The triumph of that vision was claimed again on the Medway after the closure of the remaining naval dockyard at Chatham, completed a couple of weeks after Johnson’s death, on 31 March 1984. There was, once more, a great sense of loss (“It’s installed in you”,32 as one former worker explained of the dockyard at which British nuclear submarines had latterly been serviced), and talk of the heart being ripped out of a community. Former workers may remain convinced that Medway towns such as Chatham and Gillingham have never recovered, but that is not the considered verdict of one of the sociologist Ray Pahl’s successors at the University of Kent. In a report commissioned by BBC Radio Kent in 2016, a “global business forecaster” named Professor Richard Scase concluded that the closure at Chatham had been very positive for the area. It had eliminated “unhealthy, unsafe and inefficient jobs” and put an end to “over-manning, pilfering and wastage”, and also to a “highly unionised” situation in which “bigotry and sexism” were rife.33 It had obliged the government to invest heavily in English Estates’ redevelopment of the area, while also preparing the way for the emergence of the Historic Dockyard Museum, which is helping out “Dickens World” — which may not, let’s face it, have managed to lift the town entirely on its own — and also the creation of a campus shared between the universities of Kent, Greenwich and Christ Church Canterbury.
There is no reason to imagine that, as a “guest” in the country, Johnson would have been prepared to express a view about the British miners’ strike had he lived to watch it unfold. He definitely did, though, reveal a political perspective, as well as the distancing sense of irony for which his writing is known. In his typescript “Conversation on the Novel…” Johnson noted the comments of those who dismissed the novel as a decadent distraction from the revolutionary cause if not an outright “enemy of the people” and described himself as being “on the left but in a different spot”. As the Times’ obituarist rightly noted on 15 March 1984, he had spent much of his life “searching for an undogmatic socialism with a ‘human face’” that might emerge as an alternative to the “conflicting ideologies” of the Cold War.34 The unnamed obituarist also reports that he had persisted in such a position after 1968, even though the suppression of the Prague Spring, which starts immediately after the final day of Anniversaries IV, had left him feeling “increasingly gloomy about the possibilities of this being realised by any government”. Johnson respected the values embodied in the famous manifesto, “Two Thousand Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists and Everyone”, a key document of the Prague Spring written by the then still communist writer Ludvik Vaculik, signed by various Czechoslovak intellectuals, athletes and artists, and published by some Prague newspapers in June 1968.35 Indeed, he reprinted the manifesto in Anniversaries IV: a volume that, like the manifesto itself, could never have pleased “King Arthur” Scargill, who has condemned the emergence of Solidarnosc in Warsaw and continued to defend Stalin even in his more recent stance as a communist Brexiter who would like to see a workers’ state reopening Britain’s mines, mills and factories.
Scargill was the leader of virtuous people whose communities were fundamentally threatened. He was viciously hounded too — harassed by the state as well as by the rampant Tory press and its outriders. He alone, though, chose later to sue his own National Union of Mineworkers for failing to pay the cost of his fuel allowance, the preparation of his annual tax return and the rent on his flat in London’s Barbican until the end of his days. I remember him alongside another unapologetic relic of defeated times, whom I encountered fleetingly in 2018 on a visit to Fischland with the filmmaker Shona Illingworth. We had stopped by the roadside at a T-junction in order to film a large military block that, like the Nazi pleasure-barracks at Prora, was being converted to new use. We had just got started, when an already rare pop-popping noise came along the road from a little resort town named Dierhagen. The noise was followed by a GDR-stickered Trabant, which paused while the unsmiling driver appraised us coldly, and then turned left in the direction of Ahrenshoop. The man at the wheel seemed oddly familiar, and it was a while before I realised that we may just have glimpsed the last leader of the GDR, Egon Krentz, who retired to this coast after serving his time in jail and, as I only found out later, now lives in Dierhagen — an allegedly uncontrite admirer of the more enduring strong man, Vladimir Putin. (The apparition felt unlikely to me too but that, in a sense, is the point: the GDR loyalist I saw was only another inflexible old man in a heritage car.)
There is nothing in Anniversaries IV that might seem reassuring to either of these fallen leaders or, for that matter, to Bryan “unfortunately also Johnson”, who had praised the USSR to the skies on the letters page of the Kent Evening Post. Nothing for anybody who might believe that “socialism” was a matter of holding out in an ideological bunker, keeping quiet about the subsidised holidays you may once have enjoyed on the Black Sea or staying firm in your commitment to an ever more antiquated idea of industrial class struggle. No wonder Johnson stands far back, in Anniversaries IV, from the British communists and sympathisers who flit through his account of the post-war years in East Germany. We meet them as unfriendly freeloaders claiming to be artists in the official cultural retreat at Ahrenshoop, as the “socialistically inclined English girls”36 who show up at the anti-imperialist Third World Youth Festival in East Berlin, and as the notorious Red Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, who appears here being praised to the skies by GDR loyalists for his faithful hymns of praise to “The Socialist Sixth of the World”37 — “a theologian ostracised in his own land” whose successors at the Deanery at Canterbury Cathedral are said to have discovered an abandoned menagerie of Russian animals in the attic: large folkloric toys that had been presented to this credulous Christian admirer’s children by Stalin himself.
There are, without question, moments in Anniversaries IV when the creative compact between Uwe Johnson and his reader seems to fray, and one can glimpse the author, muttering among his characters in that empty basement office. Anniversaries IV has great days set in New York City, including 1 August 1968 when the colour yellow is traced across the surface of the city — the taxis, the smog, the butter, the gold, the painted kerbs beside the fire hydrants, the sign on the Metropolitan Museum, even the allegedly “manila” envelopes — before it is finally bundled up as a “national quality” and dropped as the colour of death over people with yellow skins in Vietnam.38 And yet America seems more distant and faraway in this final volume, and so too does Mecklenburg, which is, by this time, so heavily suffused with nostalgia — a “painful virtue”,39 in Marie’s words – that the yearning must strike some readers as a malady rather than a virtue of the post-war generation of German writers, and one that is not necessarily helpful in its bearing on twenty-first-century conditions.
At its heart, though, Anniversaries IV is a brilliantly observed analytical portrait of the first few years of the GDR as it moves towards the 1953 uprising witnessed by Gesine Cresspahl in Berlin, and the establishment under Walter Ulbrich of a regime in which “The party is always right”.40 Johnson reproduces the remembered atmosphere of the time, with the ubiquitous slogans and Picasso peace doves, the work brigades hunting for blight-spreading Colorado Beetles allegedly dropped on the GDR’s potato fields from American planes, and a long inventory of the people arrested in Mecklenburg to be sent off to Russia and never seen again, or given long jail sentences for “crimes” that weren’t crimes at all.
Much of this is told through events at a high school Johnson derives partly from his memories as a student at the John-Brinkmann school in Güstrow. Anniversaries being a novel, this requires the development of some new characters. So Gesine Cresspahl is moved aside sufficiently to allow the focus to fall on a classmate, Anita Gantlik, who has arrived in Mecklenburg, along a route known to Johnson, as a refugee from East Prussia. Her mother, brothers and sisters were killed in the fields by the advancing Red Army in 1945, and she herself — aged eleven — was raped by three Russ
ian soldiers who knowingly infected her with the gonorrhoea that has left her sterile. Having escaped west with her “bonehead”41 father, who somehow managed to be a Polish Nazi sympathiser, she became a child day labourer, and then, by luck, a favoured translator for the Russian commandants. Thanks to that experience, she is able to impress her mates at the academic high school with her knowledge of Russian, which includes the obscure fact that, as she tells a teacher, “The Russian word for “train station”, ma’am, voskal, is derived from the amusement park near London’s Vauxhall station…”42 A member of the persecuted Free German Youth, she leaves to become an escape helper in West Berlin, bringing people across the border from the GDR.
In that respect, at least, she fares better than a one-armed man named Johnny Schlegel, who is another educated representative of the socialism from “a different spot” that Johnson and other young anti-Nazis had watched being snuffed out as the GDR got into its stride. Following the Second World War, Schlegel turns his inherited farm outside Jerichow into a commune, having learned both his farming skills and his ideas of social organisation from the land settlement schemes he had known during the Weimar Republic, before the Nazis refeudalised the land in the name of “Blood and Soil”.43 Since the end of the war Schlegel had “handed out his inheritance in ninths to refugees from the lost eastern territories, so long as they were farmers or willing to learn to be”.44 These fugitives were treated with considerable hostility by the locals, but not by Schlegel, who granted them a share of the farm profits depending on the work they put in and the number of horses they had brought with them. This co-operative enterprise becomes an affront to the agricultural policies of the GDR: Schlegel’s form of socialism extended beyond the use of land, draft animals vehicles and tools, to include household tasks, which were done in common, just as meals were eaten at one table. Johnny Schlegel’s farm was assessed wrongly, obliged to meet quotas several times higher than those demanded of more compliant farms, and even to pay for cows that were already its own. Schlegel eventually falls victim to his own punctilious record-keeping, which enabled the authorities to establish that he had paid money into a foreign account when buying a piece of land in 1947. He was arrested in February 1953 and convicted on the evidence of his critical comments about state agricultural policy and his diary full of ill-advised remarks about the communist takeover in Prague. He gets fifteen years in prison. The farm is confiscated and the co-operative “cleaned out”. The members who aren’t jailed join the procession into refugee camps in the West.
The utopian impulse that Johnson claimed sometimes to have glimpsed in the working-class solidarity of Sheerness certainly takes a bashing in Anniversaries IV. Johnson shows it defeated in East Germany during the post-war years, and draws things to an end just short of its extinction in Prague 1968. Displaced from political reality, it finds refuge in the unattainable and nostalgically rendered landscape of Fischland (“Never again”) while also retreating into the infantile fantasy of Marie Cresspahl who, as a four-year-old in New York in 1961, invents a “republic of children” named Cydamonoe, “a Kinder-Garten in the intended meaning of the word”,45 which is only accessible by air from specified places. Surrounded by water and filled with windmills and grass roads for pedal carts, tricycles and jump machines, Cydamonoe is a place in time as well as space, where the working principle is “help yourself” to anything you might want. “No child ever did without” in Cydamonoe, and should they develop a desire for something that wasn’t already present, there was a “Want and Will building” where members could take their requests. Many vaccinations are required by those seeking to enter Cydamonoe, since it remains “the only country in the world that is worth living in”.
For all the personal trauma and defeat, Johnson the writer who had learned his “irreplaceable method of interrogation and experimentation” under Hans Mayer in the GDR, is still very much at work in this closing volume. He is there with his persistent, sceptical search for the truth of changing situations, his sense of testimony, his curiosity, and his striving towards a kind of novel in which fiction serves historical enquiry, but not just by faking its way over inconvenient gaps in the record in the manner of so much historical fiction nowadays. On the wider political front, Gesine Cresspahl knows the dangers of narratives that simplify and schematise in order to arouse. She is pleased to have passed that scepticism on to her daughter in New York: “Marie is suspicious of stories where everything fits together — I’ve taught her that much”.46
Johnson may have tested his approach against the sloganized reality of a since abolished communist state, but Anniversaries remains on the side of anyone seeking to challenge the “post-fact” world with a recovered art of “focused observation” and critical “information”.47 It is surely a good novel to read in this period when new techniques of narrative dissimulation have once again served to empower the far-right, and when the long discredited strategy of “socialist realism”, with its Stalinist pretence that the promised future is already dawning in the present, finds a weird reprise in British government TV adverts showing the “New Start” that will follow Brexit (if only we islanders get our patriotism and paperwork in order). In this regard, Anniversaries IV completes a work that remains inspiring in its enduring visibility: resistant, contrary to expectation, and still there even after its world has dissolved around it — as arresting, perhaps, as the not yet sawn-off masts of the Richard Montgomery, and potentially a lot more useful.
NOTES
Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage: Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl was written and first published by Suhrkamp Verlag in four separate volumes (1970, 1971, 1973, 1983). Damion Searls’ American translation, from which all English quotations are derived, was published as Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl in a continuously paginated cased set of two volumes by New York Review Books in 2018. References to Anniversaries below use the pagination from this edition while also identifying the original volume with Roman numerals. All passages quoted from previously untranslated Johnson texts, including those gathered in Eberhardt Fahke’s edited anthology of Johnson’s occasional English writings, Inselgeschichten (Island Stories), are from translations prepared for this project by Damion Searls.
COVID-19 and the associated lockdown are at least partly responsible for the fact that some references are incomplete or, indeed, entirely missing.
Preface
1. Written in 1796 and originally published in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkas, “Speech of the Dead Christ” is here quoted from the translation given by Thomas Carlyle in “Jean Paul Richter Again”, first published in Foreign Review in January 1830 and collected in Thomas Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume 2, Boston: James Munroe 1838, p. 240
2. Gerhard Zwerenz, Die Verteidigung Sachsens und warum Karl May die Indianer liebte Sächsische Autobiographie in Fortsetzung, Folge 25. Accessed at poetladen.de/zwerenz-gerhard-sachsen25-uwe-johnson.htm
3. Uwe Johnson, will dated 22 March 1983, quoted from Heinrich Lübbert, Der Streit um das Erbe des Schriftstellers Uwe Johnson, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998, p. 38
4. Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries IV, p. 1384
5. A Leslie Willson, “‘An unacknowledged humorist’: Interview with Uwe Johnson, Sheerness-in-Kent, 20 April 1982”, Dimension: Contemporary German Arts and Letters, Vol 15/3, 1982, p. 410
6. “Novelist had been dead for two weeks”, Sheerness Times Guardian, 16 March 1984, p. 3
7. Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, translated and introduced by Peter Filkins, Brookline MA: Zephyry Press, 2006, p. 617
8. Matthias Bormuth, Die Verunglückten: Bachmann, Johnson, Meinhof, Améry, Berlin: Berenberg Verlag, 2019
9. Eberhard Fahlke, “Auf der Suche nach ‘Inselgeschichten’”, in Uwe Johnson, Inselgeschichten, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995, p. 175
10. Uwe Johnson, letter to Hans Joachim Schädlich, 3 October 1976, quoted in Inselgeschichten, p. 17
11.
Uwe Johnson, “Conversation on the Novel, Its Uses & Dangers, Recent Degenerations, Indignation of the Audience etc.”, typescript dated February 1972, Uwe Johnson Archive, University of Rostock, UJA/H/000918
12. “Motorboater Rescued after Circling Sheppey”, Yachting Monthly, 28 April 2010
Part I: The Writer Who Became a Reef
1. Reading Uwe Johnson in Kent, 1970–3
1. Gordon E. Cherry & Penny Leith, Holford: A Study in Architecture, Planning and Civic Design, London and New York: Alexandrine Press, 1986, p. 203
2. Ibid.
3. Edward Hyams, The Last Poor Man, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1966, p. 124
4. The lecturer, Ian Gregor, certainly understood that Forster’s injunction, which came with the more interesting rider “Live in fragments no longer”, was actually Margaret Schlegel’s way of hoping for a passionate rapport with her husband to be, the desiccated businessman Henry Wilcox — a context that may not have been grasped by students who hadn’t quite made it to chapter 22 of the novel.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 64