John Brinkmann School, Güstrow.
Old street in Güstrow with view of the cathedral, postcard, sent 1973.
Wieland Förster, portrait stele of Uwe Johnson (2006), Güstrow.
Between 1954 and 1956, Johnson continued his studies at the University of Leipzig, where he went to work under Hans Mayer, an anti-fascist and independent-minded Marxist literary scholar who had chosen to move from the West to the future GDR when invited to take up a chair at the University of Leipzig in 1948. During Johnson’s time at Leipzig, Mayer, whose parents had been murdered at Auschwitz, disputed the Stalinist claim that the literature of the GDR had emerged from the working class insisting, against the apparatchiks of socialist realism, that the literary climate of the new state would only be improved by “a comprehensive confrontation and engagement with modern art and literature”.11 It was here that Johnson, whose work would embody this engagement, also attended lectures by Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of “heritage” and “concrete utopias”, who had returned to the GDR from America in 1949 but would be condemned as a “counter-revolutionary” in the clampdown following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and forced to retire from his post as Professor of Philosophy in 1957. As a student in this increasingly beleaguered crucible of independent Marxist thought, Johnson read György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and also modern novels by Sartre and Joyce. Above all, however, he was moved by the novels of William Faulkner, a writer of the American south whose sense of the “burdened past”12 — an inheritance tainted by slavery, fear of “miscegenation”, the idea of white supremacy and the associated “rhetoric of blood”13 — was keenly studied by various post-war German writers struggling to come to terms with the Nazi past. Above all, it was The Sound and the Fury — another famously “difficult” novel with multiple narrators — that would become a decisive influence on Johnson’s writing.14
Though not among the members of the Leipzig circle who would be sentenced to long jail sentences at show trials in 1956, Johnson, whose mother and sister had by this time moved to the West, was still impeded by the ruling ideology’s watchdogs. Barred from continuing towards a PhD after graduating, he remained unable to find employment — a situation he would interpret, so he later told the academicians at Darmstadt, as an “invitation to leave, which would then have justified the label of ‘traitor’”. He stayed in the GDR for a further three years after his studies at Leipzig, writing and living on freelance literary work and the generosity of friends, including Hans Mayer, who provided him with money and “anonymous writing jobs”.15 He worked as a reader for publishers, prepared index cards for a German dictionary at ten pfennigs a go and produced, for a private publishing firm, a German translation of Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, a novel about an alleged hero of the American revolution who ends up living much of his life undercover in England, which may also have provided Johnson with his first glimpse of the Thames Estuary.16 He tried but failed to secure publication of his first novel, Ingrid Babendererde, started when he was still nineteen years old and rewritten in 1956 over an unofficial summer vacation at Ahrenshoop, a village in Fischland on the Baltic (the GDR cultural authorities had maintained Ahrenshoop’s longstanding tradition as an artists’ retreat: it was used by many, including Bertolt Brecht, who came to this place, which had recently been “pure Nazi territory”,17 in the first years of the GDR). The hostility with which state publishers in the GDR rejected Ingrid Barbendererde — one reader allegedly suggested that this evidently capable writer stood in need of “brainwashing” — hardly seems surprising since the novel, which would remain unpublished until after Johnson’s death, tells the story of a high school class, closely derived from his own at Güstrow, graduating during the fierce ideological crackdown of 1953. Johnson, who may well have preferred to continue his battle for truth and a critical independence of thought within the GDR, moved to West Berlin in 1959, a few weeks before Suhrkamp Verlag, the publishing house run in Frankfurt am Main by Peter Suhrkamp and his younger assistant Siegfried Unseld, brought out Speculations about Jakob.
Presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, this novel launched Johnson as a literary prodigy. It was positively received in West Germany, and by no means only by readers keen to construe it as an anti-communist work and to patronise Johnson as a young writer who could be expected to flourish once he had properly aligned himself with the cause of freedom as it was understood by anti-communist ideologues in the West. Within months, this hitherto unknown author had been awarded West Berlin’s prestigious Fontane Prize, and he was soon invited to join meetings of the influential association of writers and literary tribunal known as Group 47. In 1961 he embarked on his first lecture tour through the USA before returning to Berlin in time for publication of The Third Book about Achim. In 1962, the year in which he was awarded the prestigious International Publishers Prize, Johnson followed Heinrich Böll into a year-long residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome, having been awarded a stipend under a German Academy scheme run by the Cultural Ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany. A collection entitled Karsch and other Prose appeared in 1964, and the following year saw publication both of Johnson’s third novel, Two Views, about an almost accidental couple who found themselves divided by the sudden building of the Berlin Wall, and also of his edition of Bertolt Brecht’s uncompleted Me-Ti: Book of Changes, commissioned by Suhrkamp in collaboration with the Brecht Archives in East Berlin.
By 1963, when Speculations about Jakob made its first appearance in English, the publishers at Grove Press in New York could confidently blurb Johnson as “the greatest of the post-war innovators whose work has radically altered the literary landscape of our time”. Photographs from this period show an impressive — and not always forbidding — young man, often clad in black leather jacket and cap. His pipe has developed a curved flourish and his spectacles, which had been wholly utilitarian wire-framed things in photographs from “the time you couldn’t buy any better ones”,18 have become round and stylish. With his cropped head, Johnson had the look of a fearless, intellectually engaged writer who conformed to no government’s mould. A decidedly starry figure who was sometimes likened to Bertolt Brecht, he was known for arguing back fiercely against any suggestion that he had come West as a “refugee” who might be relied upon to denounce and condemn everything about “the Germany that chose the road to socialism”.19
Uwe Johnson, Berlin, c. 1970.
Johnson had indeed felt obliged to leave the GDR but only, so he would inform Le Monde in 1971, “for reasons of hygiene”.20 The decision had been his own, and was made not for partisan political reasons but, as he had earlier explained to the New York Times, in defence of his own creative independence and freedom: “If I had stayed and kept quiet I would have been given work”.21 He had conceived of Speculations about Jakob as a “literary work”, but it was inevitable, once Suhrkamp had accepted the novel for publication in the West, that the authorities in the GDR would interpret it as an attack. He had initially planned to issue the novel under the pseudonym Joachim Catt,22 but the Stasi surely had the means to penetrate any such disguise. Left with no choice but to “move house”, as he sometimes put it, Johnson had boarded a north-south train on the S-Bahn, stepped off at a station in West Berlin and, as he also told the New York Times, “got permission to stay in West Berlin without being a refugee… If you become a refugee there are loans, credits and working places available. I insisted on fending for myself so as not to have to say thank you”.
Years later, in October 1979, Johnson would explain his objection to being seen as a “refugee” in West Germany for British listeners of BBC Radio 3. The ascription was factually wrong, given that he had actually gone West reluctantly and as a “last resort”.23 However, he did not reject it in order to distinguish himself, as some hostile observers had suggested, from the crowd picking up a new ideology along with other handouts as they passed through the Marienfelde refuge
e camp in West Berlin. His main objection was that the false label “leads to misunderstanding of my novels … For instance, my first book has persons living in both parts of Germany. This was something new in German literature and another unknown quality was that living in East Germany was shown to be quite possible and even likeable”. Far from repudiating everything about the GDR, Johnson would declare that his years there had given him an “irreplaceable method of interrogation and experimentation”. Had he spent the same period in the West, so he joked for Le Monde, he would never have known that Marxism was not yet fashionable. He had, of course, “never believed the claims of socialist realism, let alone revolutionary romanticism”, judging both guilty of a “shortcutting of reality that consists of denying everything that is bad or unbearable in present facts”. On the contrary, “It is reality as I see it that interests me” and the task of literature as it worked between East and West was to serve as an intermediary between people by sending them the information they are eager to learn about each other. This may seem “a modest role”, he admitted, but we were no longer living in an epoch in which a writer might stand as referee over a game while also knowing exactly what was going on in the minds of the players. It was possible though, “that if a crowd of writers, everywhere, tell what they are seeing on their side, we might still hope to arrive eventually at a clear picture of a decade”.
3. THE BORDER: THE DISTANCE: THE DIFFERENCE
In Canterbury, we had access to Johnson’s first three published novels thanks to American translations, some of them reissued by Jonathan Cape and Penguin. Those of us who did set out to read them may well have done so with assumptions that would only have brought another shake to their author’s monolithic head. From the early Sixties, he had been widely known as “the poet of the divided Germany”,1 but this again, as he would tell the BBC in 1979, was something “I didn’t want to be at all. I just wanted to be a novelist who tries to tell a story”.2 It was a point he’d made many times before: “I have never considered myself a specialist in the division of Germany”, he informed Le Monde in 1971, going on to reiterate his interest in “the realities of the moment”.3
Johnson may indeed have been an explorer of experience rather than a pedlar of political ideologies, yet how were we to avoid repeating the question that he himself posed in The Third Book about Achim: “What led him to compare two countries: that there was a border between them?”4 It is hard not to answer that question in the positive after reading the second sentence of that novel, which seems to project his puzzled reader into the reunified Germany of the twenty-first century: “it discourages me”, Johnson writes, “to have to add that in the Germany of the Fifties there existed a territorial frontier”. He then identifies the reality he sought to explore through invented characters and events, as “the border: the distance: the difference”.5
At first, that border stands more or less open: so lightly marked, indeed, that people on a train leaving the GDR have to search the “mildewed meadows” outside for proof that they really have passed into the West.6 With the passage of time, however, it soon hardens into the closely-guarded fence that starts among “leaping patrol boats”7 in the Baltic to the east of the (Western) resort of Travemünde, bisects a “pleasant” beach on a spit named Priwall (a British observer would later find a nudist beach pressed up against the Western side of the frontier8), and then advances south after the crossing point, gathering up the brutal paraphernalia of wire, pre-cast panels, control strips, crossing points and observation posts as it stretches all the way to Czechoslovakia. The shorter border surrounding West Berlin was also permeable in the early post-war years: penetrated by the S-Bahn trains that allowed people from the two sides to mix on a daily basis, until it was abruptly sealed up on 13 August 1961 when the GDR started erecting the Berlin Wall, thereby creating the fully divided city investigated in Johnson’s third novel, Two Views.
Johnson gives us the concrete and wire, and the difficulties of passing or even telephoning through the frontier. He was interested, and not only for the sake of his fictions, in the increasingly organised systems of escape: the failed attempt to drive a low-riding sports car under the barrier; the American marine who hid escapers in a secret compartment in his car; the student activists — Detlef Girrmann and Dieter Thieme — who were among the “escape helpers” he interviewed in exacting detail about the operations they carried out to smuggle hundreds of people through the frontier from the GDR (starting with fellow students who lived in East Germany and suddenly found themselves cut off from their classes in the West, and eventually including Johnson’s wife-to-be, Elisabeth Schmidt, who was brought West by escape-helpers in February 1962).9 And yet one doesn’t have to read far to realise that Johnson also understands “the border” to involve more than the physical frontier between opposed economic and political systems: more, indeed, than an embodiment of the bloc-dividing “Iron Curtain” with which it became synonymous, and which ensured that a small event at a Berlin checkpoint could cause the entire world to shake. Johnson surveys the schism as it shapes many domains of human experience — sport, aesthetics, historical memory, claims to nationhood, even the German language, which is shown to have split into different jargons on either side. He maps the psychological, cultural and ideological gulfs squeezed into a few yards of physical space, pursuing “the border” as it runs between polarised mentalities and propagandas, as well as between different varieties of state power and employment of technology.
The border also has implications for Johnson’s characters, who may have depth and even charisma to the extent that they are not fully reconciled to either of the warring ideologies. The Eastern ones especially remain mysterious, possessed of potentialities that may glimmer suggestively through the words they are prepared to speak as they try to correlate their existence with the slogans all around them. Some seem to testify to possibilities that find no realisation in the present — indications of a “moral utopia” that might one day find expression in a more authentic kind of “socialism”, which did not sanction lies or, as happens in The Third Book about Achim, drive farmers to hang themselves rather than face enforced collectivisation of their land: a socialism, in other words, of a different order than that being constructed in the GDR, which existed “solely in the institutions which try to establish it”10 and which had built a stately cult around the figure of the “administrator”.
The border also had formal implications for Johnson, provoking some of the often noted “difficulty” of his novels. This may reflect his refusal to take sides within the terms of the division or to tell his readers what to think: his books are, so the young Jean Baudrillard suggested in 1962, works of “an artisan of language” not a “manager of conscience”.11 English translations could hardly capture the Low German or even Kashubian idioms with which he challenged official discourse (linguistic equivalents of the backwaters in which he and his young friends in Mecklenburg had liked to swim, canoe or sail). We could, though, hardly miss Johnson’s avoidance of conventional forms of narrative. That necessity had become particularly evident in the divided city of Berlin. In the months before the GDR set about constructing the Berlin Wall, Johnson had toured America, lecturing about Berlin as the “Border of a Divided World”. In an exceptional essay, translated and published under that title in Evergreen Review,12 he described in some detail how the border between East and West had worked when it was still permeable in the years before the East German authorities had “sunk the division into the ground”, and when the city transport system — the S-Bahn — still ran across the divide. Johnson, who would later republish his essay of 1961 as “Berlin Transit (Out of Date)”, explored the literary implications of a transport system that allowed people from both sides to mix, and where the most prosaic object or occurrence — he gives the example of a man stepping off a train and walking towards a station exit — might therefore exist simultaneously in contrary perspectives. As he wrote, “there is no such thing as: Berlin. There
are two cities of Berlin, comparable in population and developed footprint. Saying ‘Berlin’ is vague, or rather it is a political claim, of a kind the Eastern and Western blocs have been making for some time, insofar as each one gives the half in its respective sphere of influence the name of the whole region as though the other half either did not exist or were already included within its own”.13
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 4
