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In the years 1944 and 1945, Uwe Johnson attended a Nazi boarding school in Köslin and Koscian in Pomerania. After the end of the war, the family moved to Mecklenburg. In 1946, his father died in a Soviet internment camp. Johnson attended high school in Gostrow and completed his high school diploma. From 1952 to 1956 he studied German in Rostock and Leipzig. Among other things, he was a student of the literary historian Hans Mayer. Because Johnson left the Free German Youth (FDJ) in protest in 1954, he was refused a job as a German scholar in the civil service.
During this time, Uwe Johnson was busy translating, adapting and writing his first novel entitled "Ingrid Babendererde. Graduate Examination 1953." He presented a prose adaptation of the Nibelungenlied and the translation of "Israel Potter" by the American narrator Herman Melville. Johnson's first novel was rejected by GDR publishers and by Suhrkamp-Verlag in West Germany. Johnson's novel "Conjectures about Jacob", his second work, published in 1959, received great attention. It is about life in divided Germany and the Cold War between the two German states.
The main character is the railway worker Jakob Abs, who gets into conflicts in the East and feels strange in the West. The novel has a complex narrative structure, which the author puts together with narrative segments within and against each other at different time levels. The connections become clear to the reader little by little. In the same year, 1959, Uwe Johnson moved to the Federal Republic because he saw better opportunities there to publish his works. He repeatedly emphasized his connection to his Mecklenburg homeland. The following year, the writer was awarded the Theodor Fontane Prize by the city of West Berlin.
In 1961 his novel "The Third Book about Achim" was published, which is based on the character of the "Nouveau Roman". Johnson took inspiration from the works of the American storyteller William Faulkner. This piece is also about the division of Germany and the social conditions associated with it. The author ties the topic to a writer from the West who is planning to write the biography of a cyclist from Leipzig. What is new in Johnson's previous work is that the main character is a West German. In 1962, Johnson was in Rome on a scholarship. Two years later his stories "Karsch and Other Prose" were published.
His novel "Two Views," published in 1965, also revolves around divided Germany and its consequences. The piece describes the escape of a nurse from East Berlin to the West, which she carries out with the support of a West German journalist. The background for this and his "Achim" novel are historical events such as June 17, 1953, the uprising in Hungary in 1956 and the building of the Wall in 1961. From 1966 to 1968, Uwe Johnson stayed in New York worked as a textbook editor. He then returned to Berlin. During this time, his four-volume major work, the novel "Anniversaries," was published. It is the story of Gesine Cresspahl, in which her fictional life is interwoven with Johnson's memories of his time in Mecklenburg.
It is Johnson's last and greatest novel. He realized the narrative structure in individual days of a whole year from August 21, 1967 to August 20, 1968. The author included daily reports from the New York Times and a description of the fictional New York everyday life of the main character, which he confronted with his personal life Story. The work was well received by the public. It is characterized not only by the high precision of the descriptions, but also by the tension between the present and the past. In 1969 Uwe Johnson became a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic and the Academy of Arts in West Berlin. Two years later he received Germany's most prestigious literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize.
In 1972 he took over the vice presidency of the West Berlin Academy of the Arts. In 1974, Johnson moved to Sheerness on See on the British Thames island of Sheppey. In 1977 he became a member of the Language Academy in Darmstadt. Two years later he worked as a poetics lecturer at Frankfurt University. In the same year he received the Thomas Mann Prize. In 1982 his story "Sketch of an Accident" was published.
Uwe Johnson probably died of heart failure on the night of February 23rd to 24th, 1984 in Sheerness on Sea, England. His body was not found until weeks after his death.
