Uwe Johnson

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Uwe Johnson's bust by Wieland Förster in front of the John-Brinckman-Gymnasium , Güstrow

Uwe Johnson (born July 20, 1934 in Cammin in Pomerania , † probably on the night of February 23 to February 24, 1984 in Sheerness on Sea , England ) was a German writer. He belonged to Group 47 . In his main work, the four-volume novel Anniversaries , according to the critic Joachim Kaiser , he formulated the “comforting utopia” that “even the most ruthless dictatorship cannot control the souls of its victims”.

Life

Memorial plaque on the house at Niedstrasse 14 in Berlin-Friedenau

Johnson was the son of a qualified farmer who worked as an estate manager and later became a dairy examination officer at the Reichsnährstand . The family lived in Anklam , the birthplace of Cammin i. Pom. explains itself from the maternity hospital there. Johnson attended 1st – 4th Class of the Cothenius School in Anklam and then came "on the basis of a general selection" to the German home school in Kosten near Posen , until it was closed in January 1945. At the end of April 1945, when Anklam was to be defended against the Red Army, the family evaded relatives in Recknitz near Güstrow until 1946 . Johnson's father was arrested, held in the Soviet special camp Fünfeichen and finally deported to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1947. The mother moved to Güstrow with Uwe and his sister Elke, who was five years younger than him. There Johnson passed his matriculation examination at the John Brinckman High School in 1952 . In Güstrow he was a member of the Protestant youth group around Gerhard Bosinski from 1947 to 1949 , from which the Young Community later developed.

From 1952 to 1956, Uwe Johnson studied German in Rostock and Leipzig with the official goal of becoming a publisher's editor . In May 1953, there were violent disputes between Johnson and the FDJ or SED leadership of the University of Rostock , as Johnson spoke publicly at a so-called "protest meeting" of the Philosophical Faculty for the young community and for the rights guaranteed in the constitution of the GDR advocated freedom of expression and religion. He also denounced the Ministry of State Security's practices in high schools. Johnson was initially expelled, but then re-admitted to university after the June 17, 1953 uprising . In the fall of 1954 Johnson moved to the University of Leipzig because he wanted to study with Theodor Frings and Hans Mayer . In 1956 Johnson completed his studies with a degree in German with a thesis on Ernst Barlach's novel The Stolen Moon .

After graduating, Uwe Johnson was unemployed and without income. He had his first book Ingrid Babendererde while studying . Completed the final exam in 1953 , but did not find a publisher, and now did fee work for the Academy of Sciences in Berlin and for the Reclam publishing house , which Johnson participated in a translation of the Nibelungenlied .

After his mother fled to West Berlin in 1956 , Johnson initially stayed in the GDR, but moved to West Berlin in 1959 - the same year that his debut novel Conjectures about Jakob was published by Suhrkamp Verlag . Ingrid Babendererde had rejected the Suhrkamp Verlag in 1957 and only published it from the estate in 1985.

In 1962 Uwe Johnson stayed in Rome thanks to a Villa Massimo scholarship. In the same year he married his girlfriend Elisabeth Schmidt, who fled the GDR after the Wall was built, with whom he had a daughter a little later. From 1964 to 1983 he had a friendly, but not always smooth correspondence with the Swiss writer Max Frisch . From 1966 to 1968 Johnson lived with his family in New York on the Upper Westside in Manhattan . The exact address - Apartment 204, 243 Riverside Drive , New York, NY 10025 - is identical to the place where the author Gesine Cresspahl, the protagonist of his major work Anniversaries , lives in New York City - “one that is almost European in architecture Street on the west coast of Manhattan, with a view of park trees, meadows, swings in the ground and behind them the Hudson river as wide as an inland lake in Mecklenburg ”. The first year he worked as a textbook editor at the publishing house Harcourt, Brace & World, through the agency of the publisher Helen Wolff . During this time he put together a German-language reading book for high school, which was published in 1967 under the title Das neue Fenster . His second year in Manhattan was funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant . During this time he worked on his anniversary novel. From 1967 until her death in 1975 he had a friendly relationship with the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt . The fictional character “Countess Seydlitz” bears Arendt's traits. Arendt did not agree with this naming, as her Jewish identity is not clear.

On February 19, 1967, members of Commune I, which was founded at the beginning of the year, moved into his West Berlin studio and work apartment, which he maintained next to his actual apartment at Stierstrasse 3 and which he had sublet to Ulrich Enzensberger during his stay abroad . He only found out about it from the newspaper. The "pudding assassination attempt" on US Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was planned in the apartment . It was discovered, but led to extensive media coverage. At Johnson's request, who was not in Germany at the time, his neighbor and friend Günter Grass had the police clear the apartment.

Marine Parade in Sheerness on Sea. Johnson lived in one of the white houses on the left side of the street in the background from 1974 until his death in 1984.

From 1969 Johnson was a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Academy of Arts in West Berlin, of which he became Vice President in 1972. In 1970, Volume 1 of the Anniversaries appeared , the main work of Johnson, on which he worked until a year before his death. Volume 2 (1971) and Volume 3 (1973) were published in the following years, Volume 4 announced Johnson would be for the following year, but was only able to publish it ten years later, in 1983, after a serious personal and creative crisis. In 1971 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize . From 1974 Johnson lived in Sheerness on Sea on the Thames island of Sheppey in Kent , England. In 1977 he became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . In 1978, Elisabeth Johnson separated from her husband, who could not get over her early love affair with the Prague Mozart researcher Tomislav Volek , which she had maintained as part of an exchange of letters at the beginning of the marriage. In addition, Johnson was (erroneously) convinced that his wife's lover in Prague must be a secret agent of the Czech or GDR state security . In 1979 Johnson was the lecturer in the Frankfurt poetics lectures ; the text of his lecture was published in 1980 under the title accompanying circumstances .

In solidarity with Franz Xaver Kroetz , Johnson joined his resignation from the Association of German Writers in 1983 . After Siegfried Unseld reminded him at the beginning of December 1982 that the monthly advance payments of the publisher of 3000 Marks had accumulated a "debit balance" of "DM 230 094.89" over the years, he finally closed the manuscript in March 1983 from volume 4 of the anniversaries ; the first three volumes were published in 1970, 71 and 73. In February 1984 Uwe Johnson died of heart failure in Sheerness , presumably due to alcoholism and drug abuse ; he was 49 years old. Since the exact date of his death is not known, various sources suggest that his body was only found 19 days and three weeks after his death. The journalist Tilman Jens caused a scandal at the time , who broke into Johnson's house after he was found to take photos and do research.

Uwe Johnson was buried in the Halfway Cemetery in Sheerness.

estate

After Johnson's death there was a legal dispute over the succession - including the literary estate - between the widow and daughter on the one hand and the Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld on the other. The procedure was decided in favor of Unseld.

For three years the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA) managed Johnson's author archive, which came from the publishing houses Suhrkamp and Insel. After the financing of a final takeover by the DLA failed in 2012, the University of Rostock received the holdings. The Uwe Johnson Archives are owned by the Johannes and Annitta Fries Foundation. The archive is available to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences for a complete historical-critical “Rostock edition” of the works, writings and letters of Uwe Johnson. The digitization of the estate was completed at the end of 2017 with a volume of 155,000 scans. The estate itself comprises 77,500 sheets.

Central theme

Uwe Johnson has often been dubbed the “poet of both Germanys”, which seems obvious against the background of his personal life story in a divided Germany, but can nevertheless be misleading. Because even if “the border” runs through Uwe Johnson's entire work as a central theme, we are “not dealing with the genre of border space literature, but rather with literature that has its own limits as a linguistic (art) work in the second half of the 20th century, that is, with awareness of their historical situation, ”. These limits are also explored against the background of a fundamental doubt about the traditional novel form, which the author once asked whether it was still possible to write in this form: “I'm sure there are stories that one can can tell as simply as they seem to be. I don't know any. ”Also noteworthy is Johnson's peculiarity of ensuring that the protagonists of his novels survive in subsequent narrative projects - while at the same time keeping the“ engine of his literary productivity running ”.

style

Uwe Johnson's style is characterized, among other things, by the relativization of the authorial narrator and a paratactic sequence of main clauses. The polyphony of the voices is also characteristic , for example in Danish and English sprinkles in the novel Anniversaries . The Low German language plays a special role in Johnson's work . What is also striking in the novel Anniversaries is the extensive use of quotations from the New York Times , with which the immediate presence of Gesine Cresspahl is mirrored, who, living with her daughter Marie in Manhattan, tells the story of her ancestors (“for when I'm dead am "). The linguistic precision and accuracy of the description are complemented by Johnson's fine humor, his gentle irony, which, for example, when analyzing a decisive scene in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandkeiten , lets him write: "After the lady has boarded, a comma makes her pause."

Literature House

Uwe Johnson literature house in Klütz

In the small town of Klütz in the north-west Mecklenburg district, the Uwe-Johnson-Literaturhaus was opened on April 7, 2006. It is located in a four-story bean and grain store from 1890. The store has been extensively renovated. Two floors are home to a permanent Johnson exhibition and readings are held. The director is the Germanist Anja-Franziska Scharsich. Half of the renovation costs of 1.24 million euros come from the federal budget , plus EU funding and urban development funding . The city of Klütz took over 280,000 euros.

Johnson probably never went to Klütz, but experts believe that it was Jerichow, which appears in his books . A section from the anniversaries is cited as evidence: It says: “Jerichow would belong to the Lübeck zonal border district. [...] The Jerichow-Nord airfield would be the Mariengabe airfield, approved for nothing but private equipment, competition for Lübeck-Blankensee. Sometimes, and more and more often, the Jerichower behaved as if they were Klützer ”.

Uwe Johnson Society

On February 26, 2010, the Uwe Johnson Society was founded in Rostock on the initiative of numerous Johnson research scientists with the support of the University and the City of Rostock . She has decided to use the same spelling as Uwe Johnson used to write words that are combined with names: without a hyphen between first and last names.

Awards and other honors

Uwe Johnson (center) receiving the Fontane Prize in 1960

Works

Johnson, the four volumes of anniversaries
Correspondence
Translations
Editing
  • The new window. Selections from contemporary German literature . New York et al. a .: Harcourt, Brace & World 1967.
  • Max Frisch: Keywords . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975; as paperback 1985, ISBN 3-518-37708-6 .
  • with Hans Mayer : The work of Samuel Beckett. Berlin Colloquium . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-518-06725-7 (st 225).
  • with Elisabeth Johnson: ramifications. An autobiography . Munich 1977; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-39076-7 (autobiography of the journalist Margret Boveri ).

Work edition

The work edition, which is made up of 22 volumes in 43 sub-volumes, is published by Suhrkamp-Verlag and is called Rostocker Ausgabe . The work edition is designed as a historical-critical edition with the departments Works, Writings and Letters. On the basis of the Uwe Johnson archive, which is a deposit of the Johannes and Annitta Fries Foundation at the University of Rostock and is being processed by a 24-year research center, the edition appears as an academy project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences at the university Rostock. The editors are Holger Helbig and Ulrich Fries with the assistance of Katja Leuchtenburger. The work edition is planned as a book and in a time-shifted form on the Internet. The digital presentation aims for historical-critical completeness with the highest scientific standards and should offer maximum flexibility for the readers .

In addition to the editions as a printed book, a freely accessible digital edition is provided, which is to be released with a time delay. Not only should the various text versions of the works, all materials belonging to the respective work, such as letters, be fully digitized and linked, as well as links to film and audio documents, but also links to other works in which the same people appear.

The "anniversaries" are planned for 2024. The next volumes of the work edition should be Karsch and other prose , correspondence with friends in Leipzig , two views and Berlin things .

Published:

  • Conjectures about Jakob . Work edition Volume 2, edited by Astrid Köhler, Robert Gillett, Cornelia Bögel and Katja Leuchtenberger. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-42702-6 . The digital edition will go live in autumn 2020.
  • The third book about Achim . Rostock edition. Historical-critical edition of the writings and letters of Uwe Johnson. 22 volumes in 43 sub-volumes. An academy project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Edited by Holger Helbich, Ulrich Fries and Katja Leuchtenberger. First department: works. Volume 3. Edited by Katja Leuchtenberger and Friederike Schneider. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-42703-3

literature

  • Tilman Jens : On the way to the place where the dead are . Looking for Uwe Johnson in Sheerness. Piper, Munich and Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-492-00690-6 .
  • Eberhard Fahlke (Ed.): “I think about the story…” Uwe Johnson in conversation . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-11440-9 .
  • Raimund Fellinger (Ed.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-11821-8 .
  • The cat's memory. Uwe Johnson - A chronicle in letters and pictures , compiled by Eberhard Fahlke. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-518-40672-8 .
  • Bernd Neumann: Uwe Johnson . With 12 portraits by Diether Ritzert. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-434-50051-0 .
  • Carsten Gansel (Ed.): Uwe Johnson between pre-modern and post-modern. De Gruyter, Berlin 1995; Reprint 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-014671-4 .
  • Jürgen Grambow: Uwe Johnson . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-50445-6 (Rowohlt's monographs, volume 445).
  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Uwe Johnson . Text + criticism, issue 65/66, new version: Munich 2001, ISBN 3-88377-665-3 .
  • Roland Berbig (ed.): Friendship. Conversations, documents, essays . Context, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-931337-40-5 .
  • Ulrich Krellner: “What I bear in my memory”. Investigations into the memory concept of Uwe Johnson's narrative . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2433-8 .
  • Ulrich Fries (Ed.): Not shown yet. Uwe Johnson in memory . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-20946-2 .
  • Uwe Neumann (Ed.): Johnson Years. Testimonies from six decades . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-41598-6 .
  • Katja Leuchtenberger: Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-18247-5 .
  • Lutz Hagestedt and Michael Hofmann (eds.): Uwe Johnson and the GDR literature. Contributions to the Uwe Johnson Symposium Klütz , Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-943157-06-2 .
  • Gunnar Müller-Waldeck : Johnson, Uwe (1934–1984). In: Dirk Alvermann , Nils Jörn (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon für Pommern . Volume 1 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania. Series V, Volume 48.1). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-20936-0 , pp. 230-235.
  • Frauke Meyer-Gosau: Trying to find a home. A trip to Uwe Johnson . Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65958-4 .
  • Jasmin Rittler: Uwe Johnson's letterhead . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-631-67738-4 .
  • Video: A conversation between Manfred Bierwisch and Raimund Fellinger, the editor-in-chief of Suhrkamp-Verlag on his 80th birthday ( on the website of Suhrkamp-Verlag )

Movie

  • The great literary tour. Uwe Johnson's New York. Documentary, Germany, 2016, 51:50 min., Book: Hartmut Kasper , director: Markus Augé, André Schäfer, production: Florianfilm, MDR , RB , rbb , SWR , WDR , arte , series: Die große Literatour , first broadcast: 8 June 2016 at arte, table of contents by arte.

Web links

Commons : Uwe Johnson  - Collection of Images

About Johnson

Individual contributions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Kaiser: Experienced literature. Piper, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-492-03048-3 , p. 337: “One last thing: Johnson can also write wonderfully delicately. He knows what intimacy is, what landscape is - and how quickly everything can be talked to death, formulated to death. If he even has something to tell about his beloved animals, about cats, about the shooting of a benign, trusting horse - then he rules so completely, so without remainder over the soul of his reader and victim, like this the comforting utopia of the "anniversaries" , even the most ruthless dictatorship cannot control the souls of its victims. "
  2. ↑ Uwe Johnson: Presentation of my development . Guestrow, 23.III.1952. Johnson-Jahrbuch Volume 4/1997, p. 11 ff. Pdf
  3. ^ Rainer Paasch-Beeck: Confirmation in Güstrow . Johnson-Jahrbuch 5, 1998. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-525-20904-5 , p. 55 books.google .
  4. ↑ See the entry of Uwe Johnson's matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
  5. ↑ Manfred Bierwisch: What the author should live on . In: Sense and Form . No. 4 , 2014, ISSN  0037-5756 , p. 563-565 .
  6. ↑ Cf. Heinz Ludwig Arnold: The Unfinished. Literary portraits. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, p. 247. Arnold also describes a meeting between Johnson and Peter Suhrkamp in Berlin, at which “the old man” immediately urged him to “work on the rejection of his own work”. In fact, Suhrkamp himself was in favor of accepting the manuscript - but the young Siegfried Unseld “wished that there would be no book in Peter Suhrkamp's publishing house”.
  7. ↑ Jost Nolte : A different moral than that of other people. In: Die Welt , December 9, 1996.
  8. ^ Uwe Johnson: Accompanying circumstances. Frankfurt lectures. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 410, 411.
  9. ^ Arendt to Johnson, July 6, 1970
  10. ^ A b Ulrich Greiner : Suhrkamp Verlag: A bitter legal dispute has been raging around Uwe Johnson for years. In: Die Zeit , December 6, 1996, No. 50,
      Jost Nolte : A different moral than that of other people. In: Die Welt , December 9, 1996.
  11. ^ Rolf Becker : Books: Entry into the house of the dead. In: Der Spiegel , January 14, 1985. Andrea Strunk : Holding one world against the world. In: The Friday of February 18, 2005.
      
  12. ^ Der Tagesspiegel online edition of August 2, 2014, accessed on April 17, 2019
  13. ↑ Weser Kurier of July 11, 2012, p. 21 and Uwe Johnson work edition planned. In: Weser Kurier , July 17, 2012.
  14. ↑ Katja Leuchtenberger: "A network connects lines" and three points , in: Johnson yearbook , published on behalf of the Uwe Johnson Society by Holger Helbig, Bernd Auerochs, Katja Leuchtenberger and Ulrich Fries, Volume 22/2015, Wallstein Verlag , Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1726-0 , p. 32.
  15. ↑ Press release BBAW / PM-1/2017
  16. ^ Dpa: University of Rostock: Milestone of the Rostock Johnson edition: digitization of the Uwe Johnson archive completed . In: FOCUS Online . January 15, 2018 ( focus.de [accessed on January 16, 2018]).
  17. ↑ Uwe Johnson: The dilemma of the border. On Uwe Johnson's early work. Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate in philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, presented by Leyla Sedghi , Munich 2004, p. 11.
  18. ↑ See Reinhard Baumgart : Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart. Reviews, essays, comments. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, Vienna 1994, p. 173.
  19. ↑ See Ulrich Krellner: Neither preliminary stage nor parallel story . Plea for the re-reading of Uwe Johnson's literary works 'Today Ninety Years'. In: Michael Hofmann, Mirjam Springer (eds.), Johnson-Jahrbuch , 16th year, 2009, Göttingen 2011, p. 53 f.
  20. ↑ Peter Horn : About the slow narration in Uwe Johnson's Ingrid Babendererde@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / peterhorn.kilu.de ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  Printed in: Manfred Jurgensen : Uwe Johnson. Views - Insights - Prospects . Francke, Bern 1989, pp. 167-191.
  21. ^ A b Norbert Mecklenburg: The poetic in Uwe Johnson's prose. Commentary on a piece from "Trying to Find a Father" . In: Carsten Gansel , Nicolai Riedel (eds.): Uwe Johnson between pre-modern and post-modern . De Gruyter, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-11-014671-1 , p. 5.
  22. ^ Uwe Johnson: Accompanying circumstances. Frankfurt lectures. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 16
  23. ↑ Description of the building and expansion on the website of the Literaturhaus , accessed on July 10, 2018
  24. ↑ Council meeting of May 18, 2011 (resolution no. RBV-822/11), official announcement: Leipzig Official Gazette no. 11 of June 4, 2011, in force since July 5, 2011 and August 5, 2011. Cf. Official Journal No. 16 of September 10, 2011.
  25. ↑ Presentation of the first volume on the Suhrkamp website , accessed on March 2, 2017
  26. ↑ Press release from Suhrkamp Verlag and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities from January 19, 2017 Digital PM , accessed on March 2, 2017
  27. ↑ a b Information on the website of the Uwe Johnson edition , accessed on August 6, 2019
  28. ↑ Online report of the Frankfurter Rundschau from April 5, 2017 , accessed on July 10, 2018
  29. ↑ Information on the dust jacket of the edition of The Third Book about Achim
personal data
SURNAME Johnson, Uwe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Cammin i. Pom.
DATE OF DEATH around February 24, 1984
Place of death Sheerness , England