Along the seafront at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, behind a concrete wall, stands Marine Parade, a long terrace of Victoria era houses. One of them, that at number 26, has a small plaque on the front, commemorating the fact that the German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) lived there in the final decade of his life.
The low key nature of the surroundings and the unexceptional nature of the house itself does little to betray how significant a figure Johnson is. Called by Nobel Prize winner Guenter Grass the most important of all East German writers, his main work, the `Anniversaries’ (Jahrestage), freshly translated by Damion Searls in 2018, occupied him on and off from the late 1960s to his death. In translation, this monumental work comes to almost 1700 pages. `Anniversaries’ has been called a letter to the German people by the author. It tells the story, between August 1967 and August of the following year, of Gesine Cresspahl and her daughter Marie. Resident in New York now, with the events of each day relayed from the New York Times, the narrative refers back to the time during the Second World War, when the town in Germany in which Gesine had lived in her former life before coming to America had been occupied by the Soviet army. Her story of coming to America sits alongside these often troubling recollections of her former life, and the disjunct between them. Marie’s life also figures in this, in the new world – one still shaped and formed by the actions and connections to the old, back in Europe, via her mother and her witnessing of these.
Johnson himself had drawn on many of his experiences in writing the book. Born in Pomerania, now in Poland, his father, a member of the Nazi party from 1940, was taken into a Soviet camp at the end of the war. He was declared dead in 1948. Johnson lived in East Germany until he managed to migrate to the West in 1959, a few years after the death of his mother. He married Elizabeth Schmidt in 1962, and from 1966 lived in New York working at a publishers. After a period based in West Berlin from 1968, he decided to move to Sheerness in 1974. Quite why he chose to make this move remains a mystery. `In divided Germany, on either side, authors were very public and important figures,’ the scholar of modern German literature Astrid Koehler from Queen Mary’s University, London, stated. `And it’s almost as if he wanted to withdraw from this responsibility into a relatively anonymous private life.’ (John Goude, `Uwe Johnson in Sheerness: Why did a major East German writer move to an English seaside town?’, BBC Online, 19th April 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32335889) .
The writer certainly enjoyed relative anonymity in his new base. But he must have cut a puzzling figure in the town after his move there. He had been associated with key literary figures while in Germany and America, and had enjoyed success as an author and translator. In Sheerness, unless those around him could read German, they would not even have had access to his work if they wanted to. One of the few works that was available was a translation of his essay on a cluster of unexploded bombs in sunken ship marked out in the estuary close to Sheerness. In `The Unfathomable Ship’, published in Granta, the Literary magazine, in 1983, only a year before his death, Johnson wrote:
`In the Thames two miles north of the Isle of Sheppey, there is a curious cluster of parallel slanting takes. They are visible mainly at low water but they are also noticeable in an eighteen-foot flood tide, for behind them the surface of the water ripples away to the horizon in rapidly changing lights and shades. The visitor to the town of Sheerness in the north-west corner of the island may at first take these slanting stakes for eel traps – their poles leaning away from the strong west wind. Distances are difficult to judge over open water and the black triangle appearing between the stakes at ebb tide can be easily mistaken for the owner’s fishing boat. Anyone attracted to the spot will need binoculars. He will be wrong about the eel traps. They are not moved once a fortnight and, moreover, the stakes, of unequal length, are at strangely regular intervals. Besides they are too close to the central waterway of the Thames itself.’ (Granta, Issue Number 6, Cambridge, 1983, 262).
As the narrator knowingly continues, `The inhabitants of Sheerness are only too willing to tell a stranger. As if imparting a piece of confidential good news, they say: “However dark the cloud it still has a silver lining.”’
Johnson himself seems to have enjoyed frequenting the local pubs – this is recounted in `A Secret Life’, a radio documentary by Patrick Wright broadcast on the BBC in April 2015 – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qyjsr. Asking locals to call him `Charlie’ because they might find the name Uwe hard to pronounce, he was fascinated by the lives they lived, and the onset of the Thatcher decade of entrepreneurialism and free-wheeling social and economic change that was just beginning. He did in fact write a book in German on this, `Island Stories’, which has yet to be translated into English. Fittingly, the pub he particularly liked to go to was one of the most local and down to earth.
The Sheerness decade was not an easy one for him. Early on in his time there, the discovery that his wife may have had a dalliance over a decade before with a Czech Mozart scholar led to their separation. She and his daughter moved several streets away. Heavy drinking and writer’s block also blighted his time. But `Anniversaries’ was, triumphantly, finished despite all of this. Tragically, while he died in 22nd February 1984, his body was not found for three weeks. He had indeed retreated into a very profound isolation.
Rachel Lichtenstein writes in `Estuary’ (Hamish Hamilton, 2016) of his life in the town, and in particular of the sunken ship with its deadly unexploded cargo which so intrigued him. Johnson himself offers a perspective, in a different language, and from a different kind of cultural background, of what Kent was like in the latter part of the 20th century. This is a remarkable thing for any place to have from a writer of his quality and importance. Johnson’s achievement in `Anniversaries’ was of quiet, and for much of his life, unacknowledged heroism. It is an extraordinary thing that he was able to achieve what he achieved, and that he chose to do it where he did. It is good that his work, and his own life, are getting greater recognition now.