Anniversaries

Uwe Johnson

3 ideas

1. Lisbeth Cresspahl's death after Kristallnacht

   Lisbeth Cresspahl, a devout Mecklenburg woman who drew her carpenter husband back from England to Jerichow in 1933, came to feel complicit in the Nazi order around her, and at one point let her small daughter Gesine nearly drown in a rain barrel. After witnessing the violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938, including the killing of a Jewish child, she died in a fire she set in her husband's workshop. The case shows private guilt over public crimes, with no political outlet, turning into self-destruction and harm within the family.

2. The daily newspaper as moral mirror

   Gesine reads the New York Times every day on the subway and treats it as a character, an old aunt with manners. Its reports on Vietnam bombings and American race riots sit beside her memories of Germans who read the news and did nothing. Setting the present news against the remembered past shows that emigration does not end complicity: a citizen who pays taxes and reads the reports stands, in a new country, where her parents' neighbors once stood.

3. Memory as a disobedient cat

   The novel pictures memory as a cat: it cannot be commanded, it withholds what is sought, and it returns unbidden with fragments such as a smell, a voice or a light. So the past cannot be retrieved as a continuous account. It has to be rebuilt from gaps, documents, and imagined dialogues with the dead, and the reconstruction must openly mark what is invented and what is known.

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