Dialogue with the reader

In this insightful overview of the work of Uwe Johnson, along with Grass the most notable of Germany's post-World War II authors, Kurt Fickert has founded his interpretations on Johnson's intention to involve his readers in the structuring of his texts. Thus, in Das Dritte Buch uber Achim, his second published novel, Johnson created a readership (in the language of modern literary criticism "implied readers") who appear in the story by way of questions that Johnson has proposed they would have asked, had they had access to his manuscript. In Mutmafsungen uber Jakob, an earlier work, the reader is required to piece together various narrative segments, presented as dialogue, monologue, and the report of an objective narrator, all related in an innovative manner reminiscent of William Faulkner. Told with equal intricacy and at great length (almost 2,000 pages), Johnson's Jahrestage features a narrator who literally works together with the protagonist to produce a journal of her life in wartime and post-war Germany, along with an account of her sojourn in New York City in the tumultuous months between August 1967 and August 1968. In several respects Johnson's stylistic experiments in this monumental work show the influence of John Dos Passos, particularly in the three volumes of his U.S.A. Another of Johnson's five novels, Zwei Ansichten, written almost without narrative complexity, tells the tale of two casual lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. This novel, in style as well as in substance, gives evidence of Johnson's admiration for Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and, perhaps to a lesser degree, for Knowles's A Separate Peace, which he translated.