Uwe Johnson

German · 1934 to 1984

Johnson was born on July 20, 1934, in Cammin, Pomerania, then part of Germany and now Kamień Pomorski, Poland. His family fled west to Anklam in 1945 as the Red Army advanced, and in 1946 his father died in a Soviet internment camp at Fünfeichen. The family settled in Güstrow, in the new German Democratic Republic, where Johnson finished school before studying German literature at Rostock and Leipzig. In May 1953 Rostock University expelled him for refusing to denounce the Protestant youth group Junge Gemeinde; when the June Uprising broke out weeks later, the university reinstated him as part of the state's general retreat. He gave his own refusal to a character in his first novel, and in 1956 East German publishers turned the book down for it. It went unpublished for the rest of his life. His second novel, Speculations About Jakob (1959), found a home instead with the West German house Suhrkamp, and Johnson followed his book across the border to West Berlin that same year, a move that fixed him in German letters as the writer of a divided country, at odds with the East he had left and unconvinced by the West he had joined. He married Elisabeth Schmidt in Rome in 1962; their daughter, Katharina, was born that November. Two years in New York as a textbook editor, from 1966 to 1968, gave him the setting and the method for his masterwork: Anniversaries, four volumes written and published between 1970 and 1983, following a Mecklenburg-born mother in Manhattan through a single year told one calendar day at a time, each date anchored to an actual New York Times headline. The Georg Büchner Prize, West Germany's highest literary honor, came in 1971. In 1974 he moved with his family to a quiet house on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, where he finished Anniversaries in near isolation from the German literary world that had made him famous, and where he died alone on February 22, 1984, of hypertensive heart disease, five months short of his fiftieth birthday.