijen ging houden en een volk daarbij op zijn hoofd een plekje zocht. Hij was nog jong en begon met het bijenhouden de natuur naar zijn hand te zetten. In een dorp in de DDR zet hij een LPG (Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft). Hij laat zich weinig gezeggen door de partij en gaat liever weloverwogen te werk. Daarvoor moet hij zich steeds verantwoorden. Naast de partijvoorschriften zijn er in het dorp natuurlijk ook de gewone menselijke zwakheden als jaloezie, drankzucht, eigenbelang. Ook daar moet hij tegen opboksen.
Uiteraard is het boek gedateerd: de "slechterikken" zoeken hun heil in het westen en de goeden sloven zich af voor het welzijn van de LPG. Toch leuk om te lezen, omdat er regelmatig gerelativeerd wordt en de partij ook niet alles goed doet. Daarvoor heeft Strittmatter zich waarschijnlijk ook moeten verantwoorden!