Anniversaries

In Anniversaries, Uwe Johnson develops a unique panorama of German history in the 20th century – a »literary world trip« (Reinhard Baumgart) that starts with the story of a German family in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and continues to the eventful year of 1968 in New York.

Over the course of one year, Gesine Cresspahl narrates her family's history to her ten-year-old daughter. Day by day, she reveals more about life in Mecklenburg during the years of the Weimar Republic, during the Nazi-rule and the subsequent Soviet occupation, as well as during the first years of the German Democratic Republic. At the same time, the novel depicts the daily life of mother and daughter in the midst of student demonstrations and Vietnam War protests in the cultural metropolis that is New York in the epochal year of 1967/1968.

»It is – among many other things – a book about the city as seen by a poet with a wayward eye and prose to match. Lingering on the texture of a surface, he can turn the most familiar sight into a revelation.« The New York Times Book Review

»[Anniversaries] requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention – for attention is its great subject. […] [T]he book seeks to be a comprehensive account of the ’60s, commenting on media coverage of Vietnam, housing segregation in Manhattan, the Prague Spring. At nearly 1,700 pages long, it is oceanic, and it is a masterpiece.« Parul Sehgal, The New York Times, »Times Critics’ Top Books of 2019«

»Juxtaposing the tumult of 60s America with everyday life in Nazi Germany, Anniversaries chronicles 20th-century turmoil through the eyes of Gesine Cresspahl, who leaves postwar Mönchengladbach to raise her young daughter, Marie, on New York’s Upper West Side […] Against the big-picture backdrop, we get a fine-grained treatment of motherhood and migration […] It feels thrillingly spontaneous, almost out of control.« Anthony Cummins, The Observer

»Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated. Its streets are long, and its landmarks are varied. Sometimes the weather’s sultry, and sometimes the pipes clang in the cold. But Johnson’s rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly meticulous […] Johnson’s observations are indeed possessed of a peculiar, sprawling omniscience. His opus belongs in the canon of encyclopedic, modernist German-language tomes like Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Man Without Qualities, and it allows itself divagations on everything from the prevalence of the color yellow in the American visual landscape to the subtleties of Hungarian politics […] His writing is inhuman, godlike in its immensity.« Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum

»Johnson’s book effectively gives the reader forty or fifty years of world history and a single year of Gesine’s life, every day from August 21st, 1967 to August, the 20th, 1968. Its scope is startling, from the social organization of a small German town, to Gesine’s work in a New York bank, to her father’s work as a master carpenter, running a business in Richmond, in London.« Tom Sutcliffe, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

»I am absolutely stunned and slightly mortified that I’ve never heard of this book before […] I think it’s extraordinary, I think it is a great late-modern masterpiece […] How do you map Germany in 1933 with Vietnam? But, he does it, he does it in the first paragraph. It should be clunky or absurd or just slightly embarrassing, but he does it brilliantly. It contains the whole world. […] I was completely gripped, and there are none of the usual narrative handholds, there’s no romantic relationship, you’re never quite certain why she’s on her own, who the father of the child is – all of those props are not available to us, and still it’s absolutely extraordinary.« Kathryn Hughes, Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4

»European modernists used the novel as a means of mapping metropolitan experience. From James Joyce’s immortalizing of ›dear, dirty Dublin‹ in Ulysses, to the grimy urban paean of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, to Robert Musil’s elegy for imperial Vienna in The Man Without Qualities, the city was no longer merely decorative scrim but a collaborative possibility, the ideal vessel for consciousness. Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, a sprawling novel about an East German émigré and her 10-year-old daughter as they navigate life on New York’s Upper West Side, is a natural heir to this tradition.« Dustin Illingworth, The Atlantic

»A gripping, complex, highly significant work in which the author displays not only his mastery as a storyteller but also his humor, irony, and descriptive power.« The New York Times

»Likened to Joyce’s Ulysses, it’s really a kind of Joseph Cornell box in words, a vast montage stretching from August 1967 to August 1968. The narrator, Gesine Cresspahl, lives in self-exile on the Upper West Side, working as a translator, trying to raise a daughter, Marie, by herself. Her diary – which is to say, Johnson’s 2,000-page novel – touches on Vietnam, World War II, postwar Eastern Europe, the inhumane conditions of that New York subway system and the humanity of its riders, the triumph of despair, and countless other topics. A rich book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, from a writer too little known today.« Kirkus Reviews

»In this sprawling multivolume novel, the events of one woman’s life over the course of a year in New York hearken back to several decades’ worth of German history and political upheaval. […] The growing political consciousness of Gesine’s daughter, Marie, provides a wonderful counterpoint to the novel’s themes of crises personal, national, and global. This is a haunting and unforgettable portrait of the momentous and the historical.« Publishers Weekly

»This book is truly a masterpiece. […] It is a record, and an enduring one for our whole post-Hitler era. You have actually made this past tangible and – perhaps a much harder task – you have made it convincing. Now I know how it was and is over there – know it down to the tips of my toes. […] This seems to be the only appropriate way to speak and think: about great-grandmother and grandmother and mother and child, in the interplay of generations and across two continents.« Hannah Arendt, February 7, 1972, Letter to Uwe Johnson

»Uwe Johnson is the most incorruptible writer I’ve ever read, always searching for what we so frivolously call the truth. In Anniversaries he approaches this fundamental thing, the truth, from different sides, across different continents, across time. Page after page, we are shown how we need to see clearly, without prejudice, to think properly. Page after page, thinking with Johnson offers us the greatest of pleasures.« Jenny Erpenbeck

»Johnson has Balzac’s passion for the telling detail, the revealing exactitude, here a passion that is impelled by the imagination of love. So intensely are the figures imagined – Gesine and her daughter, Gesine’s desolated mother, and all the tribe of Baltic relatives who variously endure and resist the Nazi scourge – that the ballast of Manhattan fact is needed to keep the book on the page, the life in focus, to keep the agony from getting out of drawing.« Richard Howard