Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson

First published:Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl, 1970-1983, 4 volumes (English translation, 1975; Anniversaries II, 1987)

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: 1931-1968

Locale: New York City; Mecklenburg, East Germany; and Richmond, England

Principal Characters:

• Gesine Cresspahl, a German emigre who has relocated to Manhattan
• Marie Cresspahl, Gesine’s daughter and confidante
• Heinrich Cresspahl, Gesine’s father, a German carpenter who resided in England for a time
• Lisbeth Cresspahl, Gesine’s mother, who was born into the Papenbrock clan
• Papenbrock, a self-made man, a prominent patriarch in the fictitious town of Jerichow, Mecklenburg
• Dietrich Erichson, Gesine’s present suitor, a professor and scientist working for NATO
• The New York Times, the newspaper personified in Gesine’s imagination as “Auntie Times”

The Novel

Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl is a multileveled record of the ongoing lives of Gesine Cresspahl and her daughter Marie, counter-pointed by Gesine’s reconstruction of the past. The present encompasses the historically critical, highly eventful year of August 21, 1967, through Au-gust 20, 1968. Verbatim quotations from The New York Times provide a running chronicle that emerges as the nagging liberal voice of yet another character, “Auntie Times.”

In volume 1 (volumes 1 and 2 of the German original), a heavy drama of the 1930’s is framed by a relatively light, optimistic tale of newcomers to New York City (from August, 1967, through February, 1968). Day by day, as if making diary entries, the thirty-four-year-old Gesine Cresspahl, now a bank employee, notes both the immediate present and the events of the past, often occurring at the same time of year. Her attempts at reconstructing the past are increasingly aided by her gifted ten-year-old child, Marie, who responds, challenges, and evaluates, understanding more and more.

In the early 1930’s, Heinrich Cresspahl, a German master carpenter comfortably settled in England, impulsively married a very pious, much younger woman of a higher social status during a visit to Jerichow, a fictitious town in Germany. Despite their real love, Cresspahl’s wife, “our Lisbeth,” could not endure England and returned to the bosom of her patriarchal German family, the Papenbrocks, to give birth at home, in Jerichow. The only child of this couple is Gesine. Cresspahl eventually joined his wife and was unable to extricate himself or his family from increasingly Nazified Germany. While Cresspahl pragmatically and phlegmatically made the best of things, however, Lisbeth lost her sanity. Her last act was an illumination to others—including the daughter and granddaughter, who subsequently reconstruct her life, helping each other.

Volume 2 (volumes 3 and 4 of the German original) covers the 1940’s and the early 1950’s in Germany, and March through August of 1968 in New York, with a whirling peripheral vision of the world outside. Now the reconstruction of the past, moving into the Soviet Occupation, the years under Walter Ulbricht, and Gesine’s conscious life, becomes more ironic while the present, which had begun rather brightly, darkens.

In a sharp stroke of irony, the apolitical Cresspahl is made mayor of Jerichow by the victorious British, only to be tortured and imprisoned by the Russians who come to replace the British. Gesine’s years of growing up, the regime of a German secondary school (still very traditional despite the addition of political propaganda and Russian lessons), and the pairings and jealousies of adolescents are described with gentle irony. Before discovering her latent love for Jakob Abs (Marie’s father, who dies in an accident before Marie’s birth, without having married Gesine), Gesine had gone with the touching, faintly ridiculous Pius Pagenkopf, son of a Communist Party official. Harsher satire is found in the story of Johnny Schlegel, who sets upa wonderful agricultural commune in which everyone is supposed to be happy—for which he is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.

Back in the present, the Vietnam War is escalating, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated, and demonstrations and riots are everywhere. More intensely than before, Gesine begins reliving her mother’s obsession with guilt by association. Young Marie, though still loyal to her new homeland, also feels disappointed and disillusioned (even with her erstwhile hero Mayor John Lindsay). Then Gesine suffers a personal tragedy which she does not dare to tell her daughter: Dietrich Erichson, her longtime suitor and almost a father to Marie, dies in a plane crash. Grasping for hope around which to build a new life, Gesine commits herself to a dangerous job with which she has been toying since the novel began: to become a discreet representative for her employer, an international bank, in the recently awakening city of Prague. She would be authorized to offer millions of dollars in credit (very quietly) to the Dubcek government. Here, at last, is an upstanding, guiltless, and idealistic regime that she could admire. Always ill at ease with the West because of her Socialist-informed education and now uncomfortable with the spreading guilt of the Vietnam War and the many other troubles that she has long been imbibing through Auntie Times, Gesine uproots herself and Marie for a fresh start in a newly regenerated Czechoslovakia. Author Uwe Johnson leaves Gesine and Marie on the Baltic coast, in Denmark, poised for the last lap of their journey on August 20, 1968, the day before the Eastern Bloc’s surprise invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the Dubcek regime.

The Characters

Gesine Cresspahl, the narrator and the central figure, remains the most elusive character, evidently because she herself wishes to be. Johnson even breaks in occasionally to complain to her about her self-willed behavior. She is driven by secret drives and obsessions with which she brooks no interference. The reader, however, is challenged to put all the pieces together and is allowed to examine all the evidence, including facts and thoughts to which even Gesine’s daughter is not privy. Thus, there is something of the crime mystery and the spy thriller, brought to a high level of psychological sophistication, in Johnson’s treatment of Gesine.

Gesine’s extremely precocious daughter, charming in her process of Americanization, serves the literary device of confidante, drawing out her alter ego. Marie believes that “if a person comes to New York he must also come to his senses.” She is more than a little reminiscent of the wise, doomed children found in the works of William Shakespeare. Yet Marie shows the psychological development of a real child in her growing trust of Erichson and in her relationships with other children, particularly a black classmate, Francine, who is also aware beyond her years.

Lisbeth Cresspahl is a mysterious figure. She has a mythical quality, partly because Gesine must strain to remember her, for all the scrupulous detail of her evocation: “When she removed the rings from the stove, she sometimes forgot she was still holding them with the hook, so lost was her gaze in the fire.... She was gone so suddenly; she was never mentioned. Seen no more.”

Heinrich Cresspahl is the most solidly created figure, rooted in his occupation and cool, pragmatic approach to life. He can deal only with the external manifestations of his wife’s behavior. When there is something on which he can get a grip, he acts swiftly and firmly, once saving his daughter’s life and later coping with his wife’s death.

The novel is lightened by a whole gallery of minor characters from New York City. Among them, The New York Times stands out as “she” develops over time from a prim, self-confident, didactic “Aunt” to “a shrewish, crafty old woman with a guilty conscience.”

Johnson has long been known as a writer who makes his readers work. Anniversaries shows Johnson’s bold ambition to create characters without reference to ready-made models. Johnson’s characters are originals; each requires an entirely new (and at first glance, obscure) frame of reference to be understood. In Anniversaries, particular concessions to the reader’s powers of imagination are made by enriching these new frames of reference with more detail than before. Thus, while new and unique, Johnson’s characters acquire some of the solidity found in the more familiar world of Thomas Mann. By naming his local German clan (Lisbeth’s family) the Papenbrocks, Johnson is beaming both a nod and a smile to the family depicted in Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1900).

Critical Context

The ambiguous deaths of several of his characters foreshadowed the end of Uwe Johnson’s own life. He died in England at the age of forty-nine, not long after the publication of the final volume of Anniversaries. He had been dead for three or four weeks when his body was discovered, and the circumstances of his death remained unclear.

Anniversaries was Johnson’s crowning achievement. Critics have noted that the completion of this book was necessary in order to make all of his preceding works understandable. Important characters from all of his earlier works, including Jakob, Karsch, from Das dritte Buch uber Achim (1961; The Third Book About Achim, 1967), Cresspahl, and Gesine herself, are brought back to have some mysteries at least partly clarified and their portraits filled in or shaded. The consistency of Johnson’s characters and the web of interplay among them over time recall the grand design of Honore de Balzac’s The Human Comedy (1829-1848) and, to a lesser extent, the work of William Faulkner.

Johnson borrows John Dos Passos’ semidocumentary technique—but for a purpose other than to capture some kind of Zeitgeist. Johnson strives to reach the point of intersection of mind and reality. When he approaches such points, his language becomes poetry.

In Anniversaries, Johnson relaxes his devotion to a Spartan modernism just enough to accept some of the bourgeois sensuousness of Thomas Mann. He tips his hat to Mann both humorously, with his hapless “Papenbrocks” clan, and seriously, with the inclusion of a bona fide letter from Mann to Ulbricht (published for the first time). While Johnson was known during his lifetime for complicated political views and difficult techniques, his painfully verified characters, as if wrested from reality, overshadow technique and ideology as time passes.

Bibliography

Boulby, Mark. Uwe Johnson, 1974.

Hirsch, Marianne. Beyond the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson, 1981.

Howard, Richard. Review in Saturday Review. II (February 22, 1975), p. 38.

Pawel, Ernst. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXX (February 23, 1975), p. 4.

Thomas, R. Hinton, and Wilfried van der Will. The German Novel and the Affluent Society, 1968.