If news of Johnson’s death brought Siegfried Unseld to Sheerness, it also brought Tilman Jens, the journalist who came to investigate the circumstances for Stern, a popular weekly news magazine based in Hamburg, which was then still notorious for its purchase and publication of Hitler’s falsely alleged “diaries” a year previously. Nobody in Sheerness will have known that Jens was the son of the well-known West German writer and academic Walter Jens (a member, like Johnson, of the German literary forum Group 47). What they saw was a twenty-nine-year old reporter from a magazine that evidently had the means, as Martin Harris remembered thinking, to provide an expenses account as well as a photographer. He was among those who helped Jens pull back the shutters on the English life of “the unknown man of the Thames”.12 Not content with telling the ignorant reporter that the man he was talking about was actually “Charles”, these informants also tried to explain how it was that Johnson had been allowed to lie dead or dying in their town for two weeks before anybody even noticed. “How could we?”, they can be heard asking in Stern’s article, repeating Jens’s question before trying to pass on their excuses to the magazine’s legion of West German readers. In Martin Harris’s answer it was the fault of Johnson’s automatic light-switching device: installed to deter thieves when he was away, this contraption turned on the house lights at the strangest of hours, making it impossible to be sure whether the writer was at home or on the far side of the world again. Johnson’s housekeeper, Nora Harris, mentioned the lights too, together with the fact that Johnson had so often “disappeared” without warning, only announcing his absence on postcards that would arrive from Germany, France or America a few days later. The unemployed shipwright, Jeff Lucas, told Jens that Johnson was probably the only person in “this God-forsaken nest” who drank his tea and coffee black. It was thanks to this foreign perversity that 26 Marine Parade had never sent out the classic English distress signal: a collection of unopened milk bottles accumulating steadily on the doorstep.
As we have seen, it was Jens who provided German readers with their first dramatized glimpses into Johnson’s Kentish life as “Charles”: the pub, the working-class folk he liked to hang out with, the incredible (and possibly exaggerated) quantities of alcohol they claimed to have seen him pour down his throat and his alleged willingness to have whisky dribbled over his head every Christmas as part of his annually renewed English “baptism”. These were grotesque revelations for the novelist’s admirers in Germany to assimilate, and they were only part of the story Jens dredged out of the Kentish slime for the readers of Stern magazine. Martin Harris remembered being irritated when he eventually caught sight of Nomi Baumgartl’s photograph of a phallus scrawled on the lamppost outside Johnson’s house (just another example, he had thought, of the media’s habit of framing Sheerness as a dump). Some of the Johnsons’s West German friends may have been more concerned about the much larger photograph, attributed to the Kent Press Agency, showing Elisabeth Johnson waiting outside 26 Marine Parade for the hearse to arrive on the day of her estranged husband’s funeral. She looks uncomfortable, as anyone might when caught by an intrusive paparazzi-style snapper leaning over the new promenade wall to invade a desolate personal moment. Given the slant of Jens’ article, the bought-in picture stood there as an accusation against which no defence was really invited. Accepting Johnson’s allegations of betrayal from his book Accompanying Circumstances (Begleitumstände), Jens repeats them and then twice makes a free-standing paragraph of his own accusing words: “Elisabeth Johnson is silent. Does not defend herself”. Muriel Adams did her best to defuse his charge, telling Jens, “She’s never talked to me either… only at the beginning of July, she always reminded me of his birthday and bothered to send me a birthday card”. That “silence” may have been entirely justified, and not just by the confidentiality owed to people in private matters. Jens, however, presented it as a sign of guilt, leaving Elisabeth Johnson dangling there for all to see on the gibbet Stern made of its invasive photograph.
Unfortunately for Jens’ career as a journalist, his article also revealed that he had taken his photographer into Johnson’s house so that she could select such targets as the New York Times tote bag hanging in the hallway, or the papers and other objects standing on his “metal behemoth” of a writing desk (including the desk diary, conveniently open beside the electric typewriter at the pages for 21-22 February). While Baumgartl snapped away, Jens himself had evidently gone poking about among Johnson’s papers and possessions. When news of the fury provoked in Germany by this criminal intrusion reached Sheerness, the Sheppey Gazette added its own contribution to the coverage.13 Tilman Jens was reported to have claimed that he entered the house with permission and in the company of a security man or policeman. Martin Harris rejected the suggestion that he had assisted in this act of trespass. Jens had, he said, approached him saying he was “keen to get pictures of the house”. At the journalist’s request, he had written to Elisabeth Johnson, explaining that Jens was “trying to do a tribute to her husband” and wondered whether she was happy for him to go in the house. When she told him not to have any contact with Jens, he had written to Johnson’s literary executors, but the Wengrafs had also refused, excusing themselves on the grounds that they were “not empowered” to permit such a thing. He had, so he told the Sheppey Gazette, no idea how Jens and his photographer had got in to the house.
More than thirty years later, Martin Harris told me that he had in fact been an accomplice in Jens’s raid — not on the first occasion, when Jens entered the house with Nomi Baumgartl, but later when he is said to have returned alone for a second visit, having phoned to say that he had accidentally left a roll of film in No. 26. Harris, who had quite liked the journalist, had seen no harm in the request and agreed, after some wavering, to help. This involved another nocturnal visit to Johnson’s garden, not to steal a rose this time, but, as he remembered, to help squeeze Jens through the ground-floor window that had previously been used to enter the house by the publicans from the Napier Tavern. At this point, Harris’s story became farcical. Stern’s reporter was on the “chubby” side and got stuck in the frame, which turned out to be so loosely attached that it started coming off the wall. Once this was sorted out, Harris found himself waiting outside in the garden for far longer than he thought it would take to collect a roll of film. He returned to his own house, where he spent a considerable time wondering nervously what on earth Jens was up to (at this juncture a miniature Minox-style spy camera appeared in Harris’s recollection of the event), eventually going back to extract the intruder before the pair of them were arrested for breaking and entering.
Whatever the exact truth of this situation, and the above is only Harris’s remembered version, there can be no doubt at all that Jens’s article was a scandalous piece that brought Stern under fierce attack and caused Jens to be left without a job. Fritz J. Raddatz fiercely condemned Stern’s revelations, and repudiated the implied suggestion that it was he who had first spread the news about Johnson’s marital problems.14 Others, including Günter Grass, gave different accounts of their disgust at Jens’s conduct, citing the high premium Johnson had always placed on personal confidentiality, and also the injury the article did to the surviving members of the unwell writer’s shattered family. Jens’s worst offence was to reveal the existence of a light brown notebook in which, so the reporter alleged, Elisabeth Johnson had, at her husband’s command, described her meetings with the Prague musicologist Tomislav Volek. This trophy was presented as a confession of guilt, allegedly written in diary form on Johnson’s demand, in some perverse echo of Anniversaries. Such, boasted Jens, was “the book from which she read to him” in the evenings. Although the latter statement may not be accepted with any certainty, there is little doubt that such a book did exist. Siegfried Unseld, who was not inclined to challenge Johnson’s vengeful accusations, was careful to hint in his later account of Johnson’s last days that he knew all about the book and its contents (“I knew what t
hat was”), even though he also claims that, “at my request”, the notebook in question was later returned to Elisabeth Johnson by the executor, Dr. Felix Landgraf.15
Those inclined to defend Suhrkamp’s conduct through this shocking situation can point to various things Unseld and his company went on to do with the estate it had inherited: publishing Johnson’s work, setting up the Uwe Johnson Archive (now in Rostock), and more generally fostering the collection, editing and translation of the writer’s work. This continues to be a major undertaking, to which readers and researchers are greatly indebted. From this perspective, Unseld’s letter warning Johnson about his finances may appear no more than an extreme example of the type of letter publishers may still be inclined to send out as they approach the last resort: a brisk stimulant intended not to traumatise and threaten their sick and despairing author, but to encourage him into finishing the inordinately delayed final volume of Anniversaries, as Johnson had indeed proceeded to do over a few frenzied months. In retrospect, the arrangement that is now in place between Suhrkamp and Elisabeth and Katharina Johnson may also lend credibility to Unseld’s claim that neither he nor his publishing company had ever intended to leave Johnson’s descendants completely out in the cold, and, indeed, that Elisabeth Johnson had declined the publisher’s initial attempt to reach an informal settlement on the principled grounds that any such arrangement would be in breach of her late husband’s will.
Others, however, continued to see the situation very differently. A decade after the initial shock, Elisabeth Johnson, who had moved from Sheppey back to Mecklenburg following the reunification of Germany, went to court to challenge the will of 1983. After two hearings, in which much, including the accusations in Johnson’s “Statement to my Executors”, was exposed and raked over by lawyers, her claim was finally rejected by the Berlin Court of Appeal on 17 October 1995. The following year, the conviction that a grievous injustice had been done to Johnson’s descendants was presented in a volume by Werner Gotzmann. In this light, Unseld looked more like a manipulative overseer than a long-suffering friend and saviour. Here, he was the man who had put Johnson under severe pressure, when he was already in desperate straits, effectively obliging him to produce a new will, and going along, for his own convenience, with his allegations about his wife and their daughter. In the eyes of Gotzman and others who took Elisabeth Johnson’s side at this time, the “betrayal” narrative had been allowed to stand because it served as a “legitimation” of Suhrkamp’s breach of the wife and daughter’s natural rights.
Unseld would repudiate these suggestions as unfounded slanders,16 but he didn’t directly condemn Elisabeth Johnson for her closing words on the matter. In her “Afterword” to Gotzmann’s book, she remembered how Unseld had urged her to “mourn” when she contacted him after Johnson’s death and then sought to discipline her by hinting that the allegations made in Johnson’s “Statement to my Executors” might become public, as indeed they would eventually do, if the will was challenged in the courts. She criticises Unseld’s text, “For When I am Dead”, in which he presents his relationship with Johnson as testimony to “a beautiful friendship”, suggesting that this involved both self-deception and a refusal to accept responsibility for the pressure that had been placed on a writer who was plainly far from well, had little understanding of financial matters or, for that matter, of the difference between business and friendship. She also offered a brief account of the “affair” that had become so magnified and distorted in Johnson’s mind: “Once I was unfaithful to him; I told him in 1975. Three years later, I realized we couldn’t live together. I left the house. I felt he had to change; he hoped I’d come back. And so we lost sight of each other. Everything else is fiction”.17
It seems fair to say that news of this wounding dispute, which for many years continued to smoulder and sporadically blaze up in Germany, did not reach many in Sheerness, where people expressed their sadness differently. Susan Harris, for example, didn’t need any news from abroad to feel pained by the fact that relations with Elisabeth had never been repaired after the events of March 1984. As for Johnson himself, the available evidence does not allow us to conclude with much certainty that the writer responsible for one of the most attentive and sympathetic accounts of a mother and daughter ever written by a male author achieved at least some understanding during his last months that his accusations were both exaggerated and made by one who was “de-ranged”, which is not just to say, as Johnson got round to explaining in Anniversaries IV, out of his “place in the world”.18 At another moment in that volume, he also demonstrates an understanding of the materiality of delusions. Set in Soviet-occupied Mecklenburg in 1946, the passage in question is concerned with the perceptions of a young communist leader Gerd Schumann, who has just discovered, as he prepares to give a speech in the October election campaign, that the town of Jerichow has by no means fallen in with the party line. Turned away by a thirteen-year-old girl (Gesine Cresspahl) when he knocks on a door seeking a place to rest for a few hours before addressing the rally, the agitated Schumann, whose failings will soon enough see him carted off into a Soviet prison camp, decides she is “crazy, feebleminded, a figment of his imagination”. That’s when Johnson writes, “A man can imagine things like that in moments of severe emotional strain. Mirages, illusions like that, do exist”.19
In a Different Spot
Illness, drink and paranoia may have overwhelmed Johnson in his last months, but Anniversaries was completed before then. On 17 April 1983, he had mailed the last remaining days of Volume IV to Suhrkamp, announcing, in an accompanying letter to Burgel Seeh: “at my discretion, a temporary closure. Although there are conversations with Mrs Cresspahl such as the following: Thank God it’s over. We’re done here. With this, yes”.20
Johnson had continued to think of leaving Sheerness in the months since: options included West Berlin, where a position at the German Academy for Language and Literature seemed possible, or another spell in New York City, where Max Frisch’s apartment might have been available. Yet the text of Anniversaries IV suggests he had actually settled for a different form of withdrawal, one that carried him into the richly populated world he had kept in the “cellar of memories”21 in which neighbours and curious promenaders on the other side of Marine Parade could only see a sad-looking man failing to get down to work.
Johnson had long been bequeathing elements of his own experience and situation to his “invented persons”, and in Anniversaries IV he continued to transfer his own life into theirs. The porcelain replicas of the Liberty Bell, which had had borrowed for his essay on the Richard Montgomery, are restored to West Berlin, whence newspaper publishers will forward them to New York as gifts for “families one of whose members has been killed trying to kill members of other families on the other side of the world in Vietnam”.22 A bad day in Sheerness gives way to the communist Gerd Schumann’s description of walking into the fictional Mecklenburg town of Jerichow: “What a godforsaken dump, this is. If only he’d never set foot in it”.23 The “windy backwater” that had been so potently represented by the landscapes of the Thames and Medway estuaries finds its way back to north Germany, just as the “never-decomposing garbage” piling up along the “scabby” edge of a “putrescent river” belongs once again to the Hudson in New York City.24 The thought that strangers can be identified by their habit of looking at buildings rather than people is lifted from its earlier application to Sheerness and relocated in the novel as proof that the unparented eleven-year-old Gesine Cresspahl was no longer a stranger in the town of Gneez, where she had moved from Jerichow in order to attend school in 1946.25 Johnson’s own habit of picking at words, which had seemed so pedantic and at times insulting to his English neighbour Martin Harris, is passed to a “top student” named Dieter Lockenvitz, who gladly receives the author’s “linguistic stethoscope” and uses it to diagnose the corrupting language of official discourse in the GDR.26
Johnson also has things to offer Gesine Cresspahl�
��s friend and lover, the US government’s adviser on radar technology, Prof. Dietrich Erichson. Long ago, in Anniversaries I, “D.E”. had installed Johnson’s “metal behemoth of a desk” in a colonial house in New Jersey — together with his wine, two bottles of which his resident mother got out for him each morning so that, when he got home from work, he too could sit there as “a heavy, sorrowful figure in the night”.27 Johnson now hands his own funeral instructions to the much-travelled Erichson, who carries a piece of paper written in four different languages announcing his wish “To be cremated at the place or location of death with no music speeches flowers or any religious or other service whatsoever”.28 He requests this not out of anger or contempt, as Gesine explains, but “so he wouldn’t put me to any unnecessary trouble”. Since Erichson died when his plane crashed, his survivors were spared even that inconvenience. “Burned up n buried n now theres nothin”, as his mother puts it in her blunt Platt dialect — to which Gesine adds: “That’s how he wanted it”.
In 1981, Fritz J. Raddatz told British radio listeners that Johnson had once written something very beautiful. He had said that nobody who ever left their country did so “without writing a letter, a letter to the country”.29 Johnson’s entire work, Raddatz suggested, should be understood as “a long, long letter addressed still to the country, which means to the problems of the country”. Anniversaries may yet be read as that sort of “reflection” in a reunited Germany thirty years after the Cold War. Thanks to Damion Searls’ English translation of the full text, it is also being reactivated in the USA, not least in Nicholas Dames’ brilliantly “delirious” essay showing how it speaks to the New York City of the COVID-19 lockdown.30
In the still more or less United Kingdom, we may notice that Johnson was found dead in his house in Sheerness on the day, 12 March 1984, when the National Union of Mineworkers embarked, under its President Arthur Scargill, on their year-long and eventually defeated strike against Margaret Thatcher’s thoroughly prepared government. Although this coincidence tells us nothing about either event, it does serve to remind us that, by the end of Johnson’s life on the Isle of Sheppey, deindustrialization of the sort unleashed with some regret and trepidation by Harold Macmillan and Lord Mountbatten in 1960, when they consigned Sheerness to a future without the naval station, garrison and dockyard, had come to seem a price worth paying to the later Tory ministers who, during Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, urged the working-class victims of “change” — one of the words with which the once stately responsibilities of cause and effect were dissolved in this period — to eat fewer “chips”, “get on their bikes”, and prepare to embrace tourism as the new “industry” of the future.31
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 63