Uwe Johnson - Honors, Works

Writer, born in Kammin, Pomerania (now part of Poland). He studied at Rostock and Leipzig, and left East for West Germany after completing his first novel, Mutmassungen über Jakob (Speculations about Jakob) in 1959. His second and third novels, Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961, The Third Book about Achim), and Zwei Ansichten (1965, Two Views), develop the theme of the relation between the two Germanies. He later moved to university posts in the USA, and then to England, but published no fiction after 1965.

Uwe Johnson (July 20, 1934 - February 22, 1984) was a German writer, editor, and scholar.

Johnson was born in Kammin (now Kamien Pomorski, Poland).

Beginning in 1953, he worked on the novel Ingrid Babendererde, rejected by various publishing houses and unpublished during his lifetime.

In 1956, his mother left for West Berlin. Unemployed for political reasons, he translated Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (the translation was published in 1961) and began to write the novel Mutmassungen über Jakob, again rejected by several publishing houses, before being published in 1959 by Suhrkamp in West Berlin.

During the early 1960s, he continued to write and publish fiction, but supported himself largely as a translator, mainly of from English-language works, and as an editor.

1964 - for the Berliner Tagesspiegel, Reviews of GDR television programmes boycotted by the West German press (published under the title "Der 5.

In 1965, he travelled again to America and edited Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti. From 1966 through 1968 he worked in New York City as a textbook editor at Harcourt, Brace & During this time (in 1967 he began work on his masterwork, the Jahrestage and edited Das neue Fenster (The new window), a textbook of German-language readings for English-speaking students learning German.

On January 1, 1967 protestors from his own West Berlin apartment building founded Kommune 1. Returning to West Berlin in 1969, he became a member of the West German PEN Center and of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts). In 1970, he published the first volume of his masterwork, the Jahrestage (Anniversary).

Meanwhile, in 1972 he became Vice President of the Academy of the Arts and had a lectureship on Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971.

This was not a completely unproductive period. He published some shorter works and continued to do some work as an editor.

In 1983, the fourth volume of Jahrestage was published, but he broke off a reading tour due to health reasons.

Honors

1960 - Fontane Prize, West Berlin 1962 - Formentor Prize 1971 - Georg Büchner Prize 1975 - Wilhelm Raabe Prize, Braunschweig 1978 - Thomas Mann Prize, Lübeck 1983 - Literature prize from the city of Cologne

Works

Mutmassungen über Jakob (1959, Presumptions about Jakob) Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961, The third book about Achim) Translator of Herman Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1961) Translator of Das Nibelungenlied from Middle High German (1961) Translator of John Knowles's A Separate Peace (1959) as In diesem Land (1963) Karsch, und andere Prosa (1964, Karsch, and other prose) Eine Reise wegwohin (1964, An Absence) Zwei Ansichten (1965 Two Views) Editor of Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti. Fragments, 1933-1956) (1965) Editor of Das neue Fenster, a textbook of German-language readings for foreign students (1967) Editor of textbook for the documentary film "A Summer in the City" (1968?) Jahrestage. Anniversary: from the life of Gesine Cresspahl) Eine Reise nach Klagenfurt (1974, A trip to Klagenfurt) Berliner Sachen, Aufsätze (1975, Berlin things, essays) Editor of Max Frisch Stich-Worte (1975, Max Frisch Reference) Editor (together with Hans Mayer) of Das Werk von Samuel Beckett. Berliner Colloquium (1975, The work of Samuel Beckett: Berlin Colloquium) Von dem Fischer un syner Fru (Of the fisherman and his wife; Eine Autobiographie by journalist Margret Boveri (1977, Branchings: an Autobiography) "Ein Schiff" ("A Ship") in: Jürgen Habermas (Editor) Stichworte zur "Geistigen Situation der Zeit" (References on "The spiritual situation of the time", Volume 1000 from the publisher Suhrkamp (1979) "Ein unergründliches Schiff" ("An unfathomable ship") in: Merkur 33 (1979) Skizze eines Verunglückten (Sketch of an accident victim, 1982) Begleitumstände.