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Jahrestage #1-2
Anniversaries, Volume 1: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, August 1967–April 1968
The first volume of a titanic masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, named one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times critics.Published to great acclaim as a two-part boxed set in 2018, Anniversaries is now available as two individual volumes. It is August 1967, and Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year that Hitler came to power, a survivor of war, of Soviet occupation, and of East German Communism, has been living with her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, in New York City for six years. Mother and daughter find themselves caught up in the countless stories of the world around stories of work and school and their neighborhood, with its shifting and varied cast of characters, as well as the stories that Gesine reads in The New York Times every day—about Che Guevara, racial violence, the war in Vietnam, and the US elections to come. Now, with Marie growing up, Gesine has decided to tell her daughter the story of her own childhood in a small north German town in the 1930s and ’40s. Amid memories of Germany’s criminal and disastrous past and the daily barrage of news from a world in disarray, Gesine, conscientious, self-scrutinizing, with a sharp sense of humor, struggles to describe what she has learned over the years and what she hopes to pass on to Marie. Marie, articulate, quizzical, with a perspective that is very much her own, has plenty of questions, too.Uwe Johnson’s intimate portrait of a mother and daughter is also a panorama of past and present history and the world at large. Comparable in richness of invention and depth of feeling to Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Anniversaries is one of the world’s great novels.
912 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1971
32 people are currently reading
464 people want to read
About the author
Uwe Johnson
101 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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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 29, 2025
I don't like leaving project reads like these unfinished, but from where I stand, the rewards simply don't justify the investment needed. The prospect of another eight hundred pages of Johnson's oblique cultural meanderings simply doesn't excite me like it did in August of last year.
I finished Volume One of Anniversaries about a week after the chronological date with which the author ends it, after nearly eight months of daily readings (with the occasion deviations from the it's dated sequence). In that time, I can to regard Johnson's narrators - the titular Gesine Cresspahl, her daughter Marie, and her father Heinrich - as distant acquaintances rather than close friends. Given the remarkable latitude he's given himself to explore their lives, Johnson seems surprisingly disinterested in exploring their interiority, and would rather examine the culture of two juxtaposed eras (the forties and the sixties).
Now you may read that and recognise the makings of a systems novel, and at first glance, I would agree with you. But I simply found that neither of his projects - the psychological profile and the cultural post-mortem - are delivered in an engaging way. His command of perspective is deliberately fractured and unstable, resulting in an unclear position as to what he actually thinks about the world he's cataloguing. The use of an ever shifting narratorial perspective is an interesting formal experiment, sure, but never allowed me to feel like I truly got inside the mind of any single character. The entire time I felt very distinctly like an outsider looking in...
...and maybe that's the point. Perhaps alienation was the intended position for his audience and reflects what he felt as a man of the postwar era himself; I'm in no position to confirm this. But as one of those readers, I spent over eight hundred pages looking for an entry point I never found. While there were remarkable passages and moments of clear-eyed, elevated prose, I'm going to hold off on finishing Volume Two of Anniversaries until such a time as I've knock off more a few more of my more immediate TBRs. Maybe that'll be by the end of this year, maybe next, maybe never.
To those who stuck along with me for the serialised group read, I enjoyed your company and conversation, and hope you got more out of it than I did. If you finish it and think the second volume may be more engaging than the first, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.
I finished Volume One of Anniversaries about a week after the chronological date with which the author ends it, after nearly eight months of daily readings (with the occasion deviations from the it's dated sequence). In that time, I can to regard Johnson's narrators - the titular Gesine Cresspahl, her daughter Marie, and her father Heinrich - as distant acquaintances rather than close friends. Given the remarkable latitude he's given himself to explore their lives, Johnson seems surprisingly disinterested in exploring their interiority, and would rather examine the culture of two juxtaposed eras (the forties and the sixties).
Now you may read that and recognise the makings of a systems novel, and at first glance, I would agree with you. But I simply found that neither of his projects - the psychological profile and the cultural post-mortem - are delivered in an engaging way. His command of perspective is deliberately fractured and unstable, resulting in an unclear position as to what he actually thinks about the world he's cataloguing. The use of an ever shifting narratorial perspective is an interesting formal experiment, sure, but never allowed me to feel like I truly got inside the mind of any single character. The entire time I felt very distinctly like an outsider looking in...
...and maybe that's the point. Perhaps alienation was the intended position for his audience and reflects what he felt as a man of the postwar era himself; I'm in no position to confirm this. But as one of those readers, I spent over eight hundred pages looking for an entry point I never found. While there were remarkable passages and moments of clear-eyed, elevated prose, I'm going to hold off on finishing Volume Two of Anniversaries until such a time as I've knock off more a few more of my more immediate TBRs. Maybe that'll be by the end of this year, maybe next, maybe never.
To those who stuck along with me for the serialised group read, I enjoyed your company and conversation, and hope you got more out of it than I did. If you finish it and think the second volume may be more engaging than the first, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.
March 16, 2022
Okay, Calling it quits here. At least for the foreseeable future. I just don't think I will gain much by finishing this. And here is a good stopping place.
My rambling thoughts when I was debating whether to continue or not:
The concept is interesting. It painstakingly depicts the time (1967/1968) with its descriptions of New York City, the news and politics, a German woman’s family history and the post-war guilt that goes along with it, and countless other things. There are nice moments of great human compassion, and sometimes lovely passages and truths about human nature.
However, I don’t quite see this as ‘the most important German novel of the postwar period’ that some have claimed it to be. I admit that it has great value in historical terms, particularly with the insight into the events of this time as they happened. I’m also not denying its literary merit. But there are times that I found the structure or certain devices uneven, if not lazy. It often falls flat and is extremely tedious in some sections. Or, for example, certain quirks become grating after the 100th gd time, such as the personification of The New York Times as some kind of Auntie— a barely perceptible chuckle the first time, a ‘I swear I’m going to throw this book out the window if he does it one more time’ tirade on the 100th.
There are plenty of big books that are great. But I see a tendency to give more credit and leeway to a book just because it is big and ambitious (bonus points if it’s a white male)—it is often the big book that is automatically dubbed an author’s ‘magnum opus’, despite the term meaning ‘a great work’. Of course there are countless reasons and theories behind this… is it another symptom of our fast-paced, short-attention-span society? Or just some kind of Stockholm Syndrome that takes over when we find ourselves in the middle of a tome with no end in sight? (--Hey, Justine, did you stop and think that this is just you getting disgruntled over hype culture…. *again*? --Excellent point, I shall take that under consideration.)
I’ve digressed. I’m in a mood. This is relatively unimportant. But voilà, some semblance of thoughts so far and, after looking over what I just wrote, maybe a sign that I should not continue…. We shall see.
My rambling thoughts when I was debating whether to continue or not:
The concept is interesting. It painstakingly depicts the time (1967/1968) with its descriptions of New York City, the news and politics, a German woman’s family history and the post-war guilt that goes along with it, and countless other things. There are nice moments of great human compassion, and sometimes lovely passages and truths about human nature.
However, I don’t quite see this as ‘the most important German novel of the postwar period’ that some have claimed it to be. I admit that it has great value in historical terms, particularly with the insight into the events of this time as they happened. I’m also not denying its literary merit. But there are times that I found the structure or certain devices uneven, if not lazy. It often falls flat and is extremely tedious in some sections. Or, for example, certain quirks become grating after the 100th gd time, such as the personification of The New York Times as some kind of Auntie— a barely perceptible chuckle the first time, a ‘I swear I’m going to throw this book out the window if he does it one more time’ tirade on the 100th.
There are plenty of big books that are great. But I see a tendency to give more credit and leeway to a book just because it is big and ambitious (bonus points if it’s a white male)—it is often the big book that is automatically dubbed an author’s ‘magnum opus’, despite the term meaning ‘a great work’. Of course there are countless reasons and theories behind this… is it another symptom of our fast-paced, short-attention-span society? Or just some kind of Stockholm Syndrome that takes over when we find ourselves in the middle of a tome with no end in sight? (--Hey, Justine, did you stop and think that this is just you getting disgruntled over hype culture…. *again*? --Excellent point, I shall take that under consideration.)
I’ve digressed. I’m in a mood. This is relatively unimportant. But voilà, some semblance of thoughts so far and, after looking over what I just wrote, maybe a sign that I should not continue…. We shall see.
December 30, 2021
The gaze of this novel is astounding. It is a thoroughly impressive and exhausting look at a year in the late 60s in the US with Gesine and Marie Cresspahl, and Gesine's reconstruction of her Father's journey through the rise and Fall of Nazism in Jerichow, Germany.
Found some similarities between this and Roberto Bolano's 2666 with the absolute overload of facts and events, but despite the volume it all felt important to the larger grand masterpiece that this work is.
An incredible picture of two countries in defining moments, and told by two leads who are intelligent, funny, and interesting all the way through.
Found some similarities between this and Roberto Bolano's 2666 with the absolute overload of facts and events, but despite the volume it all felt important to the larger grand masterpiece that this work is.
An incredible picture of two countries in defining moments, and told by two leads who are intelligent, funny, and interesting all the way through.
May 25, 2022
Volume one of two chunky books following a year in the life of a German woman and her ten-year-old daughter living in New York in the 1960s. Not much happens in their lives in this time but alongside that story we have the American news as reported in the New York Times, and in another timeline we are slowly told the story of Gesine's parents and her own childhood in Nazi Germany.
This is long and slow, and if I hadn't been in a group reading the two volumes over a year, I might have given up. It's definitely not something I could read quickly, but 50 pages a week works and gives me a few weeks off. I'm not finding the mother and daughter particularly engaging, but a lot is starting to happen in the news in 1968, and the thread set in prewar and wartime Germany has a lot of emotional power.
This is long and slow, and if I hadn't been in a group reading the two volumes over a year, I might have given up. It's definitely not something I could read quickly, but 50 pages a week works and gives me a few weeks off. I'm not finding the mother and daughter particularly engaging, but a lot is starting to happen in the news in 1968, and the thread set in prewar and wartime Germany has a lot of emotional power.
October 15, 2022
This took a lot of effort and there were times when I almost gave up. I finally had to wait and read it when I had a week off, at the beach, so I could really focus on it and give it the time it deserved. I also found making a family tree helped, as I kept getting characters confused. After I finished, I immediately went out and bought Volume 2, but now it sits on my nightstand, where it will no doubt sit until I have another week off. All this being said, I highly recommend it.
Read
January 29, 2022first 50 pages showed some real promise. the following 750 completely lost any. new york times fan fic disguised as a novel-- i can't believe i will subject myself to another 800 pages as per my never a quit a book no matter how long rule.
Read
March 23, 2025Look, I accept this is quite brilliant: two parallel stories, of East German immigrant Gesine and her very precocious daughter (who speaks in a way no 10-year-old surely ever has) living in New York in the present (1960s), and the story of Gesine's family in Germany during the Nazis' rise to power and throughout the Second World War.
What makes 'Anniversaries' unique is the inclusion of a detailed catalogue of news events from the New York Times, written by the author journal-style as he wrote the book between August 1967 and April 1968. What a year he picked: the Vietnam War, the assassination of MLK, protests beginning in Czechoslovakia...
But while I found the concept and the structure super interesting, and to some extent enjoyed the storylines and the social history, this was such a struggle to finish - in the end, I think only my stubbornness in not wanting to leave it unfinished got me through. It is a REALLY long book, very detailed and there are so many characters and sub-stories. I made it to the end of part 1 but at this point I feel like I'd rather go for a dental extraction than read part 2...
What makes 'Anniversaries' unique is the inclusion of a detailed catalogue of news events from the New York Times, written by the author journal-style as he wrote the book between August 1967 and April 1968. What a year he picked: the Vietnam War, the assassination of MLK, protests beginning in Czechoslovakia...
But while I found the concept and the structure super interesting, and to some extent enjoyed the storylines and the social history, this was such a struggle to finish - in the end, I think only my stubbornness in not wanting to leave it unfinished got me through. It is a REALLY long book, very detailed and there are so many characters and sub-stories. I made it to the end of part 1 but at this point I feel like I'd rather go for a dental extraction than read part 2...
May 2, 2023
Anniversaries 1: August 1967 - April 1968 by Uwe Johnson hits my sweet spot, NYC in the late ’60s and Nazi Germany. It’s sort of an updated version of John Dos Passo’s USA Trilogy with a love letter to The New York Times.
November 27, 2021
I don’t think you can read the whole thing if it doesn’t have something for you.
June 3, 2024
This is a challenging read but valuable for the way the author describes the slow creep of fascism gripping Germany in the 30s and the way ordinary Germans tried to reconcile the loss of their country to the Nazis. I enjoyed the relationship between Gesine and Marie and how Gesine's upbringing influences her parenting and interactions with her neighbors and friends in NYC.
The sections devoted to Germany in the 30s require a lot of work on the reader's part to understand the political landscape and geographical entities and hierarchies and the writer favors a lot of casual, offhand phrasing that can obscure meaning.
The sections devoted to Germany in the 30s require a lot of work on the reader's part to understand the political landscape and geographical entities and hierarchies and the writer favors a lot of casual, offhand phrasing that can obscure meaning.
December 14, 2025
Excellent but grueling. At times it was tough finding motivation to pick this up as the parallels between 1930s and today made for depressing reading. Don’t know if I’m going to have the motivation to pick up Volume 2.
March 27, 2022
Too James Joyce for me. Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” writ long. Interesting, but headache inducing.
June 16, 2023
Remarkable translation, unreal.
Read
September 19, 2025did not finish
December 3, 2025
Seems premature to fully rate this before finishing volume two, but so far it’s pretty compelling with a distinct formal quality.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews