Uwe Johnson (1934–1984)

Uwe Johnson’s first published novel, which came out shortly after his move from East to West Germany in 1959, counts as one of the (forbidden) masterpieces of DDR literature. Through a series of reports and transcripts of dialogues we learn about the last days before the death of railway employee Jakob Abs, struck by a train as he was crossing tracks near the signal tower where he works. The documents aren’t quite arranged in chronological order, they jump around between places and show more people, and it isn’t always clear who is speaking.

It’s 1956, and the DDR is still in the aftermath of the workers’ rising of June 1953. The situation is further destabilised by news of Khruschev’s secret speech, the repression of the Hungarian uprising, and the Suez crisis in the west. Apart from Jakob the main characters are his childhood friend Gesine Cresspahl, now living in the West and working as a translator; her father, a semi-retired cabinet maker living in the Mecklenburg village where Jakob and Gesine grew up; Jonas, an English lecturer from Berlin who seems to be writing a book and has had a relationship with Gesine; and Herr Rohlff, a Stasi captain who is investigating Jakob after his mother’s departure to the West, and seems to be trying to recruit Jonas and Gesine as agents. The precise way these people interact and the sequence of events is deliberately made obscure, and we can never be quite sure that there is a “correct” answer. Johnson also keeps the reader guessing by sowing the text liberally with untranslated passages of Russian, English and Mecklenburg dialect (at least).

Oddly, the one aspect of the book that is crystal clear is Jakob’s very technical work as a railway dispatcher, which is described in fascinating detail, including a scene where East German railway workers attempt to obstruct and delay Russian military trains heading towards Budapest.

A confusing and difficult book to read, but a fascinating glimpse into the intellectual and moral state of the divided Germanies on the eve of the building of the Berlin Wall. show less

Uwe Johnson's An absence (Eine Reise wegwohin) captures remarkably something unpinnable about his thought, a perennial unease and unhappiness about the fracture in German society, which also led to fractures within individuals. His situation was something of a square peg in a round spot, if that spot also had a shifting address and his square-pegness were also subject to quantum indeterminacy. Born in the east, Johnson moved to Western Germany before the Wall went up, but couldn't stop show more repeatedly going back East, sometimes for extended periods (like the one described in the novella). One might suppose this is one way to keep a split country together, but the cost of it is alienation (of which Johnson may be one of the major exponents), a multi-layered, multi-dimensional absence.

In the end he chose to live anywhere BUT either of the Germanys -- Italy, the UK etc.

The novella is also interesting for juxtaposing two camps of refugees--those from the East in the West and vice versa. When the ex-East now-West German writer tries to communicate with either of them, everyone turns round on him. show less

This is the first part of Johnson's 4 volume Anniversaries series, written as a chapter for every day of a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German expat living in New York. The collection starts in 1967, flipping between Gesine's current day as a single mother émigré living with her only daughter, and Germany in 1933, as she recounts for her daughter Marie her grandparents' story and her early life.

It's an incredibly interesting historical and social account (albeit fictional), as show more Johnson covers 1967 perspectives on the Vietnam war, race relations and crime in New York and defections from East Germany, and in 1933 the impact of Hitler and Nazism's rise and the differing responses from people within the town of Jerichow.

Whilst it started off feeling like more of a literary experience than a novel, the further I got into it the more a story began to emerge. It's a book of great detail, shifting narrative views suddenly and without warning and employing different literary mediums (including extracts from the New York Times, tape transcripts and conversations), so it needs attention and close reading to get the most out of it. I found that my attention wandered when I was reading just a few pages a day; when I've been able to give it longer bursts of my time I started to enjoy it much more, sinking deeper into its rhythm.

Johnson often deliberately starts in the middle of a scene or conversation, making the reader work hard on comprehension, but the more I got into this first volume the more I found that sometimes things that don't quite make sense become clearer later on as Johnson drops some further clues.

4 stars - A unique and fascinating read so far. Will it last the distance of all 4 volumes? show less

A novel in 4 parts or a tetralogy of novels - either description can work. It is closer to being a single novel though - despite the changes between the parts which make it possible to see where the novel was split, it is really one long narrative. Or a few of them really - because there is more than one story in there.

On the surface, the novel looks like a diary - an entry for every day from 21 August 1967 to 21 August 1968 - 368 entries (one which serves as a prelude/introduction and then show more one for every single day of the period). Their lengths differ and their structure evolves as the novel continues but aside from some random remarks, the novel runs two parallel stories - one in Germany, where we meet Gesine Cresspahl's family and see the rise of Nazism in Jerichow, a fictional town in the Mecklenburg in Northern Germany (destined to end up in East Germany after WWII), through the eyes of the town citizens and the second one in 1967/1968 in New York where Gesine had ended up with her now 10 (later 11) years old daughter Marie.

The two stories are told differently. The German one is told by Gesine, talking to Marie (with interjections from ghosts who really want to talk to Gesine). The later parts of the story are things she knows and remembers but the earlier ones are the stories as they were told to her or that she surmised - and the she wants to share. There is also the author, Uwe Johnson in there, who occasionally takes over but it is always what Gesine wants to tell (she even scolds the author a few times about where he is taking the story). Between Gesine choosing what to mention and the stories being just heard by her, there is a double layer of unreliable narrators in the whole story and yet, it is "a story" of the times and as such it is fascinating. I'd admit that I found the story in the first 2 parts a lot more compelling (albeit not easier to hear) than the one in the later 2 parts (the post WWII story) - there are parts in these later entries which felt almost boring. Towards the end of the novel, these entries also change a bit - while earlier the story went mostly linear, now we get to hear the end of the stories, even when we will meet the protagonists later in the linear story of the past.

The US side of the story is not a straightforward either - it is told in a combination of newspaper articles (from The New York Times - the aunt as Gesine and Marie call her), stories from Gesine's professional life and stories of her life with Marie. If you have any idea of modern European history, the end date of the book should make it clear where this story is heading although with Czechoslovakia barely mentioned in the early parts, it is unclear for a moment if we are dealing with a "meanwhile in" story or a story that needs to end in Prague. In the early entries, most of the entries which we see are about Vietnam, crime in New York, Stalin's daughter memoirs and interviews and so on - topics which will be interesting to anyone living in New York. But slowly, other news start tricking in to us - news of Czechoslovakia, especially with the start of 1968. Slowly, Vietnam takes a second seat, sometimes not mentioned for days on end - not because the newspaper stopped the coverage but because Gesine finds other topics more interesting. Early on, you may be lulled into thinking that we get a picture of New York and the world from the NYT perspective but it was always what Gesine found interesting. Both stories share that - they are the story as seen by Gesine, by way of the NYT in the case of things outside of her daily routine.

These two stories are intricately bound inside each daily entry - the newspaper and day to day ones of the 1967/68 world match the dates; the German ones follow linearly from where Gesine left off the previous day. There is no connection between the two stories besides one being the past of the other or any rhyme or rhythm on why a certain part of the German story was told at a specific time. Although it is not entirely true that there is no connection - there are the ghosts/voices in Gesine's head, there is also Marie, especially in the last 2 parts, asking for the story and driving part of it (although in the third part, there was a point when she felt like a narrative device and not as a child - the author needed a way to work around the fact that Gesine now knew the story and to make sure we still have an unreliable narrator situation going on). Each entry has its own structure - some stay in just one of the timelines, most of them have a story in both, with no visual differentiation - a paragraph ends and we switch times. Add to this the constant switch between the first and third person narration and the novel could get confusing in places (especially when the two timelines get switched multiple times in the same page). It requires you to pay attention although by the middle of the novel, it felt almost natural and by the end, I almost stopped noticing the jumps - habit took over and my brain just sorted the story where it belonged. That may also had been helped by me abandoning the plan to try to read day per day or week per week and reading it as any other novel instead.

And in this long narrative, the omissions sometimes speak louder than the story. Take for example Gesine and Jakob's love story - we hear everything about her pining about him as a girl but she just sketches the change from friends to lovers. You would think that if there was one story the Gesine will want to tell to Jakob's daughter, it will be that one. And yet - she demurs. Is it because Marie knows the story? Or is there another thing going on? There is a sentence in there, almost at the very end, an almost throwaway one ("I can't believe how completely we all trusted Jakob!") in a paragraph talking about Jakob trying to protect Gesine which hints at something else and I am not sure I would have really paid attention to it if I did not know the plot of the very first novel by Johnson ([Speculations about Jakob]). That earlier novel fills the gap that this bigger novel leaves open - in the same way how the real history events fill gaps in the the rest of the story - not because they are not important but because they are too important and already known.

If you check the author's biography, you will notice that there are a lot of parts where his story matches Gesine's (but also a lot where it does not). It does make you wonder how much of what we read about is real and how much is invented, where reality ends and the novel begins. But then it does not really matter - the novel is a chronicle of the rise of Nazism and chronicle of the Prague Spring (the first through the stories a girl born in mid 1930s knows; the later mainly through the eyes of the New York Times). Mixed into them is the personal story of a mother and a daughter in New York, of New York and USA of 1967/68 (between Vietnam, MLK and Bobby Kennedy, one may be almost forgiven for not paying that much attention to events in Prague). There is a historical novel, a novel of contemporary events and a novel of manners rolled into one. And what stays with you are the people - Gesine and Marie, Cresspahl and Jakob, D.E. and Francine, Anita and Lisbeth... and many many more. The times and history are characters of the story but they do not take over the pure human story. And because of that, the end managed to shock me - not the very end (famous last words came to mind when reading these last sentences) but the events of a few days earlier, the ones that make sure that Gesine is too distracted to pay attention to the world news. I knew that this story does not have a happy ending but even like that, the August 1968 entries came as a surprise - an end not without hope but still...

I can keep talking about this novel for a very long time. There are a lot of things which I want to point to (the bank, de Rosny, the New York of 1968, Marie (when not used as a narrative device at least), the people of Jerichow and New York - they all are worth mentioning and there is so much more that you can say about the story). But then there is no way to really cover everything, even on the surface so I will leave it at that. And I am planning to track down that early novel and read it.

If you are in the mood for a very long story which takes a long time to form, give this one a chance. It may drag in places and I am still not sure that the connection between the different stories is strong enough to carry it as a unified whole and if it would not have been better as a strictly linear story (and with less jumping between the first and third person narration) but even with that in mind, it is still worth reading. show less