Slovo a Smysl (Dec 2015)
Vortage passieren lassen: Skizzen zu Transfers zwischen Ort und Zeitbezug in Uwe Johnsons Jahrestagen in Hinsicht auf Prag // Letting Preceding Days Pass: Sketches on the Transfers between Locality and Time-Anchoring in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries — with Regard to Prague
Abstract
The paper concentrates on selected passages from Uwe Johnsonʼs opus magnum, Jahrestage (Anniversaries), in which the Prague Spring and the events of 1968 play a key role, and develops some ideas on how narrations of history and critique of language can jointly (as a translation of sorts) be understood as a critical approach to what is taken to be the present and the reality of the past. It is argued that Hannah Arendtʼs notion of the unpredictability of the future and of the event variously influenced the modalities of narration as employed by Johnson. The central issue of Jacques Derridaʼs Prague lecture on how a city determines ‘our’ modes of (self-)preception and how a location can be grasped and ‘dated’ in writing is put to use in order to develop a singular perspective on some neglected aspects in Johnsonʼs work. Johnson’s novel and its commentaries form a diverse reflection on time, reality, and the media which can affirm its contemporaneity when understood as exemplary in contesting, by the voice of literature, the functionalization of history and its narrative.
