Twelve Years by Joel Agee

First published: 1981

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1948-1960

Locale: East Germany

Principal Personages:

• Joel Agee, (also known as
• Joel Uhse, ), the author of this memoir, who recalls his coming-of-age during a turbulent period in history
• James Agee, his father, an American writer
• Bodo Uhse, his stepfather, an East German novelist and editor
• Alma Mailman Agee Uhse, his mother, James Agee’s former wife
• Stefan Uhse, Joel Agee’s stepbrother

Form and Content

Twelve Years is a lyrical evocation of Joel Agee’s passage toward manhood; it is a moving autobiographical record of the failures, fumbles, and epiphanies of a boy who lands in the Soviet sector of East Germany in 1948, when he is eight years old. The boy is in the company of his mother, his stepbrother, and his stepfather, Bodo Uhse. Uhse, an “Old Communist,” and those like him, who “had fled and fought the Nazis, . . . were expected to be the leaders of the New Germany, which would be built on the ruins of the old.” For the next twelve years, until his family is finally wrenched apart by the failure of his parents’ marriage, Agee is shaped by the disappointments and repercussions of his uncontrollable adolescent individuality in a restrictive sociopolitical climate.

Following the well-known traditions of the literary self-portrait, Agee reveals himself as a benighted, sexually frustrated “young misfit,” a transplanted Huckleberry Finn who struggles to find his elusive identity and its particular artistic voice just as wretchedly as he struggles to lose his virginity. These are struggles that are neither won nor lost within the boundaries of the text, for when the twenty-year-old high school dropout turned shipyard laborer, Joel Uhse—as he is known in East Germany—leaves his home of twelve years for the United States in 1960, his identity as a man and an artist is not yet firmly established.

There are no chapters in the memoir. It is divided chronologically into three sections, three divisions of the titular twelve years. The first section, “1948-1955,” explores the first seven years of Agee’s life with his family in East Berlin, until he is sent away at the age of fifteen to a boarding school in Thuringia. The next section, “1955-1958,” concentrates on the years between age fifteen and age eighteen, years of almost unavoidable failure and increasing sexual longing and frustration. This part relies on substantive passages from Agee’s adolescent journals to textualize the process of remembering. The third section, “1959-1960” (by far the shortest), focuses on his final year in East Germany, spent as a shipyard laborer.

In the first section in particular, Agee investigates not only events and emotions but also the mysterious workings of his memory and its incomprehensible selective process. In the second section, these discursive passages are largely replaced by “documentary” entries from his diaries, including, in particular, a short and poignantly bitter play he has recorded both to illustrate and to distance himself from the horror and the guilt of his parents’ rapidly deteriorating marriage. The third and final section is appropriately less literary; the simplified style and more coherent nature of the prose are in accord with the rhythm of his shipbuilder’s hammer. The memoir ends abruptly; the past self that Agee has re-created moves as unceremoniously into the reader’s past as the train on which he and his mother are installed— they are on the first leg of their journey back to the United States—jerks roughly toward his future. The circular nature of Agee’s experiences is reflected in the structure of his writing.

Critical Context

The concerns that Agee re-creates in his finely organized network of separate, self-contained memories are not those of political parties: They are the concerns of a typically narcissistic and nihilistic adolescence that has rejected both itself and the adult world to which it paradoxically aspires.

Agee’s unattainable boyhood goal seems to be to forsake the childish realms of virginal ignominy without passing through the equally offensive gates of responsible maturity. The painfully slow resolution of this problematic dilemma occurs in the social and political climate of East Germany after the war, and to this extent, Agee chronicles not only his own development but also that of his adopted home. Still, Twelve Years never attempts to answer the question “What was East Germany like between the years of 1948 and 1960?” Instead, the memoir is a response to Agee’s own internal quest for memory, an answer to a self-posed question: “What did it feel like to grow up in East Germany between the years of 1948 and 1960?” The location is not central, but never irrelevant, to the author’s primary goal: the literary re-creation of his former boyhood self.

Twelve Years is not intended as a political or sociological document, but as an artistic re-creation and interpretation of a former self via the paths of memory. Literary accuracy, the correspondence between the written word and the event, between the expression and the experience, was Agee’s principal goal, and the formal beauty of the prose is generally acknowledged by most readers, although some have found fault with an autobiography that is so clearly “self-absorbed . . . in a world raw from its recent history and pervaded with politics.”

East German texts are often devoured by their cultural context; American texts often ignore theirs. Joel Agee’s sensitively written autobiography provides the best of both worlds: a memoir that chronicles the development of a child and a country, devoid of bitterness or propaganda yet filled with a “reflective political intelligence” and an engaging sense of self-parody. Agee documents the cultural conflicts that informed his youth with a perplexingly aggressive, yet understated, humor, best exemplified, perhaps, in his description of members of the East German intelligentsia battling one another for hotels and utilities around an American Monopoly game board. The work strives to address universal questions of adolescence and identity while recording the writer’s self-conscious quest for the script of his own memories. Twelve Years is a work which has earned consideration in many critical contexts: theoretical, literary, and sociopolitical. It is a welcome and finely crafted addition to the genre of the literary memoir.

Bibliography

Adams, P.L. Review in Atlantic Monthly. CCXLVII (June, 1981), p. 101.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXIII, July 22, 1981, p. 17.

Coles, Robert. “Growing Up East German,” in The New York Review of Books. XXXIII (July 16, 1981), p. 49.

National Review. XXXIII, November 27, 1981, p. 1435.

The New Yorker. LVII, May 11, 1981, p. 155.

Reed, J.D. “Young Misfit,” in Time. CXVII (May 11, 1981), p. 90.

Richardson, Jack. “Growing Up German,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (April 26, 1981), p. 12.

Saturday Review. VIII, May, 1981, p. 74.

Street, J.B. Review in Library Journal. CVI (May 1, 1981), p. 106.

Time. CXVII, May 11, 1981, p. 90.