1 4 6 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z We are used to seeing 1968 through the eyes of students in their early to mid-twenties. They protest government abuses, authoritarianism , racism, and the war in Vietnam; marching through Paris and Prague, these students announce a new political sensibility . They were born in the midst of World War II or in its immediate aftermath. But they are too young to remember its horrors and have grown impatient with the order of values it left in its wake. Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries keeps a foot on either side of this generation. His epic sixteen-hundred-plus-page novel moves from summer 1967 to summer 1968 through the eyes of a thirty-fouryear -old single mother and her ten-year-old daughter. The twoperson family lives in New York City, having migrated there from Germany six years previously. The daughter, Marie Cresspahl, was born in Düsseldorf in West Germany; the mother, Gesine Cresspahl , comes from Jerichow, a small town on the other side of the A n n i v e r s a r i e s : F r o m a Ye a r i n t h e L i f e o f G e s i n e C r e s s p a h l , by Uwe Johnson, translated by Damion Searls (New York Review Books, 1,720 pp., $39.95 2-volume boxed set, paper) 1 4 7 R Iron Curtain. Her family had split between Nazis and anti-Nazis. Now they are all dead, and Gesine tells Marie about them. What would the sixties seem like to someone with actual memories of the recent war – or to someone too young to rebel against her parents? Johnson’s answers to these questions are weighed and poignant. Skirting easy critiques of the decade’s better-known figures, he does suggest that their historical advantage over their elders – freedom from World War II complicity – is partly a blind spot. The young protesters his slightly older protagonist observes cannot always see how di≈cult it will be not to repeat the mistakes of 1930s Europe, or how often these mistakes are already being repeated and built on in 1960s New York. They also don’t yet face the challenge of becoming authority figures themselves: of needing to raise a new generation in the wake of ruins, tragedies, and failures. Johnson died in 1984 at the age of forty-nine, having just completed the last volume of Anniversaries. He had put it out in four installments, in 1970, 1971, 1973 and, after a long pause, 1983. Much of the novel echoes his own life, which began in Anklam, a small town in Mecklenburg, Germany. Born in 1934, Johnson saw his father become a Nazi o≈cial. The father was captured by the Soviet army at the end of the war and was never seen again; his family eventually presumed him dead. In 1945, Mecklenburg became part of East Germany. Tightening barriers began to separate it from Western Europe. Johnson’s mother fled to West Germany in 1956, leaving her son behind, which resulted in local repressions against him. Three years later, he sneaked through into West Berlin as well, and lived the rest of his life moving between West Germany, New York, and England. A member of the famed Gruppe 47 (which also included Günter Grass), he published several acclaimed novels before Anniversaries. But this final, monumental novel was posthumously recognized as his magnum opus. Gesine Cresspahl and several of her family members had already appeared in Johnson’s debut novel, Speculations About Jakob (1959). Johnson claims that he had a vision of Gesine in New York almost a decade later while living there with his wife and young daughter. The vision overtook him, he claims with characteristic detail, on Tuesday, 18 April 1967, at 5:30 p.m., on Forty-Second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. He and the apparition 1 4 8 F I G L E...