Uwe Johnson

Although Uwe Johnson immediately made a big impression with this, his first novel (1959), his audacity becomes truly astounding only in retrospect. It is not so much the way he evaded the constraints of socialist realism which was so strongly enforced in the GDR, nor the way that he continued writing under the very noses of the secret police, (he only went to West Berlin when the book was finished), despite the fact that at the time (1957-58) there were continuous arrests. Rather it is the radicalness and consistency of his aesthetic decision which still call forth admiration today. In his expansion of Walter Benjamin's Theses and with Döblin and Barlach as models, he re- invented the modern novel, in the GDR and specific to the GDR; he split perspectives in such a way that in reproducing everyday situations (e.g. "overhearing a conversation in a railway carriage") the fiction of the omniscient author became unnecessary, and the characters were to some degree extended into the collective. Among the observers is someone who does not remain anonymous. "Herr Rohlfs" is a secret police officer who wants to recruit the train dispatcher Jakob Abs into his little game of acquiring information, after Jakob's mother had escaped such requests by fleeing to the West. He keeps a careful record of everything he finds out about Jakob and his world, the author thereby allowing the reader a candid insight into the mind and feelings of this type of officer. Johnson makes his character quite intellectual and not unsympathetic, and the author's attempts at complete neutrality of viewpoint are severely tested here. (He later admitted that the creation of this character was influenced by "the desired ideal of a commissioner, one whom a university graduate at that time in the GDR would have preferred as a partner during questioning".)

At the point when speculations are being made about Jakob Abs he is dead - killed when crossing the tracks. Whether it was an accident or not remains very uncertain - but there is no doubt that the authorities, whom Johnson frequently referred to as "Eavesdropping & Interfering Ltd.", were not innocent in the matter.