When I hear “the whites”, I often think of figures in sheets, ghosts, corpses on their way to the cemetery. Since the whites as a group refuse to help, why not stick a knife in an individual white person’s heart and get what you need from his briefcase, his cash register, his apartment. Since people trapped in the slum have all their ways out to a worthwhile life blocked, why delay escaping into the illusions and sickness of drug addiction? Since society has put up a fence around this life, why follow the norms of that society, why treat a social worker as anything other than someone bringing a check, why not send the kids out to beg, why live under a roof. Since the bonds with society have been broken, why not rip out public phone cables, why leave a forwarding address when you go somewhere else, under a bridge, onto the Bowery, into jail, off to the war in Vietnam.23
The second vector shaping Anniversaries enables Johnson to raise a longer twentieth-century history into the Cresspahls’ experience of New York City through the chosen year of 1967–8. This far-reaching trawl of the remembered past is largely located in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania but with some closely observed episodes set in England where Gesine’s carpenter father, Heinrich, lived for a period from 1925 to 1933. This dimension of the novel is opened when Gesine Cresspahl begins to tell her already partly American daughter Marie about her parents’ and grandparents’ lives in the small Mecklenburg town of Jerichow, which Johnson places a few miles inland from the Baltic coast, where the actual town of Klütz can be found. Whether or not Suhrkamp was right to advertise the first volumes of Anniversaries as proof that “the story is back”, it was due to its exploration of the Cresspahl family history that Anniversaries was taken to mark a break with the earlier novels from which some of its characters were lifted. In a study published in 1989, the Belgian writer Pierre Mertens would describe the work as a “family saga” — “Dynasty a la sauce Cresspahl”, so he suggested the menu might read, or even “Dallas mecklenbourgeois”.24 “All the stereotypes are here”, so Mertens alleges, “the very same ones of every soap opera: disappointed ambitions, lost illusions, sordid intrigues, loves arranged or broken, enigmatic deaths”. Although here, as Mertens admits against his own comparison, they are set against the “debacle of ideologies” and explained by “the division of a country, the rupture of the world”.
As Gesine unfolds the past for her bright, opinionated and at times impatient daughter, that “rupture” is traced back through the division of Germany in 1945. The Mecklenburg narrative touches on the anti-revolutionary Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the political and economic struggles of the Weimar Republic, the rise and murderous triumph of Nazism, the Second World War, and, following the division of defeated Germany in 1945, the engulfing Cold War that extends into 1968 and includes, on the day after the novel’s very last entry, the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. Johnson raises vast areas of twentieth-century history into view but not in a unified or panoramic manner. Much of the work of the novel lies in the way it uses the calendar to bring together its two narrative vectors — a single day pivoting past and present on the coincidence of a date. The novel tells the story of a family, to be sure, but it also dramatises an ongoing reflection on history and the ways in which the twentieth-century past may persist in the present as blight, burden, warning, and perhaps sometimes as a source of hope and inspiration too.
Johnson was definitely not seeking to advance a clockwork idea of history of the predetermined kind favoured by Stalinist ideologues or Western triumphalists. Neither was he using his evident pleasure in coincidence to trace out a mysterious gyre of time of the shaky cosmological variety that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats imagined in the early years of the twentieth century. His engagement with history in Anniversaries is much closer to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of “montage”, in which past and present are brought together to produce the sudden and illuminating flash of a “dialectical image”25 — revealing a “correspondence” which the reader is invited to participate in understanding. These moments of connection between now and then may well reveal the catastrophic barbarity of the twentieth century, an age that continues repeatedly to expose its own claims to enlightenment as a sick joke, but they can also encourage the utopian yearning that Johnson makes central to Gesine Cresspahl’s divided experience of the world. Far from being an otherworldly fantasy or an allegedly redemptive blueprint to be imposed on reality by zealots, her utopia, as Gary L. Baker has put it, “manifests concretely in small ways”.26 Its moments of revealed potentiality may be fragmentary, fleeting and imperfectly realised, but they nevertheless testify to “the possibility for genuine positive change that would bring the human community closer to the ideal principles it sets for itself in the constitutions and moral codes that putatively guide its societies”. For Johnson as well as for Gesine Cresspahl, one of the primary instances of “concrete utopia” at that time was the Prague Spring.
As he searches through twentieth-century history in Anniversaries, Johnson also reveals himself to be fundamentally concerned with both the importance and the limits of memory in a century fractured by so much trauma. As he told an interviewer for the New York Times, “In each man’s life there exists a conscious past — what you think of yourself — and there is the real past that actually occurred and there are tensions between the two”.27 Like his uprooted and incurably homeless character Gesine, Johnson was himself capable of feeling nostalgic about Mecklenburg — not just an actual place in his book but also an unattainable past that can seem further distanced by the acts of memory that attempt to recall it.
In a tougher and more analytical register, however, memory becomes an instrument vital to the project of recovering and holding to the truth of a given situation. Sometimes that may have been a comparatively simple matter of insisting on the Nazi past of leading post-war politicians in West Germany, including the second president of the Federal Republic, Heinrich Lübke, who remarked, in response to accusations originating in the GDR, that he couldn’t recall signing (“nor not signing” as Johnson notes drily) blueprints for concentration camp labour blocks built on the German Baltic at Peenemunde.28 It is more difficult when Johnson brings Gesine up against the unfathomable question of whether her father, Heinrich, may have been blackmailed into becoming a British spy. Did he really take his five-year-old daughter abroad for six weeks shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938, and if so, why did he return to Germany afterwards? The latter question confronts Gesine with the impossible task of working out whether the fleeting and imperfect sense of familiarity she has experienced when passing through certain places were truly examples of déjà vu rather than retrospectively assembled “fake memory”.29 Johnson also leaves his readers to wonder how fully this uncertainty is resolved by the apparently indisputable fact that a British halfpenny, minted in 1940, was found among her father’s possessions after his death in the GDR.30
Bush beside Bodstedter Bodden, Darss, Western Pomerania.
All this may help to explain why the German writer who was incubating this project in his mind seemed a puzzle to some who came across him in America. The novelist Richard Stern, who greatly admired Johnson’s “beautiful” novel Two Views, remembered him coming to talk to his students in Chicago in 1967. He describes “a cryptic, witty fellow, with a long, fair, mostly bald head and an eye-glassed, owlish, Dr Cyclops look”.31 He sensed a “strange graveness” about his visitor: “He always smoked a pipe, but he was no comfortable pipe-smoking fellow. His fist gripped this complicated pacifier and puffed out what concealed him. But what was it?” Günter Grass, who had visited America on a lecture tour with Johnson in the mid-Sixties, told Stern at a PEN conference that the younger writer had “remained a stranger in the West” and, indeed, that “being a stranger was of great importance to him”.
6. LEAVING BERLIN
After two years in New York City, Johnson boarded a Pan Am plane with his wife and their questioning daughter — “Why isn’t England in Europe? / Why is Germany behind Scotland?”1 —
and brought his thoughts, notes and newspaper clippings back to West Berlin, where he would continue writing the novel that now stands as his greatest contribution to twentieth-century literature. Suhrkamp published the first volume of Anniversaries in West Germany to much acclaim in 1970. The second, which covered the second four-month period of Gesine’s New York year, won Johnson the Büchner Prize when it appeared in 1971. Johnson’s plans for the completion of the work had drifted by 1973, when the modestly delayed third volume was published. That volume had originally been intended as the last, but the book that came out covered only two months of 1968, leaving the remaining two for an originally unanticipated fourth volume in which Johnson also had to account for a long span of directly remembered history stretching from 1946 to 1968.
Anniversaries was a vast undertaking, yet if Johnson had slowed as he worked on volume III, this may also reflect the fact that he was stalked by difficulties that would eventually see him abandon once again the wired-off city in which he had appreciated the “silky light” and “the weight of colours in November”.2 Some of these troubles had occurred while he was still in New York. In November 1967, his sister-in-law Jutta Maria Schmidt, who was living in his flat in the Friedenau district of Berlin, had died in a fire thought to have been caused by a fallen cigarette. This disaster followed an earlier awkwardness. In February 1967, both his Berlin studio, which he had sublet to the poet and editor Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s brother, and his family home, in which Enzensberger’s separated wife Dagrun was living, ended up housing members of Kommune 1, a hairy and energetically left-wing group formed by the former Situationist Dieter Kunzelmann that included Rainer Langhans, Dorothea Ridder, Dagrun Enzensberger and her nine-year-old daughter Tanaquil. Like the fellow member Fritz Teufel, Kunzelmann would progress to more violent forms of terrorism, but Kommune 1’s war against “bourgeois ideology” was also directed against the family, seen partly in Reichian terms as the root of many if not all evils.
Those who remember the period will have little trouble imagining the scenario: mattresses on the floor, women no longer so willing to wash the dishes while this or that revolutionary patriarch holds forth in a Mao jacket, ardent meetings to plot the theatrical acts of “fun terrorism” that would soon enough bring a new notoriety to the collective. In April 1967, various members of Kommune 1 were arrested for planning the “pudding assassination” of American Vice President Hubert Humphrey during a state visit to West Berlin. The weapons to be employed in this never enacted venture were only plastic bags filled with flour and yoghurt, but the resulting scandal was reported in the New York Times. Never tempted by Western Maoism, Johnson was horrified to find his name in the news and, having failed to get a satisfactory response from Enzensberger, asked Günter Grass to get the Kommunards out of his properties.
Johnson did nothing to heal the breach by including a withering attack on Enzensberger in the second volume of Anniversaries — dedicating one of Gesine Cresspahl’s days to ridiculing the West German poet for posturing about the Vietnam War in an “open letter to America”, published as “On Leaving America” in the New York Review of Books, and then heading off to “make himself of use” to “the people” in Cuba.3 He’d had similar things to say outside his fiction too — not least in a short piece entitled “Concerning an Attitude of Protesting”, written in English and published in a volume entitled Authors Take Sides on Vietnam in 1967. Here he launched into the “good people” who opposed their country’s participation in the Vietnam War in the name of civilisation, Geneva, dignity and morality, while in their own lives quietly continuing to “eat of the fruits their governments harvest for them in Asian politics and markets”.4 Johnson denounced these liberal-minded westerners as self-aggrandising hypocrites who actually stood in the way of political change. They “want a good world; they do nothing about it”. Having remained silent during the long preparations, their objection to the war was really only that it had become too visible. Convinced that these good people “will also soon, with embarrassment, describe their protests against this war as their juvenile period”, Johnson urged them to “kindly shut up” and stop talking about a “species of good they help to make impossible” (an early critique there, of the sanctimonious liberal bubble that the Glaswegian housing activist, Sheila McKechnie, used to mock as the “Rightonosphere”).
Johnson found his own way of falling out with some of the leading personnel as well as the political and ideological orthodoxies of the Western left at that time, but his remaining friends knew him to be in trouble in a much closer sense. An unattributed and (at least) double-exposed photograph from this period shows Johnson in full-swing at a composite literary lunch or dinner, possibly in Fritz J. Raddatz’s place in Hamburg: glasses, bottles and cutlery everywhere, and several animated conversations going on at once.5 It’s a fetching portrait of intellectual life in the Sixties — lively, fearless and, like the image itself, potentially disorderly too. That photograph is neither the first nor the only indication of Johnson’s volatility. In 1964, when he was working as chief editor and deputy publishing manager at Rowohlt publishing house, Raddatz had invited Johnson to a dinner also attended by the African-American writer James Baldwin. During the course of the evening, Baldwin said something that irritated Johnson, who dismissed him as “not a writer”. When the wife of the publisher, Jane Ledig-Rowohlt, scolded him for this offensive remark, Johnson, who was a large man, had struck back furiously, causing her expensive jewellery to fall off her like so many “balls from a Christmas tree”.6
This is by no means the only account of Johnson’s alarming unpredictability, which could be greatly intensified by drink. The poet and translator Michael Hamburger, who knew Johnson in Berlin, New York and London, remembered many moments in which his friend had shown unusual consideration and kindness towards himself and also his family. He also recorded various “nasty incidents” associated with alcohol. A child’s sense of these had been communicated to Hamburger by his daughter, Claire, who had first met the Johnsons in America in 1966, when her father was teaching at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Johnson had come to stay with the family in their house in South Hadley, and they later met up in New York over Christmas. Claire remembers Johnson taking her around the Bronx Zoo — deserted, knee-deep in snow and freezing cold — and also the Empire State Building.7 Eight years old at the time, she recalls feeling grateful for the attention and kindness he showed her: “he was”, she writes, “one of the few of my father’s literary friends who even acknowledged the existence of his shy, awkward children, let alone actually engaged with them!” When she was eleven, Claire, who by then felt “a great fondness” for Uwe and his family, joined them for a week’s holiday near Bülk in Holstein:
I remember being … with them all on a windswept beach on the Baltic Coast. Grey sea, monochrome landscape, nondescript beach huts and houses circling the beach. There was a biting wind and, as usual, my main recollection is of being cold.
Uwe drank. He laid out bottle after bottle of beer on the table in front of him, in a long straight line, and proceeded to drink the contents, one after the other, in regimented style. He struck me as being very changeable, on the one hand being kind, generous and thoughtful, and the next minute being angry and withdrawn. His wife and child tiptoed round him, always placating him, and, when I stayed with them, I did as well.8
Upset by the “rigidity of Uwe’s family’s life”, which could hardly have contrasted more with the Hamburgers’s way of going about things (“I was used to chaos”), by the quarrelling, the heavy eiderdowns and the unfamiliar breakfasts — “a kind of apple puree and a type of raw bacon that I found impossible to stomach” — she asked to go home early. Johnson was “offended and upset” but drove her to Hamburg airport, where he bought the unhappy English child something she would eat before putting her on the plane to go home, feeling “very guilty”, as an unaccompanied minor.
This foreshortened trip was by no means the Hamburgers’ only e
xperience of Johnson’s habit of lining up a long column of bottles on the table, and then steadily drinking his way through the lot. Michael Hamburger’s wife, the poet Anne Beresford, remembers being dismissed with a terse “Why not?” when she cast her eye along one of these grim arrays and asked Johnson, “Are you really intending to drink all those?” To Michael, these joyless and “terrifying” drinking sessions seemed to be the writer’s only way of escaping his own “puritanical rigour” — a characteristic that Hamburger, who was then seeking to maintain an “open” marriage, would later identify as “the main source of the tensions between us”.9 He considered Johnson’s nightly drinking to be “not a social act at all, but a private ritual of immersion in those depths which all his conscious activities denied”. He also entered a guarded plea of mitigation, registering how “cruelly intransigent” Johnson could be “towards himself” as well as “those closest to him”.
We may detect a sympathetic nod towards Johnson’s wife and daughter there, but Hamburger had also seen “vehement quarrels” on the wider literary front in the late Sixties, when he would meet up with Johnson and Günter Grass in Berlin, “especially when Uwe had been drinking”.10 There had been more “unpleasant scenes” when he met Johnson again in Berlin in May 1974.11
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 7