Anniversaries

One critic summed up Uwe Johnson's vision of Germany this way: "Contemporary Germany is Johnson's all-purpose, modern symbol of confused human motives, social forces that drive people frantic, and frustrations in communication that finally choke men into silence" (Webster Schott, N.Y. Times). The Third Book about Achim (1961), winner of the $10,000 International Publishers' Prize in 1962, is a novel about divided Germany. It addresses one of the crucial philosophical problems of life: What is objective truth? Is there such a thing at all? Joachim Remak, in Harper's, says, "It is an easy book to dislike at first [but] in the course of the novel all the annoying traits suddenly vanish or become unimportant. For this is a great book; literary award judges can be right."

The novel was a catharsis for Johnson's own personal conflicts: he had reluctantly left his home in East Germany in 1959 in order to have his first novel published without censorship. This first novel, Speculations about Jacob (1959), was praised for a style that defies the traditional structure of the novel and indeed of language. In his Anniversaries (1970--73), Johnson again treats pressing moral and political issues by having the scene of the novel switch from New York City during the Vietnam War to Mecklenburg, Germany, in the Nazi period. One of the major themes of the book is the failure of liberalism in the United States in the 1960s and in Germany in the 1930s. Johnson's work is consistent, never pedestrian, and sometimes brilliant. In 1971 Johnson received the Buchner Prize.

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