“I could still see her in my mind’s eye”: Water and Maternal Imagery in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl

• Main Author: Caroline Rupprecht
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Prairie Press 2010-01-01
• Series: Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
• Online Access: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/7

This article analyzes the writings of East German author Uwe Johnson (1934-84) in terms of his experimental style—specifically transitions between descriptive passages—in conjunction with maternal imagery, as discussed through reference to Susan Suleiman’s concept of a “1.5 generation” of Holocaust survivors. A non-Jewish German author, Johnson addresses German history from the position of the perpetrators, yet born in 1934, he experienced National Socialism from the point of view of a child. In his tetralogy, Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (1970-83), feelings of guilt and attempts to understand the German past are negotiated through the maternal figure. This figure is linked, in turn, to water as both a structural and symbolic element throughout the novel. As this article demonstrates, the effect of “blurred boundaries” is achieved through water, which functions as paradigm for the mother-daughter relationship: the narrator-protagonist Gesine’s memory is shaped by the experience of near-drowning before the eyes of her mother, Lisbeth, who commits suicide via self-immolation during Reichskristallnacht . As this article concludes, the author himself seems caught in the predicament of Suleiman’s 1.5 Generation, where perception is blurred, and immersing oneself in (imaginary) bodies of water becomes a response to the madness of fascism.