This is another of the classic novels of the DDR, together with books like Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel, Erwin Strittmatter's Ole Bienkopp and Herman Koch's Die Aula, that all appeared during the slight cultural thaw of the early 1960s, when it almost looked as though the Republic was opening itself up to new ideas and constructive criticism. Werner Bräunig's mining epic Rummelplatz would certainly have been on that list too, but he was just too late and got trapped in the mechanism when the ideological shutters came clanging down again in 1966. Spur der Steine itself is an interesting border case: the book appeared in 1964 and became an instant success, winning various awards and rapidly finding its way onto school reading lists, but Frank Beyer's film adaptation two years later was banned immediately after its premier and couldn't be shown again in East Germany until 1990.

It's not immediately obvious why this is such a long book (940 pages): the action is mostly confined to the building site of a chemical plant near Halle an der Saale and to the period between July 1959 and May 1961, and there is a fairly tight focus on a small group of three main characters. Hannes Balla is a carpenter, the foreman ("Brigadier" in DDR terms) of a rumbustious and anarchic, but very productive, itinerant gang of builders; Katrin Klee is a new engineering graduate who has put aside her ambition to go on and study architecture because she has been told by the Party that qualified engineers are urgently needed in industrial construction; Werner Horrath is the Party secretary on the site, a convinced and dedicated communist but unhappy in his marriage and glad of the breathing-space that his transfer from Rostock to Halle has created.

The story develops the personal relationships of Balla, Kati and Horrath in parallel with the progress of the construction on the site. Ideas for improving the construction process collide with the inertia of top-down planning, the timidity or self-interest of minor officials, and general incompetence, and all three characters come into situations where they need to stand up for their ideas, something that is most shocking for Balla, who has always lived in the delusion that he doesn't have any. Horrath and Kati find themselves drawn into a sexual relationship and — contrary to their natures — forced to lie about it, even when Kati becomes pregnant.

You can read it as a book about the challenges and opportunities of building a new kind of society, and the difficult ways in which those sometimes collide with personal lives, but it's also about the difficulties of running large, complex projects in any kind of society, the collisions of technology with targets and people and weather and the calendar and far-off administrations, and lots of other things. Neutsch was a journalist who followed the work on the chemical plants closely, so there's a lot of real-world data to fit into the book, and there are also a host of sub-plots, in particular about Balla's parents, "new peasants" granted a small farm of their own after the war and now facing pressure to collectivise, about the incompetent site-manager Trutmann, about Kati's father, a trade-unionist and concentration-camp survivor before the war who is now a senior journalist (but has still never noticed that he's not the only person called Paul Klee...), about the painter Voss, whose expressionist collage techniques are about as popular with the current regime as they were with the previous one, and many others.

A complicated, messy kind of book, which resists a lot of the obvious pitfalls (including the narrative pressure to close the triangle plot neatly) but of course creates a lot of other difficulties for itself along the way. Kati finally breaks off with Horrath when she realises that he's not shown the slightest interest in her baby after she returned to the site from her brief maternity leave, but Neutsch doesn't do much better. He clearly has no idea how to represent a professional engineer who is also a young mother, so he simply leaves the fact of her motherhood out of the equation. When she and Balla go on a four week study trip to the Soviet Union, she's allowed to think about her child precisely once, as she briefly reflects after the first week that she ought to send a postcard to her mother who is looking after him.

I'm glad I read it, it's clearly an essential document of a moment in history, and it's full of interesting stuff about construction(!), but as a novel it's a bit mixed. ( )