Johnsons 'Jahrestage': Der Kommentar.(Review)

Johnsons 'Jahrestage': Der Kommentar. Ed. by Holger Helbig and others.. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1999. 1133 pp. DM 178.

Uwe Johnson's novel Jahrestage (4 vols, 1970-1983) is 1891 pages long, in the first edition. Its final volume was published with Rolf Michaelis's concordance of names and places in the novel, which many readers and scholars have since used profitably, and no doubt many have scribbled their own pencil additions and corrections on its pages. Scribbling useful further information on this new reference work on Jahrestage will be much more of a challenge.

This is a line-by-line commentary unravelling references to real places, events and people in Johnson's novel, and it is certainly a milestone in nitty-gritty Johnson research, as well as a remarkable publication in contemporary German studies. It is worth reflecting on the amount of time-consuming, painstaking research that has gone into this book, at a time when publication practices in German studies often favour the quickly finished product. The editors of this book began work in December 1991, and they have spent many years following up leads that will often have proved fruitless. They have enlisted the help of around 150 further institutions and individuals, from the Coca-Cola company in Atlanta to the legal department in Neubrandenburg local authority. The result is a beautifully produced book which will be of great use to future scholarship on Johnson, though it will remain to be seen if it can appeal to the general reader, as the editors hope.

The commentary includes information on people, places, street names and buildings in a dozen countries and over a hundred years; it explains historical events and institutions, public holidays, and the significance of dates. All foreign-language passages are translated, Johnson's quirky translations of foreign words into German are restored to their original language, and literary allusions and references to film and radio are explained. Newspapers used by the author have been consulted to find the full story behind the reference in the text. This is not only a useful service for the curious reader, it also confirms what we already know about Johnson's work as a fiction replete with history, based on real historical sources in which he immersed his characters. The editors of this book have refrained from interpreting, and there is no attempt to say what the references mean in their context. Occasional references to secondary literature on Johnson are given, but these are deliberately sparse, in spite of the mass of interpretative ...