Kurt Fickert, Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio)
A number of intricate literary relationships form the basis of the text of Johnson’s monumental novel Jahrestage (Anniversaries), published in four volumes between 1970 and 1983. The most striking of these is that of the interplay between the names of characters and the themes propounded in the novel. Emphasizing the meaningfulness of this aspect of Jahrestage, Rolf Michaelis, with Johnson’s assistance,[1] undertook the preparation of an additional volume, labeled an address book, which consists of a lengthy alphabetical listing of the characters’ names, together with numerous quotations from the novel pertaining to these personages. The quoted passages constitute in each instance a compendium of references in the text to the character listed in the address book. Thus, this “fifth volume” affords the reader the ability to keep in mind the association of a specific individual’s name with the role he or she plays in the novel. At one point in Jahrestage Johnson himself, appearing in the role of the student Dieter Lockenvitz, his alter ego, cites Goethe in order to convey the importance of the interaction between the individual and his or her name. The quotation from Goethe compares the name to the skin which envelops and defines the person.[2] It is my intention here to establish that Johnson has chosen meaningful names in order to underscore the part the characters play in developing the thematic substructure of the text.
The names in Jahrestage lend themselves to placement in a relatively small number of categories. The first and most important of these, in that it establishes the tenor of the novel, is the group of names which bolster the motif of victimization—of the individual, group, nation, indeed humanity itself, all oppressed by war—that determines the course of the novel’s plot. A subcategory of this leitmotif is fashioned by the stress Johnson places upon the concept of a homeland or a native land, the loss of which motivates the actions of many of Johnson’s characters. From this set of circumstances there evolves a related theme, the search for a politically secure haven that will compensate for the loss of the land of one’s birth. The novel’s protagonist and occasional narrator, Gesine Cresspahl, promotes this endeavor by pursuing two overlapping goals, one of which is to be reached by her taking part in a political and financial plot to shore up the socialist government of Czechoslovakia. Gesine’s second and equally significant ambition is to acquire an understanding of the forces in her past life which have sent her out on the mission of providing support for a just government somewhere in the world. These societal concerns are perceived by Gesine on the personal level as constituting “the search for the father,” that is, as an attempt to fathom her relationship with her father, which she sees from another viewpoint as being the equivalent of her relationship with her Vaterland. It is obvious that these themes are deeply rooted in the novel’s autobiographical substratum. Johnson deliberately attests to this basic aspect of his text by depicting an occasion when he himself appears in his fiction (thus his name can be found in the address book); in addition, Johnson engages in the practice of openly making reference to characters in his other works and those who appear in the literary publications of his close friends. By these means he extends the limited horizons of his protagonist who works in relative obscurity as a foreign-language secretary in a New York City bank.
The most extensive of the analyses of names that Johnson has included in Jahrestage occurs appropriately in the case of the character “Gesine Cresspahl.” An aura of sentimentality, rare in Johnson’s fiction, hovers over “Gesine”; the narrator proposes that she received her name “because Heinrich Cresspahl once wanted to abscond over land and sea with Gesine Radebrecht from Malchow” (JT 1751). In an interview, Johnson also claimed that he had chosen the name on the basis of a personal preference: “Gesine’s name I once heard shouted out by a four-year-old, and I liked it.”[3] Adding a literary allusion to his reminiscence, he explains: “Why [I liked it] I discovered somewhere in [the author] Fontane; he said in the case of [his character] Effi that the e and the i [in the name] were the best-sounding vowels, [and I decided] they were just right for [Gesine] Cresspahl at that moment.”
Gesine’s family name, “Cresspahl,” seems to have been invented by Johnson[4] in order to underscore the symbolic significance of the lives led by family members. Gesine’s parents, Heinrich and Lisbeth, share the fate of having been victimized by the times in which they lived and by people both close to them and distant, who created the political climate which determined the direction of their lives. Because Heinrich, a husband very much in love with his wife (and mother of his daughter), has acceded to Lisbeth’s wish that they remain in Germany despite the ill omen of Hitler’s ascent to power, he determines to risk his life by spying for the British during the Second World War. In this instance, he also victimizes Gesine. His granddaughter Marie, whose middle name Henriette pays tribute to her grandfather’s fondness for the English, will later hold him responsible for endangering Gesine’s life. Compounding the damage he has done, immediately after the end of the war, he allows himself to be persuaded to become mayor of his hometown Jerichow and thus a scapegoat for whatever punishment the occupiers of Germany might want to mete out.
Heinrich’s wife Lisbeth (i.e., Elisabeth, which means, aptly in her case, “consecrated to God”) more than matches his willingness to sacrifice himself for the sake of his convictions. However, in Lisbeth’s situation, these appear in a religious, rather than political context. At one point in her daughter’s early years, she restrains herself from rescuing her child, who has fallen into a full rain-barrel; by letting Gesine drown, she intends to rescue her, so the reader is led to believe, from living in an evil world. Heinrich saves his daughter in the nick of time. In an ultimate act that expresses her outrage in the face of the wickedness that prevails everywhere, Lisbeth commits suicide by an auto-da-fé, losing her life in a fire she has set in her husband’s workshop—he is a cabinetmaker. She has entered upon this course of action as the result of having witnessed the murder of a Jewish child, Marie Tannebaum, by a Nazi bully on the occasion of the Kristallnacht.
With this kind of parental heritage, Gesine vies with them in their endeavors to put moral rectitude and political correctness ahead of achieving personal goals. Abandoning her homeland, the now pseudo-socialist state of East Germany, because it has become a communist dictatorship, Gesine lives briefly in West Germany, whose capitalist regime she finds equally oppressive. Ever in search of a place where the will of the people determines governmental policy, she sets out on a journey in search of this ideal place, which she identifies as a “moral Switzerland.” A stay in the United States constitutes the next phase of her pilgrimage. Since at this point she is the unwed mother of a young daughter, she has assumed the name of “Mrs. Cresspahl.” Thereby, she reaffirms for herself and affirms for her child Marie an obligation to be loyal to the missionary imperatives designated in their name, that is, Cresspahl. At a later point in Jahrestage, Gesine describes the occasion when she became aware of the implications of “Cresspahl.” It was at school, when a discussion of class members’ family names prompted Gesine to reflect on the origin of her name: “The student Cresspahl did not want to be crucified like Christ on the cross [pole]; she also didn’t like having a name that made her a Christian.… She explained that her name was a combination of watercress and pawl” (JT 1253). But the figure of Christ on the cross, symbolizing both the ultimate victimization and the triumph over victimization, rather than the insignificant combination of “watercress” and “pawl,” indicates the burden placed on those who bear the family name. Although Johnson does not present Gesine as being equally conscious of similar meanings that can be found in her first name, they are readily apparent. The first syllable of “Gesine” suggests the collective, the communal; in Johnson’s literary autobiography Begleitumstände,[5] he comments on the enthusiasm the young students in East Germany had for the prefix “Ge,” denoting a common cause (e.g., Gemeinde, Genosse). The second and third syllable of the name, “sine,” sound like the word Sühne (atonement). Since atonement for the pogrom organized by the Hitler government is the undertaking assigned to the fictional character Uwe Johnson in the novel, the auhor’s choice of his protagonist’s first name may have an implication in addition to the one Johnson assigned to it in talking to interviewers. Therefore, “Gesine” is given the undertone of a commonly shared need to admit guilt and enact recompense.
The name of Gesine’s daughter, Marie, also has more than one signification. It would seem likely that Gesine chooses “Marie” in order to acknowledge her own indebtedness to Marie Abs, a homeless refugee from a region captured by the advancing Russian army and thus another victim of the war, who, upon being taken into Heinrich Cresspahl’s household, becomes Gesine’s foster mother. D. J. Bond has postulated that Marie is named after both her paternal grandmother Marie Abs and Marie Tannebaum.[6] The two namesakes point to the fact that Gesine’s daughter has inherited both the nobility which adheres to the name of Mary (Maria in German), mother of Christ, and the task of atoning for the corruption of that nobility which resulted from most Germans’ silent assent to the persecution of the Jews. “Tannebaum,” that is, “Tannenbaum,” refers to the birth of Christ and the Kristallnacht, on which the execution of the Jewish girl Marie occurred.
Marie’s middle name, Henriette, gives expression to Gesine’s love for her father, who, while serving an apprenticeship in England and having his own shop there, became accustomed to being called Henry. Gesine’s desire to understand her father and his influence on her life is the core not only of the search-for-a-father theme in the novel but also of the novel’s autobiographical purport. Johnson has assigned to Gesine his own questioning of his father’s relationship to his family. Erich Johnson was an enigma to his son. A petty official in the rural community in which the Johnsons lived, he did not become a member of the Nazi party until after the war began. He had, however, probably as a result of his wife’s prodding, sent his son to a boarding school supported by the Nazi government. Because of his affiliation with the Nazi party, he became a prisoner of the Russians at the end of the war and died in a Russian internment camp. In describing the fate of Heinrich Cresspahl, Johnson tries to come to terms with what he considered to be the betrayal of his country and his family by his father’s acceptance of the Hitler regime.
Johnson also provides Gesine with a suitor whose role it is to compensate both Gesine and her child for the loss of a father. This father-substitute, who in this capacity allows Johnson to avoid any mention of sexual activity in roughly two thousand pages of text, is Dietrich Erichson. The significance of the name Erichson is all too obvious: he is, like Johnson himself, Erich’s son. He represents an avowal of Johnson’s hope to be more of a father to his daughter Katharina than his father was to him, and, in the role of Gesine’s prospective husband, to be the completely giving person that “Cresspahl” fell far short of being. The significance of the name Dietrich provides another clue to the true identity of the character; as Wolfgang Paulsen has pointed out, Johnson announced to an interviewer: “Mein Name ist Uwe Klaus Dietrich Johnson.”[7] The idealized figure of Erichson—he has also mastered the task of putting the German past behind him—is humanized somewhat in the story by a character flaw which Johnson himself exhibited: Erichson is in the early stages of becoming an alcoholic. After the disintegration of his marriage and therefore of the hopes he expressed by creating the character of Erichson, Johnson decided to send this alter ego (one of several such characters) to his death in an airplane crash which takes place in the fourth volume of the novel, written and published shortly before Johnson’s own death in 1984.[8]
Another self-portrait by Johnson in the last volume of Jahrestage delineates the hopeful and not yet disillusioned young man he had been in the last year of his undergraduate education in East Germany. In naming this character Dieter Lockenvitz, Johnson once more made use of his surname “Dietrich.” “Lockenvitz” suggests to Beatrice Schulz a head of curly hair with a “Fitze”—a lock of hair usually overlapping the nape of the neck.[9] Accordingly, Johnson may have been making a playful, though bitter, reference to the fact that he lost his hair prematurely. In addition, the last syllable of the name can be associated with the German word for joke—Witz. Notably, Bernd Neumann, Johnson’s biographer, concludes that the student Lockenvitz “appears as an alter ego like none other in Uwe Johnson’s literary work.”[10] The theme which this portion of the novel develops is the espousal by both the character Gesine and the author Johnson of the cause of a socialist government. By depicting Lockenvitz as taking a stand against tyranny, Johnson alludes to his own political activities in the DDR.
Perhaps the most striking name in Jahrestage to demonstrate Johnson’s fondness for introducing figures he created in his earlier work is that of Jakob Abs, the love of Gesine’s life and the father of her daughter Marie. In Mutmaßungen über Jakob, (1959) which, as the title indicates, focuses in on this character, Jakob has died before the events of the book occur; the same situation prevails in Jahrestage, where he exists only in Gesine’s memory. Since the name calls to mind the biblical Jakob, who contended with his brother Esau in obtaining his father’s blessing (and obtained it by deception), the theme of coming to terms with the image of the father, can but underlie Johnson’s plot in Jahrestage.
The origin of Jakob’s surname has a twofold significance. For one, “Abs” lends itself to being interpreted as an abbreviation of the biblical name Absalom. His story concerns two brothers and their relationship to the woman (their sister) whom they both love (the theme of two friends in love with the same woman is a common one in fiction, including Johnson’s, e.g., Ingrid Babendererde). As a result of their quarreling, Absalom is sent into exile by King David, his father. Upon Absalom’s return, he organizes a revolt against his father’s autocratic rule. In its course Absalom, like Jakob in Johnson’s novel, becomes the victim of an accident which leads to his death. These and other aspects of Jakob Abs’s life, however, can also be interpreted as references to William Faulkner’s novel Absalom! Absalom!
Johnson’s fondness for William Faulkner (with whom he once had a disappointing interview) and his novels clearly plays a part in the literary associations which abound in Jahrestage. Having borrowed stylistic features from Faulkner’s novel Absalom! Absalom! (and The Sound and the Fury), Johnson may be assumed to have used a part of the title to add to the significance of the name of his principal character, (Jakob) Abs. Faulkner’s depiction of the inability of two brothers to deal with their despotic father constitutes the novel’s plot. In Mutmaßungen, Jakob Abs becomes acquainted with a brotherly contender for Gesine’s love, who sanctions their labor on behalf of the “socialist” East German state. The name of Jakob’s opponent is Jonas Blach, another character whose given name can but be associated with a biblical text, the book of Jonah. Jonas (a variant of Jonah) is also the protagonist who bows to authority in Johnson’s short story “Jonas zum Beispiel”—which could easily have been called “Mutmaßungen über Jonas.” The surname Blach, then, leaves little doubt that Johnson wished to pay his respects to Ernst Bloch, the East German philosopher who celebrated the “principle of hope” as an important element in the establishment of a just government. In losing his life in an accident in the railroad yard where he works as a train dispatcher, Jakob may be seen as representing a more substantial principle, one that takes into account the individual’s willingness as a citizen to fulfill his obligations to the state.
The autobiographical element in the novel, which consists in part of the inclusion of references by the narrator to various characters Johnson created in other works, enlarges the scope of the fictitious story of Gesine Cresspahl. She is depicted as being an ordinary individual who lacks the authority and station in life that would enable her to come to terms with, and make sense of, a calamitous historical period. As in the case of Jonas Blach, who, unlike Gesine, stays behind in the dismal and politically corrupt world of the German Democratic Republic to keep alive the hope that a true socialist government might yet emerge there, Johnson has included in his cast of characters a woman who pursues goals similar in their fashion to Blach’s: Anita Gantlik, with whom Gesine has had a long-lasting friendship. Although her fate during and after the war is by far worse than Gesine’s, Anita has put her life at great risk by choosing to remain in East Germany in order to assist those who wish to flee to the West. Gesine and Anita Gantlik have kept in close touch with one another; Anita remains Gesine’s only confidante and even plays a grandmotherly role in Marie’s life. To my mind, “Gantlik” is synonymous with “Gant-like.” The name Gant is a significant one in twentieth-century American literature; it is the one given by Thomas Wolfe to the protagonist and his family in his autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Johnson has acknowledged his fondness for Wolfe’s novel.[11] The character of Helen Gant, the older sister of the protagonist, Eugene, in particular resembles Johnson’s Anita Gantlik. Helen is the mainstay of all the members of a dysfunctional family; like Gesine, she has an eccentric father and a self-absorbed mother.
Among the characters presented in Jahrestage whom Johnson has culled from those appearing in his other works in order to widen the panoramic view of mid-twentieth-century life, two need to be mentioned because their names are strikingly symbolic. Both are pseudonyms for Uwe Johnson as he has depicted himself in the novella Skizze eines Verunglückten (Sketch of an Accident-Victim; 1981). The first, Joachim de Catt, is the name given to a child left on the doorstep of an orphanage. The name “Joachim” allows the reader to suppose that he might be a Jewish child; in this instance, Johnson reiterates his conviction that every German must atone for the Holocaust. “De Catt” refers more playfully to the symbol of the cat, which occurs frequently in Johnson’s fiction; it is intended to convey Johnson’s sense of his own individuality and imperturbability. In addition, the figure of the cat as it plays with its own tail is meant to bring to mind the figure of the author as he tries to pin down elusive memories. In Skizze, Joe Hinterhand is the name de Catt assumes at the beginning of his career as a writer. “Joe” is related to the term “G.I. [for government issue] Joe,” which was applied to the American soldier who in the aggregate brought the Second World War to a close. Like “the cat,” “Hinterhand” is in a double sense a playful reference; the name is a term used in the German card game Skat to designate the participant who has the last, and therefore least, opportunity to play out his hand. Since the story of the accident victim, which is told in the novella, concerns a husband (actually Johnson himself) who is the last one to learn that his wife has been unfaithful to him, the ironic implications of “Hinterhand” are blatant. Once again, by transposing characters from his other novels into the text of Jahrestage while using their names to supply further information concerning the themes which Jahrestage develops, Johnson undergirds his narrative with cross-references and thus provides it with an aura of documented truth.
In regard to names which Johnson has borrowed from the works of other authors, the use of “Anselm Kristlein” in Jahrestage is a provocative example. The name can be readily identified as that of the protagonist in three of Martin Walser’s novels. Once Walser’s close friend and literary competitor, Johnson, after their falling out, inserted the character Anselm Kristlein to draw an unflattering portrait of Walser. In this guise, Walser comes to Gesine’s attention as an inveterate womanizer. The similarity between the names “Kristlein” and “Cresspahl” indicates that both authors dealt with the theme of victimization in their work.
Many other meaningful names occur in Jahrestage. They encourage readers to become involved in the novel itself and to decipher the text. The true significance of the names, however, lies in their association with the novel’s themes. Together they form a thread of narrative that characterizes a generation (Johnson’s own) victimized by a fascist government and a brutal war. Names such as Gesine Cresspahl, Jakob Abs, and Dieter Lockenvitz establish relationships between the characters in the book and the destiny that pursues them. They also attest to the fact that their experiences are Johnson’s own. By this use of name symbolism, together with other narrative devices—the intercalation of newspaper clippings, dream and dreamlike sequences, dialogue as a substitute for narration, and an expansion as well as a diminution of the role of the narrator—Johnson has positioned himself in the ranks of James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, authors who have restructured the realist novel into a vehicle capable of depicting the chaotic world of the twentieth century.
NOTES
[1]See Ulrich Fries, Uwe Johnsons
Jahrestage (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990) 67n.
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[2]Uwe Johnson, Jahrestage
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1983) 1723. Further references to this edition will
appear in the text after the abbreviation JT.
All translations are my own.
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[3]Johnson quoted by A. Leslie Willson, “Ein verkannter Humorist,” in “Ich überlege mir die Geschichte …” Uwe
Johnson im Gespräch, ed. Eberhard Falke (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1988) 290;
my translation.
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[4]Johnson states: “I have never met anyone with the name of Cresspahl,
except for my character” (“Ich überlege
mir die Geschiche …” 290).
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[5]Uwe Johnson, Begleitumstände (Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp, 1986) 72.
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[6]D. J. Bond, German History and
Identity: Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993) 102.
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[7]Wolfgang Paulsen, Uwe Johnson:
Undine geht: Die Hintergrümde seines Romanwerks (Bern: Lang, 1993) 154. See
also Bernd Neumann, Uwe Johnson
(Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1994) 6.
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[8]In the novel Johnson depicts Erichson as carrying with him a note
which will identify him in the event of his accidental death. Testifying to
Johnson’s proclivity to combine fact and fiction, a note with the same wording
was found on his person at the time of his demise in Sheerness, England.
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[9]Beatrice Schulz, Lektüren von
Jahrestagen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995) 172n.
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[10]Neumann 20.
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[11] See “Ich überlege mir die
Geschichte …” 218, and Neumann 27.
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