The Art of Uwe Johnson

...sequences that tally...

...Through the father we feel the presence of Achim...

...But if all we come to know about Achim is loosened by doubts that call into question Karsch's modes of inquiry, what we know, or think we know, remains curiously solid...

...And if doubts about Karsch's accuracy never deny the details their "presence," the methods (Karsch's, Johnson's) cast a moral form upon the book at least as relevant to esthetic issues as to German reunification, Ul-bricht, his managers, or the fact that gdr territory has been under totalitarian rule since 1933...

...contain past in present, but not by flashbacks...

...Even so, scenes and objects often do become symbolic...

...The father comes to realize that from the beginning, long before Achim's mother and sister died in an air raid, he should have tried to talk to Achim, protect him from Nazi propaganda...

...We see Achim first on his 30th birthday, in a stadium exploding with flashbulbs and band music and the roar of his name...

...For of course the novel is also about Karsch...

...An elderly man wonders if Karsch can get him the stamps on Achim's foreign mail...

...Is it because Karsch is a West German that after eight years she got in touch with him...

...so does the village in Thur-ingia where Achim lives briefly after the War with his grandparents...

...finally, the very mind of Karsch, the views he brought with him, even a certain sexual rivalry with Achim...

...Karsch, however, wants facts that reveal...

...Speculations About Jakob (1959...

...For a mind as ambitious and skilled as Uwe Johnson's, the situation of the two Germanys is a subject at least as risky as it is rich...

...Johnson is not out to "study" bicycle racing...

...he . . . straightened himself on the pedals, threw himself into it heavy and furious, pushed forward along the side of the street...

...The State publisher that contracts Karsch wants "a useful book" that will not lead readers "in a negative direction...

...The twisted bike a Russian occupation soldier gives the boy Achim seems more real than the boy...

...Karsch receives in his dark room sunshine reflected from the windows of the house across the street...

...but "finally, in the spring, the ride had become an aim in itself and expelled the image of the arrival...

...We begin to feel the daring of his often flatly methodical system...

...Its title, The Third Book About Achim, refers not to Johnson's novel itself but to its ostensible subject, the book which the West German journalist Karsch finally decides cannot be written...

...And how did he get into racing...

...and it seems right that this first time Karsch sees him ride?a token turn around the track?Achim wears a gray business suit: Karsch must see through the children's adoration, the singing and clapping, the amplified sound, the public finality of official recognition...

...The tall, wheat-blond, bony-faced Achim we see is both distant and graciously available, too confident to be imperious, yet from the start suspicious of Karsch's project...

...Even when the reader hears people talking, Johnson plants a stillness upon events...

...Personally and, it would seem, politically, Karin is between Karsch and Achim...

...Perhaps Achim dislikes West Germany because in some minimal way he wishes to preserve himself by preserving his past...

...Karsch asks about East German economic failures, the denial of the vote, the use of labor profits to subsidize apprentice bicycle racers...

...the programmatic euphemisms and the muting of critical thought in the East Zone...

...Her firm fifteen-year-old silhouette that seemed so tender in his memory grew less familiar when he saw her, more indispensable from a distance...

...nor a "tale," a rising and falling translation of the thing itself into a conducted thrill like the gripping image of a race created by voices in radio cars trailing Achim...

...Karsch is almost as oppressed by the dispersion of possibilities as was Michel Butor's schoolteacher in Degrees: condense 10 years of races into Achim's last season...

...The sections on training, competition, and the precious machine itself substitute for suspense a fascinating thoroughness of detail...

...the gap between persons...

...To my taste, Johnson's second novel (now at last issued in English in this country six years after first publication) displays his narrow, complex gifts even more variously...

...He appears in order to be honored, not to compete...

...Even when we are closest to them, Johnson's people are fright-eningly private...

...Karsch, in the clear left lane of a superhighway driving Achim home from practice, shoots past a crowded, impersonal line of red taillights in the right lane...

...In their letters, she and Karsch have spoken "as though they were living in the same city and used the same words for comparable things...

...v this going to be after all the story of a lady and two gentlemen...

...While West German journalism [comes] face to face with this symbol in the person of Mr...

...conventional characterization is not Johnson's point at all...

...see the whole thing through the lens of the athlete's body...

...but at their most enthralling, his methods more importantly transform those local facts into a rich impasse very different from the more nearly negotiable problems of political division and ideology...

...But Two Views is original in its austere and mannered refusal to see people except in drab externals and as the aimless products of a mechanical system in which dread is coded into a concealing syntax of boredom...

...The effect is often as if we are very close and can hear the exact sense of what is being said, but cannot hear the sound of the words...

...Johnson's less unconventional third novel, Two Views (1965...

...But despite Johnson's allocated disruptions and dose-like informations, this novel is a story????a threatening, astonishing search plotted on an unsteady maneuvering board of supposition and insight...

...Yet there is indeed suspense in the hypnotic analyses of training formations, the dynamics of a racing bicycle, the naming of parts, as Johnson unfolds a momentous growth in Achim foreshadowed by what he feels as an uninitiated newcomer against members of a club: ". . . legs . . . daydreaming...

...Why did Achim actually dislike West Germany...

...He has a way of retreating from scenes...

...But this "third book" about a bicycle champion, to whom two official "lives" have already been devoted, is far more than a pretext for Johnson's tortuously ordered account of existence in the East Zone????of, as he puts it, "the border: the difference: the distance...

...Achim in the early days in Thuringia waits for the pulsing in his temples to return when he is with his girl, "but it would only come as a memory or when he thought of her, not when they were together...

...When Johnson lets his hugely con- crete world of details suggest merely an evil he would like to change, his novel moves toward propaganda and his symbolism toward formula...

...Everywhere the reader finds images of separation, discreet sectors side by side: Karin's hand aligned next to Karsch's on a bar counter is as far away as the difference between her idea of Achim's childhood and Karsch's idea...

...Well, "After all: a bicycle is a bicycle," says that italicized voice...

...they are people, and the frontiers are much older than the cold war...

...Achim finds that his bicycle has "pushed life to its right and left into a backdrop...

...And Achim's world????the apparent substance of what was to have been the biography????becomes in its authentic fullness one reason Karsch cannot do the book...

...These intrusions or headings????sceptical, gossipy, facetious, choral????fragment the novel and set its interrogative mood...

...The separated countries of this book are not only, or mainly, the Germanys...

...And this despite one voice in whose nagging, blunt challenges Johnson gives the book a kind of formal punctuation...

...Another, and intentionally odious, symbolism is the truth which political dogma manufactures: Fleisg, the pathetic, contemptible East German editor who tries to supervise Karsch, hopes Karsch will see Achim as a "symbol of the force and potential of the country...

...places, objects, other people are Johnson's main means of evoking Achim...

...His boredom there in the village, his pride and a certain neutral energy, are felt by the reader even while Johnson makes him seem a mere moving part of that early postwar setting...

...So, too, Achim mysteriously emerges in scenes focused upon his father, with whom he has a poignantly restrained, inadequate relationship...

...And the bicycle itself...

...Hence, his methodically scattered segments of perception, the narrative sidetracks, the palpable obfuscations that evoke around the question of what really happened to the young East German railroadman at once the tired desire for truth, the nervous fear of it, and the suspicion that it is not in the end available...

...Parts of Achim's past, or a possible past, gather before us, and even when (or because) they may be Karsch's suppositions, they are too vivid not to be believed...

...so does the girlfriend with whom he sometimes shares the bike...

...We see the father sitting in a kitchen chair exhausted after searching for the wife and daughter: "With a start the sleeping boy woke up under the stare of wide eyes wiped by a blackened hand, wiping off half an eyebrow as though it were dust...

...When Achim's father asks Karin why Karsch wants to do the book, she replies, "he's a West German, reunification for two people, etc...

...Is his hatred of West German capitalism doctrinaire, is it entirely heartfelt...

...It is in part the story of what stands between Karsch and truth: Achim's objections (e.g., he wants to keep his father out of the book...

...But when the geopolitical fact becomes a symptom of constant human insufficiency, Karsch's unwritten book becomes in Johnson's disjunct forms and unsettled conclusions the occasion for an original, crushingly honest work of art...

...Grove Press, 1963), indicated that the young German writer was trying to respond to the divided Germanys in a fictional form drawn from his own sense of the intersection between an observed life partly shared and certain esthetic possibilities that might freshly present that life...

...It is an endless pursuit...

...Achim's evasions (how did he turn up in a photograph of protest marchers in the 1953 uprising...

...Years ago, he bicycled hours every Sunday to meet his girl...

...In answer Achim accuses Karsch of insulting his hosts...

...Karsch finds it more and more difficult to make comparisons, more and more necessary to see each thing in its own private existence...

...The bicycle in its two very different wheels, single track, circulatory treading, and other parts and attributes, grows into a delicate, looming token of human activity...

...make Achim's rise to fame like a citizen's rise to power...

...Johnson's formal techniques may be due in part to the effects of Germany's division...

...the means becomes an end, cause and effect tenuously tangled: yet ends become means: at the beginning of Johnson's narrative, Karsch gets a phone call from an old girlfriend, Karin, an actress who lives in the East Zone: the trip leads complexly, though abruptly, to her lover, Achim...

...Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), marks a retreat from the formal difficulties of the first...

...The response, like others, comes indirectly, here first in an anecdote: When, after placing one-two-three in Austria, Achim and his mates have to stand on the honors slab and listen to the German????now West German ????national anthem over the loudspeaker, he abruptly leads them off the slab and out of the stadium...

...The vividness seldom comes from a frontal anatomy of the racer...

...he was his bicycle...

...dispositions of life in the ordinary rhythm: not some life line from wartime city to postwar village, mason's apprentice, cycling champion, member of parliament...

...Between the question and its answer, the voice says, "He should have touched her...

...Chance acquaintances in bars offer opinions...

...Karsch...