Anniversaries (novel)

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Original publisher's covers of the first prints

Anniversaries. The title of the four-volume main work by Uwe Johnson , published between 1970 and 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, is from Gesine Cresspahl's life .

The time span of the 1703-page novel spans the end of the Weimar Republic , the rise of National Socialism , the occupation of Mecklenburg by the Red Army , the beginnings of the GDR and the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968. The second location, New York , the main character Gesine Cresspahl experiences during the Vietnam War and the social conflicts of the 1960s .

Overview

The story accompanies the 34-year-old German bank employee Gesine Cresspahl and her 10-year-old daughter Marie from August 1967 to August 1968 in New York for one year. Gesine and a narrator figure who bears the same name as the author create an unusual New York diary or a subjective chronicle of the year from the stream of daily events, newspaper reports, thoughts and conversations . The reports from the life of the Cresspahl family in the fictional small town of Jerichow in Mecklenburg from the 1930s to Gesine's emigration to New York are inserted as growing internal narratives .

More than 2/3 of the anniversaries are a discussion of the political decisions of the Soviet military administration and of politics in the early GDR. The Jerichow stories describe in increasing detail the violence and arbitrariness of the Red Army and the GDR that is dependent on it . When Gesine decided to promote the socialist renewal in the CSSR on behalf of her American bank, but also out of political conviction, the Warsaw Pact troops ended this attempt at reform of Stalinism on August 20, 1968 - Gesine had one last hope for a socialist one Lost home. After the settlement with the Soviet system, after the failure of the Prague Spring and after the critical view of America that pervaded the novel, the only political stance attributed to Gesine's daughter Marie remains "perplexed anti-communism": any departure towards a human society seems blocked for the time being. But Gesine's revered "teacher of English and decency", Julius Kliefoth, closes the novel with a touch of hope: "Basically, one only knows one thing about life: what is subject to the law of becoming must perish according to this law."

The narrative moves in the daily chapters from "outside in": they usually begin with news from the New York Times and then usually follow Gesine's memories of the events in Germany. So a double novel about the New York created the 60's and the fictional Mecklenburg town Jerichow, about Gesine eventually escape into the anti-Semitism beschweigende and rearmament be operated FRG and their emigration to the United States . The connecting lines between New York and Jerichow as centers of action exist in the anti-Semitism and racism that exist here and there , in the city of New York as a diaspora of refugees from Europe, in the concentration camp number on the arm of Gesine's New York neighbor Mrs. Ferwalter.

title

The "anniversaries" are the 366 calendar New York days described in the novel from August 1967 to August 1968 (1968 was a leap year), in the middle of the Cold War , in the hot war of the USA in Vietnam with its expansion of the fighting measures in North Vietnam, with daily racism , the civil rights movement , corruption and crime.

Anniversaries are also the consecutive days of remembrance, days of remembrance on which something worth considering happens anew every day and remembrance of what is long past takes place - so the days of the year 67/68 are days of attentive observation of the present as well as of looking back, of remembrance to the events of over 30 years ago: Gesine had lost her mother, her father and her lover and father of Marie early due to political circumstances - her quiet inconsolability is a motive of the almost socially solitary life and her persistent work of memory.

As a disclaimer of incompleteness, the title addition "From the life of ..." already points to the questions of selection, "objectivity" and reliability of today's narration and thus to the poetological reasons for extensive discussions about the structure of the novel and the narrator of the anniversaries .

Emergence

Johnson worked intermittently from 1968 to 1983 on his four-volume main work, which he ends on August 20, 1968, the day on which the CSSR was occupied and the attempt at " socialism with a human face " was eliminated.

The work, initially planned for only one volume, grew within 15 years to a four-volume novel of 1700 printed pages, of which the first three volumes appeared in 1970–73, but the fourth volume only after a ten-year break in 1983.

The figures are z. Partly known from other works by Johnson. The anniversaries have z. For example, the conjectures about Jacob “as their presupposition” and “continue to write them (...).” The subject matter and characters of that debut also found their way into the anniversaries from the posthumously published novel Ingrid Babendererde .

Find the right life

The central theme of the anniversaries is the process of recognizing a world full of dangers, in which experience, remembering and experiencing become the basis of one's own life decisions. That is Johnson's old topic: “How is it to live properly and to speak truthfully in this world of systemic constraints, its ideological deceptions and propagandistic language regulations? (...) And how do you raise a child in this world? ”The decision-making situations in question are e.g. B. political engagement, flight and emigration or adjustment to hierarchies.

Gesine's goal is “to learn about things. At least with knowledge ”to live in the“ consciousness of the day ”. Nothing should be missing for a sensible "presence" in the present, which for Gesine is only possible as a resistance against an alienated way of life. Gesine speaks her comments and stories on tape “for when I'm dead”, fearing that her effort to live up to her time is not always understandable, even for her precocious daughter Marie.

“That is the theme of the entire cycle of novels, a single paraphrase about politics and crime, about people's attempts to free themselves and about the futility of this attempt.” Chances in life are distributed through social hierarchies, group membership, political systems and their wars . Gesine is therefore concerned with “giving the friendly sight and moment and moment a sharp edge of danger and misfortune” in order to be able to behave accordingly.

New York Times compass

Important passages on the Path of World Orientation lead through the pages of the New York Times ; it is the beginning of all political, social and historical knowledge. Gesine sees her as a person, an “honest old aunt”, who, because of her pre-sorting of events, is always a patronizing governess, with whom she deals more and more.

Reading is a central function of orientation in the world and studying the Times on a daily basis is a moral duty for Gesine - and increasingly also for Marie. “Reading the newspaper is the compass for your homeless soul.” Only publication in the Times guarantees the truth of the news, and thus of the world, to whose realities one must orient oneself.

The anniversaries are “a newspaper novel in many ways. (...) In his Frankfurt poetology lectures from 1979, Uwe Johnson once spoke of the fact that in the anniversaries he raised his 'picking up the city's reality that was not being worked on with excerpts from the New York Times' to the choreographic principle of the book. “With her efforts, Gesine personifies this knowledge and memory-based practice of knowledge, which the reader himself mimetically practices in his reading of the 366 daily entries.

Memory work

The messages registered by Gesine in the Times , the “Diary of the World”, are almost all in the context of social and political conflicts, which for Gesine make clear the social immaturity in post-war societies in the USA and Europe.

This kaleidoscope of parallel, disparate, problematic impressions is countered by memory work, the second main theme of the anniversaries. The point is to understand the cumbersome past with the means by which we also try to understand our present: with the “multi-faceted grid of earth time and causality and chronology and logic.” The narrated past, demanded by her daughter, should therefore stop Gesine's view also has an educational effect as a demonstration of possibilities against which Marie still believes she is immune.

The disparate present makes all orientation difficult and only in memory, only in historical reflection, in the almost daily internal narratives of the Jerichow sequences, a representation of linear historical processes and thus a narrative family history emerges. The past, shaped in the narrative, is only an incompletely constructed linear flow of events, but this path of reduced memory is the only way to wrest an insight from the past, to become sensitive to hints before they become possibilities from which dangers arise.

Structure of the narrative

The novel is not a continuous chronicle, not a diary with subject-related content, but a montage, collage or mosaic of newspaper notes, episodes, memories, character images, dialogues and letters. The novel also tells its stories in a double refraction: on the one hand, a "vertical" distinction is made between the time levels of the New York present and the Jerichow past, and on the other hand, a "horizontal" distinction is made between a narrator Gesine, who at first glance appears confident in the foreground, and the narrator in the background with the narrator figure "Johnson" leading the pen. The author was aware of this narrative innovation and repeatedly problematized the mode of his own narration.

“His radical break with any traditional narrative form - the different levels of experience, reporting and memory often merge into one another in a single sentence - he explained to his American editor years ago, almost flippantly, when he asked about the traditional form: 'That is a pretty basic question - and it requires a full answer, and I don't know a full answer. I'm sure there are stories that are as easy to tell as they seem. I do not know any.' "

Storytelling in a team

Gesine's daughter Marie is usually present when Gesine records her reports on tape. Marie does not listen passively, but asks in between and demands clarifications, criticizes and doubts her mother's representations. But not only Marie influences the story, but also the character of the narrator "Johnson", who was commissioned by Gesine to describe this one year 1967/68. The Johnson narrator appears in the text as Gesine's dialogue partner, ultimately designs the text for her and is therefore responsible for the artistic form of her biography. But the client and the “comrade writer” cannot always agree on the quantity and quality of the daily entries and sometimes the only compromise that remains is a reference to deletion.

Only the introduction of the double narrator enables critical inquiries, necessary additions or omissions and, if necessary, even corrections - and thus clarifies the approach to the truth as a process of negotiation. The narrative is the result of an unusual teamwork, through which the narrative fiction is broken, the claim to the greatest possible truth of the events is at least narrative fulfilled and the activation of the reader is achieved. For these narrative and epistemological reasons, the narrator Gesine is given a reflector figure and this bears the name of the author, so that the desired effects do not appear as a play of figures within the narration.

Can you still rely on Gesine as a witness of her life, since the Johnson narrator figure knows more about her life than she does? This uncertainty of the reader about the guarantor for her biography underlines the uncertainty inherent in the composition about the correct version of the facts and about her ideological résumé. The reader's expectation of linear, reliable narration, already disappointed by the news fragments from the Times , is not fulfilled a second time through the participation of the narrator, who largely works in the background. The reader remains in the existential uncertainty about the truth and remembered life, which also applies to him, and is thus thrown back on the task of inventing the rhyme for the events himself.

Language and style

The anniversaries' sentences are clear and paratactic, rich in attributes, subject and object-oriented and use an unusual number of foreign languages ​​(German of course, English, French, Czech, Russian, Danish, Low German ...).

Rolf Becker registers continuity of the work: "Johnson’s stubborn, sometimes odd, circumspect care about naming has not diminished."

The complicated process of approaching Gesine and her narrator to reality becomes clear in the careful, trial use of unusual formulations - but when he describes everyday racism in the USA, "he finds edgy and direct words," says Heike Mund.

What Andreas Bernard appreciates about Johnson's language is that it “seeks to redefine the relationship between words and things in every expression, in every sentence and does not allow itself any outdated formulation, no ingrained inaccuracy” and thus “generates an unusual intensity. "

Fritz J. Raddatz finds a “miracle construction made of words”, while Marcel Reich-Ranicki sees it as “leather, no, artificial leather” (quoted from Rolf Michaelis).

reception

The anniversaries were included in the ZEIT library of 100 books and in 1999 writers, critics and Germanists voted the anniversaries at number 6 on their list of the most important German-language novels of the 20th century in a campaign by the Munich Literature House .

“Although the anniversaries were considered illegible, the literary critics received Johnson's“ Glimpse into the Epoch ”with euphoria,” summarizes Heike Mund.

Rolf Michaelis outlines the range of reactions: “One obviously cannot talk calmly about a book from the last third of the twentieth century that tells so calmly, sometimes almost comfortably. 'Clumsy sentence structure', 'pretentious tone of voice', 'stiff and old-fashioned language' is chalked up by a reader of the older generation (Reich-Ranicki) of the Mecklenburg Chronicle, which he reviled as 'leather, no, artificial leather', while a younger critic ( Urs Jenny ) praises the 'moving vitality' of a book that 'nobody but Uwe Johnson' could write: 'so stubborn, so scrupulous, so patient and so sensitive'. "

“The critic Joachim Kaiser, ” writes the anonymous author in getabstract.com, “praised the Anniversaries tetralogy as an 'opus magnum' and demanded that it be placed alongside the great works of our German literary history. ' (...) Some critics criticized the extremely cumbersome reading and the author's lack of psychological empathy for his characters. (...) Siegfried Unseld saw in the work about a 'World Year' the so far 'last epoch novel' and compared it to James Joyce ' Ulysses about a' World Day ':' It is at the same time an epiphany of everyday life and a utopian draft. ' For many, the actual German post-war modernity began with Johnson. "

filming

With the title Anniversaries , Margarethe von Trotta's novel with Suzanne von Borsody , Axel Milberg , Matthias Habich , Nina Hoger and Hanns Zischler was filmed as a four-part television film in 1999/2000 (duration: 360 minutes, producer: Wolfgang Tumler ).

literature

  • Michael Bengel (Ed.): Johnson's Anniversaries . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1985 (Suhrkamp paperback materials). ISBN 3-518-38557-7
  • Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's anniversaries . Narrative structure and political subjectivity. ( Also dissertation) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990. ISBN 3525205635
  • Rolf Michaelis : Small address book for Jerichow and New York. A register for Uwe Johnson's novel Anniversaries . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983, ISBN 3-518-04530-X
  • Sarah Till: storytelling against oblivion. About the narrative reflection of history in Uwe Johnson's anniversaries and Einar Schleef's Gertrud . Grin 2009 ISBN 978-3640321841

Web links

  • Rolf Becker, Uwe Johnson. Jerichow in New York, Spiegel [1]
  • Andreas Bernard , Back to Riverside Drive, Frankfurter Allgemeine [2]
  • Getabstract (without author), summary of anniversaries [3]
  • Hanjo Kesting , History of Disillusionment, NDR Kultur [4]
  • Christian Köllerer, Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries (summary notes) [5]
  • Rolf Michaelis , Anniversaries , Zeit-Online [6]
  • Heike Mund, Uwe Johnson: Anniversaries , Deutsche Welle [7]
  • Fritz J. Raddatz , A fairy tale from history and stories, Zeit-Online [8]
  • Dieter Wunderlich , The Anniversaries of Uwe Johnson [9]

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ Uwe Johnson:. 2nd Edition. Volume 1-4. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2017, 1st volume ISBN 978-3-518-46451-9 , 2nd volume ISBN 978-3-518-46452-6 , 3rd volume ISBN 978-3-518-46453-3 , 4th volume ISBN 978-3-518-46454-0
  2. ↑ Gesine's father is triple victim of administered injustice and more than 2 years of almost fatal imprisonment. But without admitting a mistake, he is to be posthumously honored as a spy of the Allies - an example of systemic madness. (Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 842 ff., 1498, 1571) Johnson's concerns about the system are condensed in the narrative at the end of Volume 4 into a list of, among other 64 named victims, high punishments for political deviations. (ibid., p. 1608 ff.)
  3. ↑ Gesine once expresses metaphorically: “Where is moral Switzerland to which we could emigrate?” (Johnson, Anniversaries, 345) And she also knows where one comes closest to her ideal: “If you want to know what is possible about socialism is in our times, learn Czech, people! "(Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1288; 616)
  4. ↑ Before these events Gesine says: "If this does not work either, I would give up." (Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 610) In getabstract.com it is generalized: "Gesine stands for the lost generation of Germany."
  5. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1181
  6. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1702
  7. ↑ Rolf Michaelis: "Simultaneous Epic"
  8. ↑ Andreas Bernard: "In this environment (...) the two time levels of the novel refer to each other."
  9. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 521, 1670. Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's “Anniversaries”, p. 77 ff., 91, 161 ff.
  10. ↑ He interprets his own poetological considerations e.g. Take, for example, the figure of the German teacher Weserich, who analyzes Theodor Fontane's story Schach von Wuthenow . (Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1519 ff.)
  11. ↑ Ulrich Fries comments on the special function of the fourth volume after the long break as a reflective sum of the first three volumes and the discussions triggered by this: Uwe Johnson's “Anniversaries”, p. 175 ff.
  12. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 22, note 10 and p. 35
  13. ↑ Compare Rolf Becker
  14. ↑ Johannes Zech quoted from Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 123 f.
  15. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 63, 188 f.
  16. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 141 f. and note 33
  17. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 63, 348, 614 ff.
  18. ↑ Compare Fritz Raddatz. Hanjo Kesting, for example: the anniversaries tell the “story of a disillusionment.” Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's “Anniversaries”, p. 93: “Cresspahl and Gesine are the people in whom Johnson demonstrates two ways of missing out on happiness in this century . "The same p. 143:" The sum that the novel draws is clear - and depressing. "
  19. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 113. The deep emotional currents of the characters Gesine and Marie are determined by fear (Johnson Anniversaries, p. 480, 483, 513 f., 596 f., 614, 672, 840, 1012, 1048 f. , 1291, 1303 ...) and danger (ibid, pp. 441, 464, 469, 629, 653, ...). The psychoanalyst interviewed by Gesine also noticed this psychological texture. (ibid., p. 1670) Gesine, her mother, her father lived or live more or less close to giving up. (ibid., pp. 552, 610, 680, 704, 988, 731, 1042, 1133, 1185 ...)
  20. ↑ The Times is the “most experienced person in the world”, the “blind mirror of daily events”, our “proven supplier of reality”. (Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 172, 459, 543)
  21. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 14 f., 36 f., 577 ff., 1346
  22. ↑ Gesine finds the politically relevant but "hidden" news in the Times, often more than 50 pages (Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 578), becomes aware of the ways in which facts are presented (ibid., P. 546, 571), gains insights into the unspoken motives for political maneuvers (ibid, p. 441) and distrust stories that go together in everything (ibid, p. 1295).
  23. ↑ Compare Heike Mund.
  24. ↑ Being affected by measures by political apparatuses should be seen as “social instruction” from which those affected can “gain for their social knowledge”, says Gesine. (Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 1600, 1644, 1646)
  25. ↑ Compare Andreas Bernard, also Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 112
  26. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1345
  27. ↑ "Here it is shown not: how, but: that the present and the past are intertwined in a (ordinary) consciousness, that all moments of the past are present in every moment, but disordered, subject to the whims of memory, but not arbitrarily. "(Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's" Anniversaries ", p. 38; 28)
  28. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 58
  29. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 130
  30. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 108 f.
  31. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 216, 313.
  32. ↑ Johnson comments on his method: "Here a scribe makes an entry on your behalf for each day in your stead, with your permission, but not for the daily day." (Johnson, Anniversaries, p, 1313)
  33. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", p. 108
  34. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's “Anniversaries”, p. 69: “Without completely losing the playful moment, there is an element both in the accumulation of passages with an implicit poetological dimension and - and especially - in their greater detail of the novel apply in a new quality: the self-thematization of the poetological. "
  35. ↑ Compare Fritz J. Raddatz
  36. ↑ Marie forces Gesine to make changes (Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 481 f., 521, 523, 724, 769 f., ...), but conciliatory states in Mecklenburg: “You smile so beautifully!” (Johnson, Anniversaries , Pp. 1377, 1383, 1479, 1481; 598, 724, 769 f.)
  37. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 1268 ff., 1313
  38. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 231: “Who is actually talking here, Gesine? - We both. You can hear that, Johnson. "Dieter Wunderlich:" So what we read is broken or filtered twice in relation to reality: first through Gesine's subjective memory, then through the revision of the author. "- more correctly: the Johnson narrator figure . Likewise Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries , pp. 59, 69 ff., 107, 121, 148.
  39. ↑ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 90 ff., 229, 924, 956, 1467, 1549, 1586, 1638
  40. ^ Johnson, Anniversaries, pp. 749, 956, 1301, 1465
  41. ↑ Johnson alludes to knowledge and decision-making as a social practice when a colleague of Gesine once sums up after exchanging ideas with her, "How strangely more abundant and faster thinking runs when one speaks" (Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 622 Gesine’s discussion with the Johnson narrator figure has an important function in reflecting on her life story, as does the internal dialogues with the voices of those present, absent and deceased, from whom she feels well advised in her existential uncertainty. (ibid., pp. 252, 304, 519 ff., 1373 ff, 1415, ...) The “Manifesto of 2000 words” from the Prague Spring also contains this narrative realized here as a political doctrine. (ibid, p. 1283). The narrative team, that inner team, the social team - Johnson's parallelization of his political utopia.
  42. ↑ Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries", pp. 65f., 98, 104
  43. ↑ “History is a draft.” (Johnson, Anniversaries, p. 1703) Explained in more detail in Ulrich Fries: Uwe Johnson's “Anniversaries”, p. 99, 108 ff., 116 ff., 143
  44. ↑ Musil's “Man Without Qualities” is “the most important novel of the century”. In: www.literaturhaus.at. Archived from the original on June 7, 2001 ; accessed on January 10, 2015 .
  45. ↑ Detailed presentation of Margarethe von Trotta's film on monstersandcritics.de ( memento of the original from October 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.monstersandcritics.de