Uwe Johnson: Epochal in the regional league

When someone who doesn’t come from the genre or the industry suddenly starts writing books, from the perspective of a fan, you can take notice. The actor Charly Hübner, known from television and cinema, is such an author. Thanks to his role as Inspector Sascha Bukow in Rostock’s “Polizeiruf 110”, he was already a complete sympathizer, and in 2021 he published “Charly Hübner on Motörhead – or why I should be grateful to James Last”. Now the Neustrelitzer surprises with a homage to his favorite author Uwe Johnson, published by his old publisher Suhrkamp.

At the beginning of the 90s, most of my friends were Easterners, and most of them devoured “Anniversaries,” the four-volume masterpiece by Uwe Johnson. This is obviously what happened to Charly Hübner, who has now divided his slim volume into nine “attempts” at approaching it from a non-academic perspective. In the very first sentence of the book, Hübner uses the word “recently” three times, which is supposed to be original. I couldn’t laugh about it. The sentence ends with the exclamation: “Uwe Johnson is the greatest German writer of the 20th century anyway.” He heard himself say that in a conversation with two authors. »Afterwards there was a tense silence. The two authors’ gazes froze.”

When it comes to the proclamation of “greatest German writers,” I immediately think of authors such as Oskar Maria Graf, Erich Maria Remarque, Gisela Elsner, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Elke Erb, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Peter Wawerzinek, Ludwig Fels, Erich Kästner, Jörg Fauser, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Wolfgang Hilbig, Christian Geissler and Michael Wildenhain. Compared to them, Johnson is regional league. It’s great that Hübner didn’t write “German language”; then the chaos would be perfect.

He describes Johnson’s narrative work as, among other things, “fine, clever, brutal, epic, complicated, confident, arrogant and sensitive” and listens “in spite of all the external silence to the noise of Johnson’s world.” About the “Anniversaries” he remarks: “A montage that (…) could be described as a hectic psychological video.” For him, Johnson was “epochal.” Which, as far as I know, is not a quality criterion. Hübner, who tends not to be in the limelight for political comments, today still sees Johnson’s works as “highly political.” At least the SED leadership may have once seen it in a similar way, as Johnson was also interested in the sometimes smooth transitions from National Socialist officials to the GDR system.

When Hübner presents his favorite author as a pioneer of visual storytelling and quick cuts, not without sprinkling in his own GDR socialization, one asks oneself: And Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann or Jörg Burkhard? And have you never heard of a cut-up? Or by Hans Arp or Max Frisch?

The actor is fascinated by how Johnson can confuse the perspectives of different characters in one paragraph, how he combines Mecklenburg in the 1920s and 1930s with New York in the 1960s in “Anniversaries.” It should be noted that Johnson describes this New York in a similar way to how Alfred Döblin described pre-war Berlin in “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” and that was long before that.

In the summer of 1959, when Uwe Johnson was almost 25, he got on the S-Bahn in East Berlin with his typewriter under his arm and got off in West Berlin. The publisher Siegried Unseld (a member of the Rotarians) rented him a room in Dahlem, thus saving him the Marienfelde reception camp. He had also sent a salary certificate to the office for immigration permits in Zehlendorf. In the fall there was a book fair in Frankfurt and Suhrkamp published “Mutmassungen über Jakob” and was celebrated by illustrious critics alongside Ernst Bloch’s “Principle of Hope,” Günter Grass’ “Tin Drum” and Heinrich Böll’s “Billiards at Half Past Nine.” It took less than three months and Uwe Johnson had arrived in the West, as a dissident, as a defector with that certain exotic something about the Cold War.

In Berlin he moved into the neighborhood of Grass and Frisch. The latter describes him in his “Berliner Journal” as a wounded Puritan who drinks four bottles of wine in the evening to combat the “excessive pressure of conscientiousness” and then drifts off into associative “crossword puzzles.” When he tried to reinvent himself in New York in 1967, members of the newly founded “Kommune I” marched into his West Berlin studio and work apartment. He first found out about this through the media and then asked his friend Günter Grass to have the Mischpoke removed by the police as quickly as possible allow.

I was never a Johnson follower. It was too bulky and vague in terms of content for me. The West German Group 47 was a horror to me. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I founded a network with friends called “Social Beat.” We had enough of being treated to new old stories about National Socialism, we had an addiction to reality, to the present, the time of the old men was over.

Uwe Johnson died on an English island in 1984 at the age of 49. He had fallen out with everyone and was considered paranoid. Some said he looked like Andy Warhol. Maybe he was on the phone with God. Or with East Berlin. Mecklenburg’s – perhaps involuntary – figurehead Peter Wawerzinek once told me when I asked him that his quirks were “the best way to disguise a show off”, i.e. he was clever. Charly Hübner can certainly inspire some new people for Johnson with his homage. I’ll take the liberty of passing on Wawerzinek’s Johnson baton to him: “He approached the people in silence. Anyone who is silent, they said, and only nods briefly has a clue.”

Charly Hübner: “If you knew what I know…”. Suhrkamp, ​​125 pages, hardcover, €20.

Become a member of the nd.Genossenschaft!

Since January 1, 2022, the »nd« will be published as an independent left-wing newspaper owned by the staff and readers. Be there and support media diversity and visible left-wing positions as a cooperative member. Fill out the membership form now.

More information on www.dasnd.de/genossenschaft