Exploring the same theme a few years later, the French author and critic Maurice Blanchot identified Johnson as the writer who had done most to demonstrate “the truth of Literature” in the context of a city that had been thrown into “abstraction” by the division and could no longer be grasped definitively in its “complete” reality.14 Divided Berlin was, so Blanchot suggested, a place that had no use for “omniscience”, nor for the panoramic survey through which writers elsewhere or in different eras might seek to capture reality. Berlin was a “situation” in which the concrete and the abstract were strangely combined. It was a predicament in which no given particular could be singled out without the risk of falsification, but which nevertheless could only be grasped by singling out particulars.
Under more conventional circumstances, a writer who chose to concentrate on “fragmentary” phenomena might be considered guilty of beating a “sceptical retreat” from reality or of a “lazy renouncement of a complete synthesis”.15 However, the shattered and then torn again city of Berlin, which the wall had turned into a “symbol of the division of the world”, required a fragmentary approach. There was, Blanchot ventured, no other way of articulating the new fact that “the entirety of meaning, is not to be found immediately either in ourselves or in what we write”. Countless words had already been written about the split yet, for Blanchot, Johnson’s first two published novels, Speculations about Jakob and The Third Book about Achim, proved that literature offered “the best approach to the situation”.16 He commended them as works by a writer who had adopted an “indirect” approach in order to articulate the “impossibility” of writing “books in which the division is put into play”. Johnson, in short, was aware of the “gap” and the “dark unrelenting tension” between reality and “the literary grasping of its sense”.17
The central character both in The Third Book about Achim and in a related later story, published in English as An Absence, is a divorced West German journalist named Karsch who lives alone near Hamburg and one day gets a call from an actress named Karin, a former girlfriend who now lives in the East. Having known one another in Berlin, they had agreed to communicate if anything important came up. So Karsch makes his way through the border, meets her, and stays to write the biography of Karin’s new boyfriend, a “noted racing cyclist” named Achim — a commission that is put his way by GDR officials hoping that this “third” biography of their loyal trophy athlete will make a useful impression in neutral countries and West Germany. Karsch accepts partly out of a love of biography: he enjoys “matching a conscious past with the actual past, guiding a person’s memory back to forgotten things, seeing them surprised at themselves”.18 During the course of his research, he finds himself surrounded by a new version of the German language — featuring “strings of genitives”,19 much citing of statistics and reliance on words like “dissemination”, “shortage”, “bottleneck” and “distribution”. He also encounters a popular avoidance of “official terminology”20 on the part of people who had developed their own subtle and inflected ways of checking out one another’s attitudes to the regime.
The project does indeed turn out to be “impossible”. Achim wants his biography to look as if his life had taken a turn for the better when Soviet soldiers turned up in his country, while Karsch is more interested in exploring other possibilities: that this revered communist hero may actually once have been a young Nazi thug, that he may have broken currency regulations by going West to buy a set of French gears for his bicycle, that he may even have been among the protesting workers who took to the streets in the tank-crushed Berlin uprising of 1953. Karsch has to give up as he realises that the truth about Achim lies beyond his reach. In the absence of any consensual reality, there is only the futile battle between embedded ideological assumptions. Achim cites some of the Western attitudes he has encountered while visiting to compete in cycle races. In the Federal Republic he met people who believed that Russia ruled the East directly, and that everyone in the East is starving (“Dig in, boy. For once in your life eat your fill”21). In Austria, he had been expected to stand for the West German anthem, the organisers apparently not understanding that the GDR possessed an anthem of its own — a “melody”, as Karsch drily notes, intended to turn its long-suffering singers “away from the ruins altogether toward a future where the sun would shine over Germany more brightly than ever before”.22 There is a moment in An Absence when Karsch tries to “talk Achim out of his ‘warmonger capitalists of the Ruhr’”. He wants to confront these slogans with a more generous sense of reality but finds himself “hampered by being able to evoke no more about the Ruhr district, say, than the night express between Dortmund and Cologne, on its way to Italy with cars and a corridor in which Karsch stood next to a girl who smoked sleeplessly against the November-black, coke-illumined window pane. Any young fellow with a sad face would have done alright there”.23
4. PRAISE AND DENUNCIATION: A PAIN FOR ALL ZEALOTS
However challenging they may have been to “the perceptive faculties of the general public” these three novels made Johnson the subject of considerable international discussion. In the USA, the German-born historian Joachim Remak hailed The Third Book about Achim as “a great book” and its author as “a writer of genius”.1 John Updike would come out more quietly in favour of Two Views, announcing in the New Yorker that “the perfunctory liaison and nearly accidental reunion of Dietbert and Beate serves, at least for me, as a moving parable of human love and as a sufficient indictment of the political systems that separate us”.2 Another reviewer appreciated the “disciplined parataxis”3 of Two Views. Others, however, got nowhere at all. “I am still not clear as to what was happening”, said The Nation of Speculations about Jakob, leaving the Christian Science Monitor to complain more explicitly about the difficulty of finding a way through the “labyrinth of confused, devious, and often contradictory incident” that was The Third Book about Achim.4 Johnson was also scolded by American Cold Warriors for refusing to take sides. Far from just condemning both systems, Johnson plainly needed to recognise that there was a “real difference” between East Germany and the Federal Republic. Melvyn Lasky, editor of the CIA-backed magazine Encounter, was disdainful of Speculations about Jakob: “As for his vaunted self-liberation from East-West clichés, what could be more sloganized and platitudinous than his trite picture of Jakob in the land of ‘juke boxes and poisonous neon lights.’” Overlooking the fact that the offending scenes were actually written as imagined by a Stasi agent in the GDR, America’s steaming partisan suggested “A little more cool tentativeness here too would have been in order”.5
In France, there was rather less sneering about the “difficulty” of Johnson’s writing. Jean Baudrillard, who published his essay on Johnson’s first two novels in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Moderne, appreciated the “Faulknerian” influence he saw in Johnson’s sensitivity to a fundamental and pervasive “discord” — not between black and white, as in Faulkner’s American South, but between the two German states.6 He was impressed by Johnson’s meticulous observations, whether of transport or communication systems or of nature (“a tree may even be a tree beyond the border”), by his refusal to dictate rather than describe, and by his insistence on the “unsurpassable distance” that lay between himself and his objects or characters. He hailed Johnson as a decipherer of “political man”, who seemed to associate the possibilities of socialism, not with position-taking, slogans or dogmatic views, but with the increasingly “technical character of the world”.
In both Germanies, however, Johnson would find himself being “unmasked” and harshly condemned as a renegade or worse. He was aware that the Stasi may well have been keeping an eye on him in West Berlin, apparently even poking around in his flat in the Friedenau district. The level of official mistrust in the GDR is indicated by the questions raised when Johnson started a spell of work at the Brecht Archives in East Berlin. Hearing that he had been appointed to edit Brecht’s Me-Ti: B
ook of Changes for Suhrkamp, Manfred Wekwerth, a theatre director associated with the Berliner Ensemble who was later revealed to have Stasi connections, wrote to Brecht’s widow and archivist Helene Weigel protesting that Johnson was both a “mediocre” opportunist who would use Brecht to elevate himself and also “an anarcho-Trotskyist — avantgardist — pluralist — existentialist, brilliantly eccentric (what do I know) scatterbrain”.7 Johnson, whose novels were never published in the GDR, would also be judged harshly by some Eastern émigrés in the West, including the writer Gerhard Zwerenz, who had met Johnson when he himself was studying under the philosopher Ernst Bloch in Leipzig in the Fifties. At a meeting of Group 47, held at the Bavarian alpine resort of Elmau in 1959, Zwerenz tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the just emigrated Johnson to take up the cause of dissenting intellectuals, many of them closely associated with Mayer and Bloch’s circle in Leipzig, who had recently been jailed as “counter-revolutionary” conspirators.8 Zwerenz, whose suspicions may have been shared by others associated with the Leipzig circle, judged Johnson’s refusal harshly, and appears never to have abandoned his belief that he must have been some sort of GDR agent.
There were those who took offence in the Federal Republic too. That Johnson had arguments with some on the Western left can be seen in a splendid typescript entitled “Conversation on the Novel, its uses & dangers, recent degenerations, indignation of the audience etc”. and dated February 1973.9 Written in English, presumably for use in lectures, this defends the novel against a voice that is young, educated and well-versed in sociological expressions: a voice belonging to those who find many reasons for condemning the novel: for not being “a revolutionary weapon”, for being too expensive for workers who can hardly even afford breakfast, for taking up time that might otherwise be used to change the world, for demanding quiescence of its readers by ripping them out of their “community of interests”. These militant voices objected that the novel’s “personnel” tend to be affluent, and that readers need a bourgeois education if they are to stand a hope of understanding the nuances and multiplicity of a novel that prides itself on never issuing clear and simple instructions as to how one should act or behave. In short, the novel is nothing but an “instrument of well-meaning fools playing into the hands of the enemy”. We heard faint echoes of this call to arms as students in England too, where a blunt instrument was being made of the suggestion, attributed to the British documentary filmmaker Ronald Grierson as well as to Bertolt Brecht, that “Art is not a mirror; it is a hammer”. In the perspective Johnson was working to establish, the novel was neither: it was, as he put it, a “world of its own” rather than “a mirror or reflection of the world”, and you should throw it out if it was really just a stretched-out slogan telling you what to think or, even worse, what it was “trying to say”.
Yet the most formidable onslaught faced by Johnson in the Federal Republic of Germany came neither from a handful of oppositional leftists seeking to turn the novel into their own kind of (Western) Marxist instrument, nor from suspicious members of the harassed and extinguished Leipzig circle.10 The bitterest attack was launched by anti-communists who disliked Johnson’s critical portrayals of the West as a place of rising consumerism with barely contrite former Nazis in positions of power, and who considered it scandalous to portray the GDR as a state that had its own constitution and terms of existence, and was not just a conquered, oppressed and illegitimate vassal of the USSR.
The worst period for Johnson began on 11 November 1961, when tensions between East and West were much aggravated by the GDR’s recent construction of the Berlin Wall. The trouble started in Milan at a conference connected with the Italian publication of Speculations about Jakob. Hermann Kesten, a sixty-one-year-old German-Jewish author who was also an influential champion of the luminous works of Joseph Roth (and a member of Group 47 who had himself been forced into exile by Nazism in 1933), delivered a lecture in which he condemned the wall, claiming that it marked a “caesura” in German literature — an end to the “post-fascist” period and the moment for a return to the humanist tradition of earlier German authors. He also described Bertolt Brecht as “one of your dictatorship”.11 Johnson opposed this view, declaring that the GDR’s sudden closure of the border in Berlin the previous August was neither a literary watershed nor a surprise. The wall was indeed “wretched” but it was also a rational and predictable response to a challenging situation: more than three million East Germans had already gone West, and the GDR’s economy was imperilled by the flight. He also defended Brecht, and reiterated his view that the novelist’s job was to tell a story — which was surely not the same as trying to “usher readers into illusions” of the kind that might serve official policy on either side: far from being a compliant fable, the novel should be seen as a kind of “reconnaissance” which invites readers to make their own sense of whatever might be revealed. Committed to the pursuit of Enlightenment and truth, he was emphatic that “mixing history with moral accusations” was to be avoided.
Twenty years later, Johnson would remember his alleged “defence of the wall”, still somewhat grumpily, for a documentary on BBC Radio 4: “I stated that the East German communists didn’t want to commit a moral act by erecting this barrier but they just wanted to defend themselves and their state and their economy, and this was taken by a lot of people as a sort of okaying of the wall and I had two or three unhappy months in the press”.12 The trouble began when Kesten used the pages of the Springer-owned paper Die Welt to further his misrepresentation of what Johnson had said in Milan, asserting that the writer had defended the wall as “good, reasonable and moral”, and effectively accused him of being Walter Ulbricht’s poodle in the West — as well as an author of no talent whose work was just a “pot-pourri” of stylistic tricks borrowed from Brecht, Faulkner, Robbe-Grillet and others in order to make a mannerist efflorescence of attitudes that, if expressed more plainly, might stand revealed as a GDR tourism brochure. A recording of Johnson’s contribution to the Milan conference supported his claim that Kesten had, as the traduced writer told Der Speigel, turned him into a “lunatic” and “gunman”, attributing words to him that he would never have uttered even if they had “made him unconscious with alcohol”.13 Apologies, however, were not forthcoming. Indeed, Johnson’s counter-arguments appear only to have convinced his already decided accusers that he had something to hide.
Shortly afterwards, the “character assassination” that Johnson had suffered in the Springer press was repeated in the West German Parliament by the Foreign Minister. Dr Heinrich von Brentano had already won himself a place in Johnson’s The Third Book about Achim by brutishly comparing Brecht’s pre-war lyrics, written for works such as Kurt Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”, to the “storming” Nazi anthem composed by the pimp and thug Horst Wessel,14 and he now demanded that the Federal Republic stipend recently awarded to Johnson for his approaching year at Villa Massimo in Rome be withdrawn. Brentano failed to apologise when it was pointed out that Kesten had misrepresented Johnson’s talk, and Johnson remained a target of anti-communist hate from figures such as the Austrian Kurt Ziesel, whose own record as an unapologetic Nazi did not prevent him from mocking the Western literary establishment for getting down on its knees to worship this “incomprehensible” writer who refused to denounce the barbarity of Bolshevism. Another former Nazi, Wolfdietrich Schnurre, denounced Johnson as a “camouflaged communist”. Books and readings were boycotted and, as he himself would remember at Darmstadt, he was accused of being a “trojan horse” and, indeed, “a Communist pig”.15 As Colin Riordan writes, the man who had arrived in West Berlin to be hailed as a “champion of freedom” had, within only three years, been branded a “traitorous communist” and put to work as the whipping boy of the West German right.16 Even without the threatening and insulting nocturnal phone calls he received at this time, this was a considerable shock to Johnson, excoriating and even “devastating” as Riordan suggests. Johnson may have t
old the BBC that his difficulties extended over two or three months, but their memory was still raw in 1979, when he recalled the events in close detail in his Frankfurt lectures on poetics. Here he railed against “Senator McKesten”17 and remembers resigning his membership of the German Academy of Language and Literature because it had refused to withdraw misleading references to the “Kesten Affair”.
Johnson’s exasperation at the reception of his own efforts as a novelist to “establish the truth” and “come closer to actual life”18 is reflected in the story that was translated as An Absence and published as No. 35 in the mind-opening series of assaults on British insularity that was Nathaniel Tarn’s beautiful collection of “Cape Editions”. Here, the West German journalist Karsch returns from the East having failed to find a way through to the actual human being behind the cyclist Achim’s promoted image as a faultless hero of the GDR. In the spirit of an ideological wire-cutter, he starts challenging Western myths about the GDR, and not just those of the children who are convinced that the police in East Germany “went after ordinary passers-by with machine-guns”.19 He quickly gets into trouble for his efforts. Things come to a head after a television discussion in which he uses the word “recognition” in connection with East Germany — a provocation to those Westerners who saw the GDR as an illegal Soviet regime squatting on stolen German soil.
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