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Jahrestage #3-4 abridged
Anniversaries II: From The Life Of Gesine Cresspahl
Gesine and her daughter, Marie, emigrate from West Germany to New York City, where they are caught up in the political events of 1968
- GenresFiction
644 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1987
About the author
Uwe Johnson
102 books63 followersUwe Johnson was a German writer, editor, and scholar.
Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania (now Kamień Pomorski, Poland). His father was a Swedish-descent peasant from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pommern. At the end of World War II in 1945, he fled with his family to Anklam (West Pomerania); his father died in a Soviet internment camp (Fünfeichen). The family eventually settled in Güstrow, where he attended John-Brinckman-Oberschule 1948–1952. He went on to study German philology, first in Rostock (1952–54), then in Leipzig (1954–56). His Diplomarbeit (final thesis) was on Ernst Barlach. Due to his lack of political support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the University on 17 June 1953 but was later reinstated.
Beginning in 1953, Johnson worked on the novel Ingrid Babendererde, rejected by various publishing houses and unpublished during his lifetime.
In 1956, Johnson's mother left for West Berlin. As a result, he was not allowed to work a normal job in the East. Unemployed for political reasons, he translated Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (the translation was published in 1961) and began to write the novel Mutmassungen über Jakob, published in 1959 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main. Johnson himself moved to West Berlin at this time. He promptly became associated with Gruppe 47, which Hans Magnus Enzensberger once described as "the Central Café of a literature without a capital." [1]
During the early 1960s, Johnson continued to write and publish fiction, and also supported himself as a translator, mainly from English-language works, and as an editor. He travelled to America in 1961; the following year he was married, had a daughter, received a scholarship to Villa Massimo, Rome, and won the Prix International.
1964 - for the Berliner Tagesspiegel, Reviews of GDR television programmes boycotted by the West German press (published under the title "Der 5. Kanal", "The Fifth Channel", 1987).
In 1965, Johnson travelled again to America. He then edited Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen. Fragmente 1933-1956 (Me-ti: the Book of Changes. Fragments, 1933-1956). From 1966 through 1968 he worked in New York City as a textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace & World and lived with his family in an apartment at 243 Riverside Drive (Manhattan). During this time (in 1967) he began work on his magnum opus, the Jahrestage and edited Das neue Fenster (The new window), a textbook of German-language readings for English-speaking students learning German.
On 1 January 1967 protesters from Johnson's own West Berlin apartment building founded Kommune 1. He first learned about it by reading it in the newspaper. Returning to West Berlin in 1969, he became a member of the West German PEN Center and of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). In 1970, he published the first volume of his Jahrestage (Anniversaries). Two more volumes were to follow in the next three years, but the fourth volume would not appear until 1983.
Meanwhile, in 1972 Johnson became Vice President of the Academy of the Arts and was the editor of Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971. In 1974, he moved to Sheerness on the English Isle of Sheppey; shortly after, he broke off work on Jahrestage due partly to health problems and partly to writer's block.
This was not a completely unproductive period. Johnson published some shorter works and continued to do some work as an editor. In 1977, he was admitted to the Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt Academy for Speech and Writing); two years later he informally withdrew. In 1979 he gave a series of Lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt (published posthumously as Begleitumstände. Frankfurter Vorlesungen).
In 1983, the fourth volume of Jahrestage was published, but Johnson broke off a reading tour for health reasons. He died on 22 February 1984 in Sheerness in England. His body was not found until
Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania (now Kamień Pomorski, Poland). His father was a Swedish-descent peasant from Mecklenburg and his mother was from Pommern. At the end of World War II in 1945, he fled with his family to Anklam (West Pomerania); his father died in a Soviet internment camp (Fünfeichen). The family eventually settled in Güstrow, where he attended John-Brinckman-Oberschule 1948–1952. He went on to study German philology, first in Rostock (1952–54), then in Leipzig (1954–56). His Diplomarbeit (final thesis) was on Ernst Barlach. Due to his lack of political support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the University on 17 June 1953 but was later reinstated.
Beginning in 1953, Johnson worked on the novel Ingrid Babendererde, rejected by various publishing houses and unpublished during his lifetime.
In 1956, Johnson's mother left for West Berlin. As a result, he was not allowed to work a normal job in the East. Unemployed for political reasons, he translated Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (the translation was published in 1961) and began to write the novel Mutmassungen über Jakob, published in 1959 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main. Johnson himself moved to West Berlin at this time. He promptly became associated with Gruppe 47, which Hans Magnus Enzensberger once described as "the Central Café of a literature without a capital." [1]
During the early 1960s, Johnson continued to write and publish fiction, and also supported himself as a translator, mainly from English-language works, and as an editor. He travelled to America in 1961; the following year he was married, had a daughter, received a scholarship to Villa Massimo, Rome, and won the Prix International.
1964 - for the Berliner Tagesspiegel, Reviews of GDR television programmes boycotted by the West German press (published under the title "Der 5. Kanal", "The Fifth Channel", 1987).
In 1965, Johnson travelled again to America. He then edited Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen. Fragmente 1933-1956 (Me-ti: the Book of Changes. Fragments, 1933-1956). From 1966 through 1968 he worked in New York City as a textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace & World and lived with his family in an apartment at 243 Riverside Drive (Manhattan). During this time (in 1967) he began work on his magnum opus, the Jahrestage and edited Das neue Fenster (The new window), a textbook of German-language readings for English-speaking students learning German.
On 1 January 1967 protesters from Johnson's own West Berlin apartment building founded Kommune 1. He first learned about it by reading it in the newspaper. Returning to West Berlin in 1969, he became a member of the West German PEN Center and of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). In 1970, he published the first volume of his Jahrestage (Anniversaries). Two more volumes were to follow in the next three years, but the fourth volume would not appear until 1983.
Meanwhile, in 1972 Johnson became Vice President of the Academy of the Arts and was the editor of Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971. In 1974, he moved to Sheerness on the English Isle of Sheppey; shortly after, he broke off work on Jahrestage due partly to health problems and partly to writer's block.
This was not a completely unproductive period. Johnson published some shorter works and continued to do some work as an editor. In 1977, he was admitted to the Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt Academy for Speech and Writing); two years later he informally withdrew. In 1979 he gave a series of Lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt (published posthumously as Begleitumstände. Frankfurter Vorlesungen).
In 1983, the fourth volume of Jahrestage was published, but Johnson broke off a reading tour for health reasons. He died on 22 February 1984 in Sheerness in England. His body was not found until
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August 16, 2019
I actually read the newer translation by Damion Searles, which Goodreads doesn't seem to have. I haven't read the older abridged version, but my partner has and she says it's absolutely night and day. There's a lot of compression apparently going on in the old one, and this is a book where more is always better.
There's not enough praise in the world for mankind to heap on this project. It's not just great: it's important. By any right, it'd be as important as Joyce's Ulysses. It's not as lyrically experimental or as groundbreaking, probably, but in ambition, in intellect, in every other measure it's the equal of that book. If Joyce's task was trying to dramatize the feeling of being an Irishman at a time when the Empire was crumbling and one had to reconcile oneself to both a brutal past and an uncertain future, to understand what belonging to that kind of polity meant, this book takes the same mission and applies to a world racked by the wars that failing Empire produced. It offers the same diagnostics - a focus on a small set of characters at a particular time in history - but adds in voids of time where the needle of its incredibly detailed, finely recalled personal histories just... skips. Sometimes for five years, as in the entirety of the second World War, and sometimes for longer or just for days. It uses that to explain what happens when nationalism, ideology and the forces of history collide in the smallest of battlefields: a single village. And what happens to a product of that place when she decides to escape.
And it does all of that with singularly masterful prose and a protagonist who thinks in every way like you, the reader, do: circularly, full of trivial concerns that connect themselves to big ones, personal judgments and habits of thought that emerge from the impossible situations she has found herself in and that survive long past their expiration date, weird suspicions she examines, weird suspicions she doesn't. Gesine herself is photorealistic, and if nothing else, you will keep reading for that.
But you'll read it for other reasons, too, because when you locate a character like that in the most momentous period in recent history - the end of the Weimar Republic, the advent of the Third Reich, the fall of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany, and later, the height of the Cold War as the United States conducts a vicious war in Vietnam and comes apart at the seams under Pres. Johnson - you come to really see a time and a place and a people as they were. The power of the technique is remarkable, and Johnson must have realized it, as the project apparently dominated his life for decades, until he died in England with only Gesine for company, in the Eighties.
The dedication, in a word, shows.
The final book has its problems. There are clearly points during which Johnson's focus slipped, and a plot that felt - for all its detours - disciplined in the first volume starts to exhibit lapses that seem less deliberate. Not flubs, exactly: the details are all present and correct. Rather, there are things you'll wish Johnson spent time on that he seems to forget to. There are places he lingers he shouldn't, and places he should go that he doesn't. You get the sense that he could have continued this for another 365 "entries" if he had the time and health, but sadly, he didn't. You can both abridge that and you can't. Get the unabridged version though. Even if it occasionally loses its way, this is still a monumental work that deserves as much time as you can give it.
There's not enough praise in the world for mankind to heap on this project. It's not just great: it's important. By any right, it'd be as important as Joyce's Ulysses. It's not as lyrically experimental or as groundbreaking, probably, but in ambition, in intellect, in every other measure it's the equal of that book. If Joyce's task was trying to dramatize the feeling of being an Irishman at a time when the Empire was crumbling and one had to reconcile oneself to both a brutal past and an uncertain future, to understand what belonging to that kind of polity meant, this book takes the same mission and applies to a world racked by the wars that failing Empire produced. It offers the same diagnostics - a focus on a small set of characters at a particular time in history - but adds in voids of time where the needle of its incredibly detailed, finely recalled personal histories just... skips. Sometimes for five years, as in the entirety of the second World War, and sometimes for longer or just for days. It uses that to explain what happens when nationalism, ideology and the forces of history collide in the smallest of battlefields: a single village. And what happens to a product of that place when she decides to escape.
And it does all of that with singularly masterful prose and a protagonist who thinks in every way like you, the reader, do: circularly, full of trivial concerns that connect themselves to big ones, personal judgments and habits of thought that emerge from the impossible situations she has found herself in and that survive long past their expiration date, weird suspicions she examines, weird suspicions she doesn't. Gesine herself is photorealistic, and if nothing else, you will keep reading for that.
But you'll read it for other reasons, too, because when you locate a character like that in the most momentous period in recent history - the end of the Weimar Republic, the advent of the Third Reich, the fall of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany, and later, the height of the Cold War as the United States conducts a vicious war in Vietnam and comes apart at the seams under Pres. Johnson - you come to really see a time and a place and a people as they were. The power of the technique is remarkable, and Johnson must have realized it, as the project apparently dominated his life for decades, until he died in England with only Gesine for company, in the Eighties.
The dedication, in a word, shows.
The final book has its problems. There are clearly points during which Johnson's focus slipped, and a plot that felt - for all its detours - disciplined in the first volume starts to exhibit lapses that seem less deliberate. Not flubs, exactly: the details are all present and correct. Rather, there are things you'll wish Johnson spent time on that he seems to forget to. There are places he lingers he shouldn't, and places he should go that he doesn't. You get the sense that he could have continued this for another 365 "entries" if he had the time and health, but sadly, he didn't. You can both abridge that and you can't. Get the unabridged version though. Even if it occasionally loses its way, this is still a monumental work that deserves as much time as you can give it.
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