2024-07-20 13:57:35
WIf Uwe Johnson had not died early, he was 49 in 1984, he would probably have written an autobiography about a man from Mecklenburg who fell out with his parents in an argument about their vanished GDR, and left to a forest house on the edge of the river. of the forest, study world literature and in the New Germany became a famous actor on television, in film and on the theater stage. He showed East, in Rostock “police call,” and lived in the West, where he rented a room in Hamburg and wrote books about his heroes. The first is about Lemmy Kilmister and Motörhead. Another about Uwe Johnson and himself: It’s right “‘If you knew what I know…’ – Author of my life and he showed Charly Hübner an envelope in a store, “Thoughts about Jacob” that Johnson had in his hand.
Last year, Charly Hübner read “Anniversaries”, Johnson’s classic, together with Caren Miosga for the audiobook, for 74 hours, and “The third book about Achim”. No one likes to accept waves, wind and clouds and sentences like: “After such rain, the Baltic Sea is washed flat, almost even to the ground.” In Johnson’s own book, Hübner asks himself in 120 pages, why a strange writer who has been dead for 40 years is the author of his life. And what and how your author will write today if he turns 90 on Saturday, July 20, 2024.
Charly Hübner, actor and writer
Source: Jens Kalaene/image alliance/dpa
Why: When Hübner fell out with his parents, his father was the deputy mayor of Feldberg and was already loyal to the program, Johnson’s “birthday parties” arrived through a group of books in his hideout in the forest. The family saga takes place locally, in historic eastern districts such as Gneetz, Jerikow and Wendisch-Burg, which the Neustrelitz graduate easily discovers. And he played in New York, the mother city of punk rock: “world literature from home.” Johnson is from Anklam, grew up in Güstrow and graduated from the university in Rostock, went west in 1959, to New York in 1966 and to Sheerness-on-Sea in the south of England in 1974, where he finally died. Like Hübner’s two other heroes, Lemmy from the rock’n’roll underworld and Hans Fallada from Feldberg as the Hübners, Uwe Johnson is also an epic drinker.
For Johnson there are three facts
Hübner tells how young Charly created his Johnson, his man from Mecklenburg, who is optimistic about his times and country. The author himself provided a guide to reading his book in 1961; His “Achim” was published the day the Wall was built: “I wrote the book as if people would read it as slowly as I wrote it.” Hübner: “Letters become close-ups, words become streets, sentences become panoramas.” Johnson’s “Anniversaries,” the story of the Cresspahl family, opens two panoramas of modern German history. In 1933 the NSDAP took power in Gneez and Jericho and claimed their victims; In 1968, evil spirits, anti-Semites and racists, are still around, even far, in foreign countries, in New York. Everything private is political, he said at the time. Johnson saw it this way: “It is impossible to live apart from modern history.” Therefore: “By writing, I want to know the truth.” He had suffered from the third in his entire short life.
Charly Hübner tells his own story in comparison to Johnson’s “birthday parties”. From the Lost Boys, a youth gang founded in Mecklenburg in the GDR to listen to metal and punk, play sports and drink. The program, the state, the school and the Hübners’ elders saw the Lost Boys as an anti-terrorist group. For the young people from the small town, the conflict became a crash course in the daily life of the dictator and the divided reality, which made the GDR and the world of their parents collapse. “Now I am beginning to lose this hope, your teenage son shouting around you, cheering the world on his progress in history and rejoicing in the endless opportunities that open before me.”
What would Johnson have thought, written and said about everything, about the “so-called revolution” (Hübner), about the restored border and about German unity? Hübner leaves the question open and quotes Johnson from an interview from 1962: “The idea of unity seems to me to ask that we prepare ourselves carefully and patiently, that is, by trying to understand and observe the Things instead complicated.” but still smarter than the Germans in 1990. After that, Hübner was very happy: “Someone like me can live in a sense of security that lasts throughout his life, apart from the problems of privacy and of the private economy, and trusts that the Federal Government of Germany/EU/NATO protects it. your own life and you can truly, above all, take care of your own business.”
Now his new study of “Anniversaries” reminds us of what Johnson wrote about the denazification of all East Germans that was summarily ordered by the Soviet invaders: It was futile. For him, the anti-fascism workers in the GDR brought up, he said: “But not for others.” ‘ four times. 2024 – Super election year. State elections in Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg. The right-wing populist AfD leads in all surveys. “
Then there is the ignorance that exists in the West. Hübner asks himself why anyone should read Johnson in 2024 and novels like “The Third Book of Achim” and About the Wall. He found the answer in one of the best sellers in the East: “‘The East: The Making of West Germany’ by scholar Dirk Oschmann shows that Johnson’s novel does not tell the past, but so something burning, since even fifty-two years after the publication of the ‘Third book about Achim’ wanted to show the differences between the East and the West.” And unity lopsided. “Poverty is , isn’t it?” in one from television, that counts the series and social media to today’s world magazine, to Charly Hübner about Uwe Johnson.
Charly Hübner: “‘If you knew what I know…’ – The author of my life” (Suhrkamp, 125 pages, €20)
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