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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction

     

Anniversaries
(Jahrestage)

by
Uwe Johnson


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Anniversaries


Title: Anniversaries
Author: Uwe Johnson
Genre: Novel
Written: 1970/83 (Eng. 2018)
Length: 1719 pages
Original in: German
Availability: Anniversaries - US
Anniversaries - UK
Anniversaries - Canada
Jahrestage - Deutschland
Une année dans la vie de Gesine Cresspahl - I - France
I giorni e gli anni - Italia
  • From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl
  • German title: Jahrestage
  • Translated by Damion Searls (2018)
  • Previously translated and published as Anniversaries (abbreviated version, part one) translated by Leila Vennewitz (1975) and Anniversaries II (abbreviated version, part two) translated by Leila Vennewitz and by Walter Arndt (1987)
  • Note that the first English translation was an abridged version (authorized by the author): of the 367 chapters 64 were cut entirely and only 130 are translated in their entirety; avoid it !
  • Originally published in four volumes in German, in 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1983
  • Anniversaries was made into a TV-mini-series, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, with Suzanne von Borsody as Gesine Cressphal

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Our Assessment:

A : staggering

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The NY Times . 18/12/2018 Parul Sehgal
The NY Times Book Rev.* A 23/2/1975 Ernst Pawel
The Observer A 30/12/2018 Anthony Cummins
Saturday Rev.* . 22/2/1975 Richard Howard
The Spectator A+ 24/11/2018 Jonathan Steinberg
TLS . 23/4/1971 .
TLS . 14/10/1983 G.P.Butler
TLS . 29/3/2019 Mary E. Stewart
Weekly Standard A+ 13/12/2018 Christoph Irmscher

*: review of the earlier translation

  From the Reviews:
  • "It is a novel that swallows reality -- as noisy and demanding as the world itself. (...) Anniversaries is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking. The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. (...) The excess of this book can feel occasionally oppressive, the detail mismanaged even -- must every tertiary character come equipped with such a lavishly imagined back story ? But two days without the novel now, and I’m lonesome for its patient, laboring gaze, a kind of holy attention that Gesine recalls in her youth" - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

  • "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. (...) Johnson's prose defies translation: that he survives at all is a minor miracle. One would desperately wish for a major one, because Johnson in the original can be superb. (...) Reading Uwe Johnson in English is better than not reading him at all, because even in this less than perfect version he comes across as an uncommonly original and provocative voice." - Ernst Pawel, The New York Times Book Review

  • "All this unfolds in a swirl of characters’ thoughts, reported speech (imaginary or otherwise), paraphrased journalism and authorial description, as Johnson toggles between the first and third person. There are metafictive games, too. (...) Once you catch Johnson’s rhythms, you stay tuned. (...) It feels thrillingly spontaneous, almost out of control. You can certainly see why it wasn’t all translated before now. But here it is: a novel of a year, perhaps the novel of the year." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer

  • "The most striking and difficult aspect of this novel is its incredible scale. (...) All I can say is that nothing I have read resembles these narratives, and in their ambition, construction, spirit and atmosphere they constitute an astonishing achievement." - Jonathan Steinberg, The Spectator

  • "(T)he publication of this fascinating, infuriating, inchoate jumble is something of an event in postwar German literature (.....) Johnson's way, although no doubt tiresome and gimmicky at times, is that of an admirably uncompromising and impressively earnest inventor. Not only does he wield his language(s) with a virtuosity surpassed by -- arguably -- no other German writer of his generation (God help his translators); he also makes almost no definable concessions to the tastes and habits of the novel-reading public. There's no sex for a start" - Times Literary Supplement

  • "Clearly, therfore, despite its lighter moments, its superb (and for the most part defensible) waspishness, its grand, ingenious design, and the linguistic subtlety, versatility, and inventiveness which are among Johnson's hallmarks -- despite all this and more besides, there is no likelihood Jahrestage will wear well. It is a highly allusive work, addressed much of the time to insiders (.....) If it is much respected and little read, embalmed in academic libraries as a remarkable but increasingly inaccessible relic, no one should be surprised." - G.P.Butler, Times Literary Supplement

  • "What develops over four volumes is a highly sophisticated interweaving of many threads. (...) There are some less energetic sections in the later volumes -- not surprising given its lengthy gestation -- but what is unusual and vibrant about most of the text is the constant interruption of one narrative plane by another, so that the reader is forced to think not just sequentially but also comparatively, to see patterns and recurrent themes that give weight to the present as well as helping to define the nature of change and characterize what is important. (...) (T)aken as a whole, this 1,600-page rendering is a triumph. At heart the book is in a sense about translation, about the need for mediation between past and present, between different cultures." - Mary E. Stewart, Times Literary Supplement

  • "(O)ne of the greatest novels of the 20th century, a massive achievement on the scale of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Joyce’s Ulysses that deserves to be better known. Full disclosure: I love this outsized, bulging, bursting-at-the seams colossus of a novel, a book to live by and with. It defies classification, the way its author did, too. (...) Anniversaries is one of the busiest and most disquieting novels you will read (.....) Searls’s nimble translation faithfully reflects the constantly shifting registers of the novel and bravely tackles a problem Vennewitz avoided: finding an English equivalent for the dialect spoken at crucial moments in the novel by Gesine herself and her ghostly visitors" - Christoph Irmscher, Weekly Standard

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

[Note: this review refers to and relies on the original German edition, and all translations of quotes are our own. The first English translation is an abridged version (authorized by the author), and of the 367 chapters, 64 were cut entirely and only 130 are translated in their entirety; a new translation, by Damion Searls, published in 2018 finally makes the complete novel available to English-language readers.]
       Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (Jahrestage) was originally published in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, but it is a single, unified work. The literal translation of the title is, indeed, 'anniversaries', but can also mean 'days of the year', and it is as both of these meanings that Johnson presents his text. The novel covers, day by day, a year in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, beginning 21 August 1967, and concluding 20 August 1968. Johnson anchors the narrative in the present-day, making Gesine a dedicated and somewhat obsessive reader of The New York Times, and so there are many references to the stories of the day, most every day, and often longer excerpts from the newspaper. At the same time, Gesine is providing a (more or less chronological) account of her past to her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and there are also present-day domestic scenes from their lives.
       Gesine was born 3 March 1933 in Jerichow in Germany, in a part of the country that would become East Germany. She is a single mother who moved to the United States when her daughter was four and who works for a bank. They live in Apartment 204 at 243 Riverside Drive (three rooms, all with a view of the Hudson, for $124.00 a month ...).
       Marie is a precocious and independent-minded ten-year-old who has readily and completely adopted New York as her home and who only speaks German (sometimes) with her mother. Gesine's on-going account of her past is delivered in part on tape, to be listened to later by Marie, as well as in their conversations (allowing for interjections and questions by the child): it is often straightforward narrative but occasionally tortured in trying to deal with a difficult past (shifting from recounted history to conversation to letters, etc.).
       It's Marie that requests her mother record much of this: "What you're thinking now, what I'll only understand later. Complaints, too." There's a wariness on both sides, about what might be revealed or the sheer weight of it all, but typically they're comforted by their agreement:
- For when I'm dead ?
- Yes. For when you're dead.
       Gesine's past covers much of Germany's most troubled times, from the rise of Nazism to the war years to the occupations first (briefly) by the British and then, more permanently, by the Soviets. Her focus in the early years is very much on her parents: a father who had settled in England and was doing well there but then married and followed his wife back to Germany when she wanted to give birth to their child there.
       Cresspahl marries into the Papenbrock-family, but he remains an outsider: known as 'the Englishman' (despite being German) he remains friendly with the local Jews even as ugly nationalism rises around them. Tolerant, careful, he tries to keep a low profile and do his best to get through the difficult years: Gesine is able to say "Mein Krieg war gut versteckt" ("My war was well-concealed"), and not just because of Jerichow's remote location. Arguably -- Marie has her doubts -- he was also an agent for the English, and when they occupied the town after the war the British did make him mayor -- a position he filled capably, and one the Soviets (who then were awarded the territory) kept him in (before eventually tossing him in jail).
       The flighty, depressive Lisbeth, Gesine's mother, was complicated in different ways, and never made the situation better. She was unhinged enough to watch and do nothing as infant Gesine threatened to drown (Cresspahl happened to witness the scene and plucked her out of danger), and if her violent death isn't a suicide, there's certainly enough reason to believe she would have done herself in eventually. As is, she dies when Gesine is still a small child; fortunately Cresspahl is up to the challenge of raising the girl more or less on his own. (Gesine does remain haunted by the mother-figure: when Marie asks her for her New Year's resolutions 1968, one of them is: "That I don't become like my mother" -- and even though her dread is obvious it's a remarkable admission to make to the child; it throws even the generally unperturable Marie, who tries explains it away for both of them: "You have fever, Gesine.")
       Johnson began writing the book on 29 January 1968, and he lucked into quite a year. It's more than back-drop: the period is front and centre, omnipresent. The war in Viet Nam obviously dominates -- the first sentence of the first dated entry refers to it ("Clearing weather in North Viet Nam permitted Air Force raids north of Hanoi", etc.) -- yet it in its almost daily constancy becomes an almost repetitive drone: Johnson's choice to refer to weather conditions in his opening salvo are apt, since the Viet Nam-reports (much as the daily reports of American fatalities in Iraq have become in 2005 and 2006) resemble nothing as much as the daily weather report, with what (in print if not real life) amount to only small varying details. 1968 would also be the year of the shooting of Rudi Dutschke and assassinations of Martin Luther King jr. and Robert Kennedy (the latter two events that hit Marie harder -- or at least more demonstratively -- than Gesine), as well as the Prague spring. The Czech connexion is of particular importance, because Gesine is taking Czech lessons, and the book moves towards a planned trip to Prague (indeed, that is where they are set to be the day after the book closes, on 21 August 1968 (a date and place that should resonate for what else was to happen there and then, the Soviets putting a brutal end to the Prague spring)).
       Anniversaries is also very much a New York-portrait, with Gesine still a part of immigrant culture while Marie is a full-fledged New Yorker ("Mit New York: sagt sie siegesgewiß, verächtlich: damit legst du mich nicht herein" ("With New York: she said, certain of prevailing, contemptuously: with that you can't fool me") Marie proclaims, knowing that she knows the city better than her mother). It's also a city that isn't doing that well: crime-ridden (their Upper West Side apartment is in what isn't -- at that time -- a great neighbourhood, and it sounds like they're lucky only to be robbed once over the course of the year), with racial tension, as well political unrest.
       Race figures prominently too: Gesine won't stand for any racism, and proves more open-minded than most of the locals -- an attitude similar to that of her father, and which she passes on to her daughter. Among the many sub-plots is Francine, the token black girl who winds up in Marie's class at the exclusive private school she attends. Unlike her classmates, Marie feels an obligation to assist the child who is completely out of her element. Johnson's girl is, at times, arguably too precocious, but even something as difficult as this he handles well, convincingly having Marie express her frustration at the injustice perpetrated on Francine, who has, for example, never been taught how to learn.
       Francine and her family are types -- snapshots of a world largely beyond his ken -- but for all that Johnson handles them well, without condescension (largely by describing it through Marie's experiences, and never having, for example, Gesine try to be buddies with Francine's mom or anything like that). Even brave Marie has difficulty in venturing more than once to Francine's tenement home; later, Francine's mother is injured in a violent incident, and it's only natural for the Cresspahls to take in the girl (as the other children are scattered in foster homes and elsewhere), a reaching out that mirrors Gesine's fathers attempts to reach out to strangers and locals when Gesine was a child (even as it probably strikes most American readers as utterly absurd). Again, the unlikely situation works because Johnson does not paint an easy idyll, but rather suggests the actual difficulties such an arrangement would pose: it is here that Marie is presented at her most childish (and thus, in some ways, most believable), fundamentally decent and trying to be helpful but also irritated by this foreign presence who herself feels so very much out of her element. Hands-off Gesine offers a secure environment that allows Francine the space to adapt, and Johnson captures this transition well -- and without forcing a happy end: Francine goes home again (and is ultimately a lost child), the status quo barely changed (and, yes, even Marie sighs somewhat in relief).
       It is a political time, and while Gesine does not shy away from it, she almost tries to keep it at a certain remove. (Ironically, the reader sees her hurtling towards one of the decisive historical moments of the age, knowing the trip she is long planning -- Prague -- and knowing the date on which the book ends, one day before the fateful and dreadful 21 August 1968.) It's no wonder she prefers the black-and-white accounts from the day after as provided in the newspaper, refusing even to get a television despite Marie's frequent appeals. (It's after RFK's assassination that Marie decides enough is enough: she needs her mother's signature on the rental agreement, but she's the one that hires a television (and pays the $19.50 cost) -- and has it set up in her room.) It's Marie, too, that is the more active, louder with her outrage, eager to go to the marches and parades, caught up in the immediacy of things in a way that Gesine, who has seen and lived through so much, is not. On 1 May 1968 Gesine looks to Europe, but Marie has left that long behind, caught up in the here and now in a way that her mother can't seem to keep up with:
- Was geht's dich an ! du hast bloß mal da gewohnt ! sagt Marie.
- Da hab ich bloß mal gewohnt.
- Hier aber haben wir eine Revolution, bloß zwanzig Blocks von unserer Haustür !
- Hast du sie gesehen ?
- Den fünften Nachmittag heute ! Selbst du solltest es wissen aus deiner Zeitung. Müßte deine Tante dir doch gesagt haben.

(- What concern is it of yours ! you just lived there once ! Marie says.
- I just lived there once.
- But here we have a revolution, just twenty blocks from our door !
- You saw it ?
- The fifth afternoon today ! Even you should know it, from your newspaper. Your aunt should have told you.)
       (The 'aunt' of course being the old grey lady, The New York Times)
       Even Gesine is a bit shocked at Marie running underfoot at the Columbia-protests, and admittedly the girl's unsupervised gallivanting across town is one of the less believable elements of the book. Canny and wise beyond her years, the girl is still just ten and it's hard to believe any mother would let a child that age run about (and take the subway) as freely as Gesine does.
       Eager to protest and make her objections to injustice known, Marie nevertheless has wholeheartedly embraced America. She is, for all intents and purposes, an American girl, and among the few things about her that seem to annoy Gesine is the girl's unquestioning anti-communism. It's not that Gesine necessarily disapproves of the attitude itself, but rather that Marie has bought into that party line unthinkingly: communism is simply an evil, enough said -- but Gesine knows from experience that it's all more complicated than that. Gesine is also far more ambivalent about the America she has made their home. Marie can protest the war in Viet Nam and the military-industrial complex and still live happily within the system, but Gesine is nowhere near as comfortable. "Wo ist die moralische Schweiz, in die wir emigrieren könnten ?" ("Where is that moral Switzerland to which we could emigrate ?") she asks herself only half-jokingly -- as experience has taught her that there is no place that allows such neutrality (hence also the question referring to a "moral Switzerland", rather than Switzerland itself, a country that can stand for neutrality without actually being that).
       Some men do vie for Gesine's attention, but she's careful about letting anyone get too close. She doesn't reveal much about Marie's father, and admits on one of those tapes that she leaves for when she's dead that she can't let anyone (save her daughter) close for fear of losing them: "Ich will diesen Schmerz nicht noch einmal" ("I don't want that pain again"). The scientist Erichson -- known as D.E. -- is a frequent visitor and close friend, but as much an uncle-figure to the child as lover for Gesine.
       Among the playful asides are some swats at German literati: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's open letter in The New York Review of Books (explaining why he resigned from his appointment at Wesleyan), picked apart over half a dozen pages, or a report in The New York Times on West German author 'Günther Glass' (his name more readily misspelt pre-Nobel prize) -- and there are even some Uwe Johnson sightings, including an awkward question-and-answer session at a Jewish American Congress event.
       Anniversaries is a very long book; remarkably, it hardly ever flags. The variety of narrative techniques -- quotation, different voices and perspectives -- help keep the reader focussed, and the different storylines (Gesine's past, Gesine's present, Marie's present, the world at large) are woven together well. It is a history of Germany, 1933 to ca. 1953, as well as of 1968 America. It is about the experience of being a European emigrant, and about being an almost-teen in the late 60s. It is about past and present and, emphatically, morality in its broadest senses. It is about society -- German and American, and society under Nazi, communist, and capitalist systems -- and works as such because it isn't a moralising text and offers little forced philosophical exposition and debate: Johnson shows by example and experience. The major characters -- father Cresspahl, Gesine, Marie -- act, and while they don't or can't always do right, and can't always be sure of what they do, they are, in their different ways, exemplary.
       Johnson mixes things up enough to keep readers alert -- tossing in a grocery list (on snowy 29 December), notes for a school-essay on RFK (6 June), even variations on the colour yellow (in New York -- 1 August). But it's with the effective repeated use (but not over-use) of newspaper-detail -- all those bits of reality which can never be kept at bay -- as well as, especially, the mother-daughter back-and-forth that Johnson achieves so much momentum. Much of the story is most powerful when Gesine is not, in fact, front and centre: especially the parts about her parents and then her father are more interesting than when she figures more prominently in her own story of childhood and youth. But in the present, and especially in her dealings at work and at home, Johnson presents a remarkably full character-portrait -- enlivened also by the challenging semi-equal, Marie (who, after all, doesn't call her 'Mammi' or anything of that sort, but simply: Gesine).
       There are some lapses: an odd kidnapping episode seems out of place, and much of volume three seems off-pace, but overall it's a remarkable and consistent accomplishment. For what looks like a diary-book it's, in fact, a compelling novel, and in the three generation-representatives of Cresspahl, Gesine, and Marie a book with three superbly rendered characters. For insight into life in Germany in the 1930s, and in New York in the 1960s -- admittedly both times from a particular vantage point -- it bears comparison to the best literary portraits of those eras and places.
       It is a lot to tackle, but it is a book that is in every sense substantial, and ultimately very much worth the time. (The effort, too, one might add, but it doesn't really require much effort, readily engaging the reader.) Certainly a book that will endure, deserving of a place beside the best of the most ambitious post-World War II German novels (such as The Tin Drum, The Aesthetics of Resistance, and The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura).

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Links:

Anniversaries: Reviews (* reviews of earlier (abridged) translation): Jahrestage - the mini-series: Uwe Johnson: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Uwe Johnson was born in 1934, and moved from East to West Germany in 1959. He died in 1984.

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© 2007-2019 the complete review

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