Uwe Johnson

German novelist

• Born: July 20, 1934
• Birthplace: Cammin, Pomerania, Germany (now Kamień Pomorski, Poland)
• Died: February 23 or 24, 1984
• Place of death: Sheerness, England

Biography

Uwe Johnson has been called “the author of both Germanies,” sitting, as it were, on the border dividing East and West Germany and directing his critically analytical yet passionate glance at both parts simultaneously. Johnson was born in 1934 in Cammin on the Dievenow River in Pomerania, a former northern German province which has been part of Poland since 1945. At age ten, he was sent to an elite school run by the Nazis, where he was reprimanded for his “unhealthy continuous reading.” After flight from his now-Polish homeland, he and his family settled in Güstrow, in the northern German province of Mecklenburg, which had also been the home of the world-renowned sculptor and writer Ernst Barlach, persecuted by the Nazi regime, about whom Johnson later wrote a lengthy essay. While at the University of Rostock, Johnson was called upon, as a member of a Communist youth organization, to testify about the political crimes of the religiously affiliated youth group Junge Gemeinde in 1952. He refused to participate in the false accusations and decided to tell the world about how those lies were used for the furtherance of political causes. Because of the incident Johnson had to change universities, and he finished his studies under the eminent literary critic Hans Mayer in Leipzig.

Johnson admired the writings of Thomas Mann enormously and began to tell himself that he, too, could write. He started to give fictional shape to the experienced events he found so deplorable in his first novel, Ingrid Babendererde. After rejections from two East German publishing houses, he submitted the novel to the West German publishing house of Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main. Peter Suhrkamp met with Johnson in Berlin to let him know that he thought the young man definitely had a talent for writing, but he rejected Ingrid Babendererde because of its provinciality, because of what he called “a lack of world.” The novel was finally published, posthumously, in 1985.

After graduation from the university, Johnson found that he was unemployable; based on his refusal to cooperate with the functionaries in power in East Germany, his cadre papers were found lacking. To earn some money, the author translated novels by American authors and for the first time read several novels by William Faulkner. It proved to be a seminal experience; Johnson destroyed the first chapter of his next novel, Speculations About Jakob, as he had written it and opted for a multiperspectival style which no other German author had yet employed and which would prove highly controversial once the novel was published by Suhrkamp. Johnson left East Germany and settled in West Berlin in 1959, the year of the publication of Speculations About Jakob, which was advertised by Suhrkamp as a perfect blend of local concerns and avant-garde. In 1960 the young author was awarded the Fontane Prize of the City of West Berlin, and he was invited to read from his works to the prestigious Gruppe 47.

Speculations About Jakob chronicles the death of a railroad dispatcher and is set in that working milieu which the governmental policy of socialist realism exhorted writers to employ. Nobody was a witness to Jakob’s being killed by a train in dense fog. While the novel clearly evokes the figure of the young working man and his relationships with various people, the reader is never told whether the death was an accident, whether Jakob committed suicide, or whether he was killed after being suspected of fraternization with people from West Germany.

After having won the Prix Internationale de la Littérature in 1962, Johnson wrote the shorter novel Two Views, which was published in 1965. Two lovers, a photographer from West Germany and a nurse from East Germany, cannot be united because of the closing of the borders when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. An underground effort helps the nurse to escape, but on the Western side she is a stranger in a strange country and no longer sure of her feelings.

Johnson’s last work, his tetralogy Anniversaries, a gigantic novel of almost two thousand pages, its four volumes first published in 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1983, chronicles another border experience, namely that of a young German woman transplanted to New York with her young daughter. Johnson, like Faulkner in the southeastern United States, populated a certain region in Mecklenburg with certain people who appear in several of his works. The young woman, Gesine Cresspahl, had been the lover of Jakob Abs, the main character in Speculations About Jakob, and Marie is their child. The novel purports to be a diary-like account of exactly one year (August 21, 1967, to August 20, 1968), told sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third person. The narrative is interspersed with direct quotes from The New York Times. It interweaves Gesine’s memories of the Adolf Hitler years in the Mecklenburg of her youth with the events of this specific year, which include the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The canvas of the novel is enormous, the juxtaposition of former developments in Germany and present developments in the United States fascinating and mutually illuminating.

After having spent nearly two years in New York, from 1966 to 1968 (he insisted that he could only write the truth as he himself had experienced it), Johnson settled in Sheerness, England, on the island of Sheppey in the mouth of the Thames River, because the region reminded his wife, Elisabeth, of stretches of Mecklenburg. It took Johnson ten years to complete the fourth volume of Anniversaries, at least partly because he was deeply troubled by suspicions of his wife’s infidelity during the 1970’s. Although he finished Anniversaries and had even started to work on another project, he never recovered from his disappointment concerning his wife, about which he wrote the moving short story “Skizze eines Verunglückten” (sketch of an unlucky one) in 1980. Johnson slowly drank himself to death. He must have died (based on circumstantial evidence) on February 23 or 24, 1984, but his body was not found until three weeks later.

For a contemporary author, Johnson is the subject of a relatively large body of critical works. His reception, however, has not been without controversy. The critic Richard Alewyn found the author’s style “mannered,” and Marcel Reich-Ranicki called him a mere “registrar.” Johnson’s works were met with silence by the East German literary establishment. His reputation as one of the most important postwar German authors is now well established, however.

Bibliography

Baker, Gary Lee. Understanding Uwe Johnson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Part of the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature series. Provides insight to Johnson’s literature and politics.

Boulby, Mark. Uwe Johnson. New York: Ungar, 1974. Uses the psychoanalytic approach and analyzes the psychological-erotic conflict between the figures in Johnson’s novels. Includes a bibliography.

Fickert, Kurt J. Dialogue with the Reader: The Narrative Stance in Uwe Johnson’s Fiction. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996. Delves into Johnson’s narrative technique. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fickert, Kurt J. Neither Left nor Right: The Politics of Individualism in Uwe Johnson’s Work. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Volume 59 of American University Studies: Series I, Germanic Languages and Literature. Focuses on Johnson’s political and social views.

Hirsch, Marianne. Beyond the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson. York, S.C.: French Literature Publications, 1981. Places Johnson beside other authors in literary history and criticism. Focuses on cultural conflicts in their lives and as represented in their works.

Riordan, Colin. The Ethics of Narration: Uwe Johnson’s Novels from “Ingrid Babendererde” to “Jahrestage.” London: Modern Humanities Research Association for the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1989. Based on a dissertation, this work focuses on Johnson’s ethics in narration.

Shirer, Robert K. Difficulties in Saying “I”: The Narrator as Protagonist in Uwe Johnson’s “Jahrestage” and Chrisa Wolf’s “Kindheitsmuster.” New York: Peter Lang, 1988. A close look at the first-person narrative in two major works from twentieth century German literature.

Shirer, Robert K. “Uwe Johnson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 75: Contemporary German Fiction Writers, Second Series, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Provides a biographical and critical essay on Johnson. It also discusses several of his works.

Taberner, Stuart. Distorted Reflections: The Public and Private Uses of the Author in the Work of Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, and Martin Walser, 1965-1975. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. A specialized literary study. Includes a bibliography.