5. Uwe Johnson, Speculations about Jakob [1959] (trans. Ursule Molinaro), New York & London: Grove Press, 1963
6. D. J. Enright, “Make it Hard”, New Statesman, 6 September 1963, p. 290
7. Uwe Johnson, “Preface” in Das Neue Fenster: Selections from Contemporary German Literature, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p. viii
8. Ibid., p. vii
9. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”, Selected Poems and Prose (trans. John Felstiner), New York & London: Norton, 2001, p. 395
10. Ibid., p. 396
11. Ilse Aichinger, “Dover”, Bad Words: Selected Short Prose (trans. Uljana Wolfe and Christian Hawkey), London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2018, p. 103
12. Speculations, p. 222
13. Ibid.
14. Romain Rolland, “An Open Letter to Gerhart Hauptman” (29 August 1914), in Above the Battle (trans. G.K. Ogden), London: Allen &Unwin, 1916, p. 19
15. Reinhard Baumgart, “Laudatory Address, Georg-Büchner-Prize, 1971”, Deutsch Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, www.deutscheakademie.de/en/awards/georg-buechner-preis/uwe-johnson/laudatio
16. Speculations, p. 224
17. Ibid., p. 221
18. Ibid., p. 209
19. Ibid., p. 147. For a critical discussion of the publisher Siegfried Unseld’s post-war reservations about the treatment of nature — wrongly identified as “bordering on Blood and Soil” — in the first novel Johnson’s wrote, the posthumously published Ingrid Babererende, see Hugh Ridley, “‘Nach einem Lenz, der sich nur halb entfaltet’: Aspects of the Reception of Uwe Jonson’s Ingrid Babendererde”, in D. Byrnes et al, German Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture, Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2018, pp. 114–5
20. Ibid., p. 147
21. Ibid., p. 152
22. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, p. 1376
23. Roger Taylor, Art, An Enemy of the People, Hassocks: Harvester, 1978
24. Roger Taylor, “The Marxist theory of Art”, Radical Philosophy 5, Summer 1973, pp. 29-30
25. Ibid., pp. 29-34
26. Alicja Iwánska, “Without Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 11, No. 4, Autumn 1971, p. 406 Quoted in Taylor, “The Marxist theory of Art”, p. 31
27. Ibid., p. 410
28. Stewart Home, “Art is like Cancer: Interview with Roger Taylor” [2004], www.stewarthomesociety.org/pol/Taylor.htm. See also Roger Taylor, Beyond Art: What Art is and Might Become if Freed from Cultural Elitism, Hassocks: Harvester, 1981
2. On the Move but Nobody’s Refugee
1. Dietrich Orlow, The Nazi Party 1919–1945: A Complete History, New York: Enigma, 2008, pp. 405–6
2. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939–March 1942, London: Arrow Books, 2005, p. 189
3. Max Frisch, From the Berlin Journal (trans. Wieland Hoban), London & Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2017, p. 163
4. Tomasz Blusiewicz, “Überseehafen Rostock: East Germany’s Window to the World under Stasi Watch, 1961–1989” in Center for European Studies, Modern Europe Workshop, Harvard University; 2016. Blusiewicz is quoting from Christian Halbrock, Freiheit heisst die Angst Verlieren: Verweigerung, Widerstand und Opposition in der DDR: Der Ostseebezirk Rostock, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014, p. 51
5. Uwe Johnson, “About Myself: Acceptance Speech upon Induction into the German Academy for Language and Literature” [“Ich über mich: vorstellung bei der Aufname in die Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung”] (trans. Damion Searls), Darmstadt, 11 November 1977, Zeit Online, 11 November 1977
6. Christa Wolf, City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr Freud (trans. Damion Searls), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. 221
7. Victor Klemperer, diary entry for 17 August 1945, The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945–54, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 40
8. Gary L. Baker, Understanding Uwe Johnson, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999, p. 18
9. Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries II, pp. 968–9
10. “About Myself”
11. Dorothea Dornhoff, “The Inconsequence of Doubt: Intellectuals and the Discourse on Socialist Unity”, in Michael Geyer (ed.), The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, University of Chicago Press, 2001, footnote 38, p. 86
12. Peter Nicolaisen, “Faulkner and Southern History: A View from Germany”, Southern Cultures, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1998, p. 34
13. Ibid., 40
14. Katja Leuchtenberger, Uwe Johnson, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 22
15. Harry Gilroy, “Author Who Left East Germany”, New York Times, 4 December 1966, p. 171
16. “Now, sailing on the Thames, nigh its mouth, of fair days, when the wind is favorable for inward bound craft, the stranger will sometimes see processions of vessels, all of similar size and rig, stretching for miles and miles, like a long string of horses tied two and two to a rope and driven to market. These are colliers going to London with coal” (Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile [1855], New York & London: Penguin, 2008, p. 114).
17. Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 541
18. Speculations, p. 161
19. Ibid., p. 221
20. Jean-Louis De Rambures, “Uwe Johnson, de l’Allemagne de l’Est aux États-Unis”, Le Monde, 3 December 1971, p. 24
21. “Author Who Left East Germany”, p. 171
22. Leuchtenberger, Uwe Johnson, p. 26.
23. Colin Riordan, “Reifeprüfung 1961: Uwe Johnson and the Cold War”, in Rhys W. Williams et al (eds.), German Writers and the Cold War 1945–61, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 210
3. The Border: The Distance: The Difference
1. This label is said to have been coined in 1962 by the literary reviewer Gunter Blocker. See Deborah L. Horzen, “Past Meets Present in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage and the New York Times”, PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 1996, p. 6. The translator Damion Searls suggests that this cliché would be more accurately rendered into English as “the voice of divided Germany”, since the word “poet”, unlike the German “Dichter”, implies someone who writes poetry rather than prose. See his “On Uwe Johnson: Poet of Both Germany’s”, Paris Review online, 15 October 2018 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/15/on-uwe-johnson-poet-of-both-germanys/
2. Fire in the Phoenix (presented by Richard Mayne), BBC Radio 3, 29 October 1979
3. De Rambures, “Uwe Johnson, de L’Allemagne de l’Est aux États-Unis”
4. Uwe Johnson, The Third Book about Achim (trans. Ursule Molinaro), London: Cape, 1968, p. 236
5. Ibid., p. 4
6. Ibid., p. 230
7. Ibid., p. 3
8. Anthony Bailey, Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey, New York: Random House, 1983, p. 6
9. Uwe Johnson, Ich wollte keine Frage ausgelassen haben: Gespräche mit Fluchthelfern, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010
10. Speculations, p. 214
11. Jean Baudrillard, “Review of Uwe Johnson’s The Border: Toward the Seventh Spring of the German Democratic Republic”. This review of the French translation of Speculations About Jacob, was first published as “Uwe Johnson: La Frontière” in Les Temps Modernes, 199 (1962), pp. 1094–1107. Thomas Kemple’s translation is included in Gary Genosko (ed.), The Uncollected Baudrillard, New York: Sage, 2001
12. Uwe Johnson, “Berlin, Border of a Divided World”, Evergreen Review, 5 (1961), pp.18–25
13. Uwe Johnson, “Berliner Stadtbahn (veraltet)”, 1961, in Berliner Sachen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, p. 9. Here quoted from Damion Searls’ translation, “Berlin Transit”
14. Maurice Blanchot, “Berlin [1964]”, MLN, 1099:3, April 1994, pp.345–64
15. Ibid., p. 348
16. Ibid., p. 352
17. Ibid., p. 354
&
nbsp; 18. Uwe Johnson, An Absence (trans. Richard & Clara Winston), London: Cape, 1969, p. 23
19. Ibid., p. 17
20. Ibid., p. 18
21. The Third Book about Achim, p. 231
22. Ibid., p. 233
23. An Absence, p. 28
4. Praise and Denunciation: A Headache for All Zealots
1. Joachim Remak, “Germany in Fact and Fiction”, Harpers Monthly, August 1967, pp. 94–6
2. John Updike, “Two Points on a Descending Curve”, New Yorker, 7 January 1967, p. 91
3. Choice, April 1967, Vol. No., 2, p. 165
4. Donald Heiney, Christian Science Monitor, 27 April 1967
5. M. J. Lasky, “Review of Speculations about Jakob”, New York Times Book Review, 14 April 1963
6. “Review of Uwe Johnson’s The Border”
7. Manfred Wekwerth, Letter to Helene Weigel, 25 May 1964. Quoted in Erdmut Wizisla, “Private or Public? The Bertolt Brecht Archive as an Object of Desire”, L. Bradley & K Leeder (eds.) Edinburgh German Yearbook 5: Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity, Camden House, 2011, p. 106
8. “Die Verteidigung Sachsens und warum Karl May die Indianer liebte”
9. “Conversation on the Novel, Its Uses & Dangers, Recent Degenerations, Indignation of the Audience etc”.
10. Ernst Bloch, who had been forced into retirement in 1957, stayed in the West after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Hans Mayer crossed over in 1963, after enduring years of condemnation and pressure for refusing the orthodoxies of Ulbricht’s Stalinist regime. See Dorothea Dornhoff, “the Inconsequence of Doubt: Intellectuals and the Discourse on Socialist Unity”, in Michael Geyer (ed.), The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 59–87
11. “Reifeprüfung 1961”, p. 214
12. Berlin Wall, BBC Radio 4, 13 August 1981
13. “Mauerschau” (Walter Busse), “Johnson”, Der Speigel, 50/1961, 6 December 1961
14. Third Book About Achim, p. 229. Johnson also looks back on Brentano and his accusations in Begleitumstände: Frankfurter Vorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 204–5
15. “About Myself”
16. “Reifeprüfung 1961”, p. 216
17. Begleitumstände, pp. 206–51. The thoroughly damned “Senator McKesten” appears on p. 231
18. Eberhard Fahlke, “Ich überlege mir die Geschichte”: Uwe Johnson im Gespräch, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988, p. 244. Quoted in K. Fickert, “Martin Walser’s Portrait of Uwe Johnson”, International Fiction Review, 22, p. 5
19. An Absence, p. 44
20. Ibid., pp. 53–4
5. New York City: Beginning Anniversaries
1. “Author Who Left East Germany”, p. 171
2. “Faulkner and Southern History: A View from Germany”, pp. 31–44
3. Understanding Uwe Johnson, p. 6
4. Anniversaries IV, p. 1637
5. Bernd Neumann, Uwe Johnson, Hamburg: Europäiche Verlagsanstalt, 1994, p. 599
6. Pawel Monat with John Dille, Spy in the U.S., New York: Berkley Medallion, 1963
7. Anniversaries II, p. 495
8. Michael Hamburger, “Uwe Johnson: A Friendship”, Grand Street, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 112 & 110
9. Begleitumstände, pp. 425–6
10. Understanding Uwe Johnson, pp. 116–7
11. Uwe Johnson interview with Dieter Zimmer, quoted in Mark Boulby, Uwe Johnson, NY: Ungar, 1974, p. 98
12. Understanding Uwe Johnson, p. 117
13. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962] (trans. Thomas Burger), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989
14. Nicholas Dames, Departures and Returns, N +1, 5 June 2020. https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/departures-and-returns/
15. Anniversaries II, pp. 596–7
16. Anniversaries I, p. 3
17. Ibid., p. 14
18. Ibid., p. 15
19. Anniversaries II, p. 526
20. Ibid., p. 731
21. Ibid., p. 732
22. Ibid., p. 734
23. Ibid., p. 735
24. Pierre Mertens, Uwe Johnson, Le Scripteur de Mur, Arles: Actes Sud, 1989, p.31
25. Osborne, Peter and Charles, Matthew, “Walter Benjamin”, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/benjamin/.
26. Understanding Uwe Johnson, p. 143
27. Phylis Meras, “Talk with Uwe Johnson”, New York Times Book Review, 72, No. 17, 1967, p. 43 Quoted from K. J. Fickert, “Ambiguity and Style: A Study of Uwe Johnson’s “Osterwasser”, International Fiction Review, 9, No. 1, 1982, p. 21
28. Anniversaries, I, p. 703
29. Anniversaries II p. 683
30. Ibid., p. 703
31. Richard Stern, “Penned In”, Critical Inquiry, 13. 1 (Autumn 1986), p. 26
6. Leaving Berlin
1. Uwe Johnson, “How to Explain Berlin to a Newcoming Child”, Berlin Sachen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, p. 102
2. Ibid., 104
3. Anniversaries II, pp. 690 & 697
4. Uwe Johnson, “Concerning an Attitude of Protesting”, Cecil Woolf & John Bagguley (eds.), Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, London: Peter Owen, 1967, pp. 108–9
5. Illustration 6. In R. Wizisla (ed.), “Liebes Fritzchen” “Lieber Groß-Uwe”: Uwe Johnson — Fritz J. Raddatz, Der Briefwechsel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006, pp 168–9
6. From Fritz Raddatz’s autobiography Unruhestifter (The Troublemaker), http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/fritz-j-raddatz-hauptsache-irgendein-licht-faellt-auf-ihn-a-431479.html See also Gianna Zocco, “Disturbing the Peace of ‘Two Not So Very Different’ Countries: James Baldwin and Fritz Raddatz”, James Baldwin Review, Vol. 3, 2017, p. 94
7. “Uwe Johnson: A Friendship”, p. 112
8. Claire Hamburger, informal note written for the author and the BBC radio producer John Goudie in 2016
9. “Uwe Johnson: A Friendship, p. 113
10. Ibid., pp. 113, 117 & 110
11. Ibid., p. 115
12. From the Berlin Journal, p. 19
13. Ibid., 147
14. “Die Verteidigung Sachsens und warum Karl May die Indianer liebte”
15. From the Berlin Journal, p. 103
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 156
18. Ibid., p. 148-9
19. Jack London in John Barleycorn, or Alcoholic Memoirs, quoted in Donald Newlove, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers, London: Junction Books, 1981, p. 133
20. Ibid., p. 60
21. Ibid., p. 62
22. Max Frisch, Montauk (trans. Geoffrey Skelton) [1976], Portland & Brooklyn: Tin House Books, 2016, p. 200
23. Uwe Johnson, p. 12
24. Kurt Fickert, Neither Left Nor Right: The Politics of Individualism in Uwe Johnson’s Work, New York: Lang, 1987, p. 121
25. Anniversaries IV, p. 1533
Part II The Island: Modernity’s Mudbank
7. 1974: Looking Out from Bellevue Road
1. Cecily Brown, interviewed in FT Weekend Magazine, 11/12 April 2020, p. 28
2. Annie Ernaux, The Years, tr. Alison L. Strayer, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2008. p. 109
3. Hansard, HC Deb 04 March 1980 vol 980 cc 237
4. Built in the 1820s as part of the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, the Tyler Hill tunnel is now Grade II* listed and described by Historic England as “the world’s first modern railway tunnel on the first passenger steam railway”. The long disused tunnel collapsed under the university’s Cornwallis Building on 11 July 1974
5. Geoffrey Goodman, “Lord Scanlon of Davyhulme”, Guardian, 28 Jan 2004
6. E.P. Thompson, “Sir, Writing by Candlelight”, New Society, 24 December 1970, reprinted in Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin, 1980, p. 39
7. Dominic Sandbrook, “The Day Britain Lost Its Soul: How Decimalisation Sig
nalled the Demise of a Proudly Independent Nation”, Daily Mail, 31 January 2011
8. “Terribly Seventies”, Times, 4 Nov 1978, p. 8
9. Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, London: Faber, 2009, p. 246
10. Douglas Oliver, The Harmless Building, Brighton: Ferry Press, 1973, p. 80
11. Michael Walters, “Smiling Through — 1975 Style”, Belfast Telegraph, 3 September 1975, p. 8
12. “Janet Street-Porter’s Whitstable”, Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2012
13. Gordon Leak, “Now for Battle of Britain II”, Newcastle Journal, 19 September 1974, p. 8
14. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage [1915], London: Vintage, 2000, p. 23
15. Quoted by Ben Bridges, http://www.benbridges.co.uk/riders8.html. Accessed 29 February 2016
16. Dave Taylor, “Origins… In Law and Social Change”, “Memories of the Sir William Nottidge”, www.simplywhitstable.com. (Accessed 20 April 2016)
17. Carol Sims, “Life as Pupil and Governor at 60-year-old Showcase School”, Whitstable Times, 3 September 2012
18. Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien & Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5: East, The Buildings of England, Yale University Press, 2005, P. 208
19. William Holford, “Letter to the Editor”, The Times, 12 June 1962
20. Reyner Banham, “Introduction” in The Architecture of Yorke Rosenberg Mardall 1944/1972, London: Lund Humphries, 1972, p. 4. The documents connected to the Sir William Nottidge School are here quoted from the YRM holdings at the RIBA Archive held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
8. Neither St. Helena nor Hong Kong
1. Hear, for example, “What’s Wrong With Me” on Wild Billy Childish and the Chatham Singers, Kings of the Medway Delta, Damaged Goods, 2020
2. George Hammond, “The Beginner’s Guide to Buying an Island”, Financial Times, 32 March 2019, p. 1
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaKZqMxdS7k
4. Paul Moody, “England’s Dreaming”, Classic Rock, No 161, August 2011 http://officialcaravan.co.uk/blog/2011/07/20/classicrockmagazinejuly2011/ Accessed on 29 February 2016
5. “Circular Tours for Saturday Cyclists: Sheppey”, London Daily News, 23 September 1899, p. 7
6. Thomas Ingoldsby, “Blue Dolphin: A Legend of Sheppey”, The Ingoldsby Legends or Mirth and Marvels, London: Richard Bentley, 1858, p. 70
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 65