Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl [Paperback]

Uwe Johnson (Author), Leila Vennewitz (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002 | Series: Anniversaries (Book 1)

A translation of the first two volumes of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Uwe Johnson (July 20, 1934 - February 22, 1984) was a German writer, editor, and scholar.

Johnson was born in Kammin in Pomerania (now Kamien Pomorski, Poland). At the end of World War II in 1945, he fled with his family to Mecklenburg; his father died in a Soviet internment camp (Fünfeichen). The family eventually settled in Güstrow, where he attended John-Brinckman-Oberschule 1948–1952. He went on to study German philology, first in Rostock (1952-54), then in Leipzig (1954-56). His Diplomarbeit (final thesis) was on Ernst Barlach. Due to his lack of political support for the Communist regime of East Germany, he was suspended from the University June 17, 1953, but was later reinstated.

Beginning in 1953, Johnson worked on the novel Ingrid Babendererde, rejected by various publishing houses and unpublished during his lifetime.

In 1956, Johnson's mother left for West Berlin. As a result, he was not allowed to work a normal job in the East. Unemployed for political reasons, he translated Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (the translation was published in 1961) and began to write the novel Mutmassungen über Jakob, published in 1959 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main. Johnson himself moved to West Berlin at this time. He promptly became associated with Gruppe 47, which Hans Magnus Enzensberger once described as "the Central Café of a literature without a capital."

During the early 1960s, Johnson continued to write and publish fiction, and also supported himself as a translator, mainly from English-language works, and as an editor. He travelled to America in 1961; the following year he was married, had a daughter, received a scholarship to Villa Massimo, Rome, and won the International Publishers' Formentor Prize.

In 1965, Johnson travelled again to America. He then edited Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen. Fragmente 1933-1956 (Me-ti: the Book of Changes. Fragments, 1933-1956). From 1966 through 1968 he worked in New York City as a textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace & World. During this time (in 1967) he began work on his magnum opus, the Jahrestage and edited Das neue Fenster (The new window), a textbook of German-language readings for English-speaking students learning German.

On January 1, 1967 protesters from Johnson's own West Berlin apartment building founded Kommune 1. He first learned about it by reading it in the newspaper. Returning to West Berlin in 1969, he became a member of the West German PEN Center and of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). In 1970, he published the first volume of his Jahrestage (Anniversaries). Two more volumes were to follow in the next three years, but the fourth volume would not appear until 1983.

Meanwhile, in 1972 Johnson became Vice President of the Academy of the Arts and was the editor of Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971. In 1974, he moved to Sheerness on the English Isle of Sheppey; shortly after, he broke off work on Jahrestage due partly to health problems and partly to writer's block.

This was not a completely unproductive period. Johnson published some shorter works and continued to do some work as an editor. In 1977, he was admitted to the Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt Academy for Speech and Writing); two years later he informally withdrew. In 1979 he gave a series of Lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt (published posthumously as Begleitumstände. Frankfurter Vorlesungen).

In 1983, the fourth volume of Jahrestage was published, but Johnson broke off a reading tour for health reasons. He died February 22, 1984 in Sheerness in England. His body was not found until March 13 of the same year. At the time of his death, he had been planning a one-year stay in New York City.

Leila Vennewitz is a contributor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt titles including: "Anniversaries".

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156011662
• ISBN-13: 978-0156011662
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,531,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great German Novel, September 20, 2001

By 

John D. Faucher (Greater Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (Paperback)

Gesine Cresspahl, a 34-year-old German national, single mother of a 10-year-old, lives in New York City and works for a large bank. Starting in August 1967, she records her thoughts, her life and her research into her family history every day for her daughter's benefit.

She comes from Mecklenburg, a province on Germany's Baltic coast. She was born on the weekend when the Nazis came to power in 1933 (echoes of The Tin Drum, except Gesine grew up). She grew up during the Nazi dictatorship, then the communist dictatorship. Somehow, she escaped from East Germany through Czechoslovakia and Frankfurt to reach her permanent residence in New York.

Her thoughts (sometimes they are clearly diary entries, other times they seem more glimpses into her consciousness) take us through several points in 20th-century German history. We see the land-baron Junker society of eastern Germany, tottering amid worker and farmer uprisings in the desperate years after World War I; her father gets caught in the struggles between socialists, communists and nationalists as the Nazis take power; religious figures suffer in the lawless Hitler regime.

At the same time, she observes her surroundings sharply: the upper West Side neighborhood in which she lives, the daily dispatches of America's Vietnam involvement, courtesy of that "friendly aunt, the New York Times," her ambivalent quasi-romantic involvement with alcoholic weapons engineer "D.E." The English title is slightly misleading: Gesine Cresspahl relates stories relevant to her life each particular day, rather than stories of what happened on each day in history. "Days of the Year" would be a better translation than "Anniversaries."

I read the first of the four "deliveries" of this novel on the recommendation of a German in-law; he said he thought it the most engrossing work he's read. I agree: the descriptions of the long-gone pre-1945 German society are fascinating, and Gesine is a striking narrator, as much for what she tells you about herself and her observations as what she does not. I read it very slowly (in German, 6 pages a night with my dictionary beside me), and never felt like giving up. Having finished volume one, I intend to continue my slow march through the 1,200 other pages to find out how Gesine left the Democratic Republic and to see if we find out anything more about Jacob, the mysterious father of her child.

The style is very down-to-earth. While Johnson (like Grass) may be trying to tell us something deeper about how Germans should handle their intimidating history, the message is subtle and not given at the expense of the interest in sheer narration.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The most complete account of modern German history, December 8, 2006

By 

F. Hoffmann "flh" (Toronto CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (Paperback)

"Anniversaries" is a tetralogy, and only two parts are translated into English. Thats a little unfortunate because it certainly is one of the most complete description of german history immediately before and after World War II. I also find it the most subtle and terrifying description of how the Nazis took power in Germany. I read all four parts in German and find that the first two parts are the best ones, so that you do not miss too much by not having the last two at hand.

Johnson tells the story of Gesine Cresspahl, who was born in Eastern Germany and now lives in New York with her 10 year old daughter. The book is structured like a diary, with an every day entry from August 1967 to August 1968. But it is not really a diary, because it is not her who writes the entries. Instead she "gave the right" to the writer to write down her thoughts, conversations and experiences during these 365 days. This style is somewhat similar to James Joyce' Ulysses, but certainly not directly comparable.

But the diary does not only refer to Gesine's life in New York, but it also refers to important experiences she made during her childhood and youth in pre-and post war Germany. In that way, Johnson contrasts Gesines life in modern New York to her childhood in rural Eastern Germany. He draws a huge panorama of 4 decades, starting with the raise of the Nazis in Germany, continuing with WWII, Soviet Occupation, beginning of the Cold War, modern life in US and the racial tensions of the 60's and ending with the Massacre in Prague in 1968.

It certainly is a major task to organize so much material, and most books choosing such a wide focus do fail completely (for example "Middlesex"). Not so "Anniversary". By using the diary-structure, Johnson really manages the huge amount of material quite well and keeps track of all the major and minor storylines without loosing the reader.

The book starts a little slowly, introducing us to the Cresspahl family living in a little Eastern German village at the beginning of the 30's. Quite soon we see the first signs of rising National Socialism: Some inhabitants of this village start to bad-mouthing the small Jewish community, and initially their old friend still support them. But this changes soon. The Nazis become stronger, and trying to keep their stakes, most people give up their relationships to the Jewish.

It is the major strength of the book to desribe this process of a slowly emerging dictatorship in a very subtle way. By focussing on a very small village where everybody knows each other, this process becomes the more terrifying. It is the best description of pre-WWII Germany I have read so far, and it is completely contained in the first 2 books.

The last two books, which are not in this edition, are considerably weaker and do not deserve 4 stars. Especially the third one which basically describes the transition phase between the end of WWII and separation of the 2 Germanies is not so good. The fourth part proceeds with the beginning of the Soviet Dictatorship, and we learn that people have not learned so much from Nazi-Germany so much, after all. But that does not only apply to Germans, it applies to us all and teaches us that we do have to fight every day for democracy and equal rights and that we should not tolerate any intolerance.