2024 will be a Uwe Johnson memorial year. Forty years ago this coming February, the writer died at his home in England, aged just 49 – with a damaged heart. With his novel colossus, the four-volume, 1,700-page “Anniversaries. From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl”, written between 1970 and 1983, he has presented a work of the century. Ninety years ago next July, Johnson was born in Cammin, today’s Kamień Pomorski. After the war he spent his youth and studies in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
In the area where he later settled his fictitious Baltic Sea village of Jerichow, the story of which is told from the 1930s to the middle of the 20th century using the example of the Cresspahl family. And which is also home to the Landestheater Neustrelitz, which is dedicating a series of events to him this season. Also there: Charly Hübner and Caren Miosga.
The present is never possible without the past, that’s what this novel of the century tells the story of
The Neustrelitz-born actor and the television journalist present their reading of Johnson’s magnum opus, which has just been published by DAV. For the first time in full length, after Max Volkert Martens had already sat down on it in 1995/96 and recorded a version that was shortened by a good half. This lasted 40 hours, the current reading now almost 74 hours. Thanks to the extraordinary performance of Charly Hübner, who had to deal with the biggest part by far, a feat that should make his name in the history of audio books. From now on, his name will be mentioned in the same breath as the audio book monuments by Peter Matić (“In Search of Lost Time”) and Wolfram Berger (“The Man Without Qualities”).
If you listened to eight hours a day, you would be finished with Johnson’s work in ten days, which, against the backdrop of the Holocaust, revolves around the themes of remembering and forgetting, guilt and responsibility and is equally provincial history, family chronicle, time, media and historical is a novel. Of course, you could also listen to one of the 366 daily entries every day for a year and do the “anniversaries” the most justice.
It is the single mother Gesine Cresspahl, who was born in Jerichow in 1933 and has lived in New York since 1961, a female figure of tremendous modernity, who looks back on her problematic origins from August 21, 1967 to August 20, 1968 and at the same time thanks to her daily reading the New York Timeswith whom she interacts “like a person” and reflects on her own present: from the Vietnam War to the racism in her adopted homeland to the invasion of Soviet troops in Prague, with which the hope for a more humane socialism also comes to an end.
The interweaving of past and present characterizes the novel as well as its special narrative approach, about which it is once said: “Who is actually telling the story here, Gesine. Both of us. You can hear that, Johnson.” Johnson eloquently stated in his letter that he was clearly being “talked to” by “his people.” In this respect, Holger Helbig, holder of the Uwe Johnson Professorship at the University of Rostock, is right when he states in the booklet that the “Anniversaries” were from the beginning a story that was not only written down to be read, but also to be read to be heard.
Charly Hübner knows the Mecklenburg sound of this story
It therefore makes sense that the director Wolfgang Stockmann brought two speakers into the studio: Hübner and Miosga. Bringing Johnson’s artfully arranged choir of voices together, the recording takes on an energy and vibrancy that is unparalleled. After a short time it develops a pull that can tolerate even if your thoughts wander. Which, given Johnson’s detail-obsessed writing, can certainly happen.
One expects the typical news tone from Caren Miosga, who not only recites the quotes from “Aunt Times”. But she doesn’t deliver that right now. Instead, she modulates like an actress. Sometimes in places where it wouldn’t be necessary, for example when she specifically emphasizes the “beast” in Ilse Koch, the “Beast of Buchenwald”. One cannot imagine a better interpreter for the “anniversaries” than Charly Hübner.
Uwe Johnson, anniversaries. From the life of Gesine Cresspahl. Unabridged reading with Charly Hübner and Caren Miosga. 73 hours and 53 minutes. DAV, Berlin 2023, 60 euros.
(Photo: DAV)
Hübner selects his projects specifically and is often closely connected to his homeland. For years he was Inspector Sascha Bukow in Rostock’s “Polizeiruf 110”, about the Mecklenburg punk band Fine cream fish fillet He made the documentary “Wild Heart”. It is only logical that he has now taken on Uwe Johnson. As a son of Mecklenburg, he is no stranger to its sound; he has mastered the Low German passages of the “anniversaries” anyway. He reads calmly and confidently, sometimes the rogue shines through. He opens up this huge work to a new audience.
In view of growing anti-Semitism, “Anniversaries” is not a novel that has fallen out of time, but is still oppressively relevant. In it, Johnson states the least that can be done. Namely: “To live at least with knowledge.”