The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness

by Patrick Wright

Overview

The story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s.

Towards the end of 1974, a stranger arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post. "Charles" was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.

But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a "moral utopia" in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to "deindustrialisation" and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs?

Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the "island that is all the world" to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own "island stories", the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912248605
Publisher:	Watkins Media
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Pages:	751
Sales rank:	840,846
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.50(d)

About the Author

Patrick Wight is Emeritus Professor of Literature, History and Politics at Kings College, London. His books include The Village that Died for England, A Journey Through Ruins, and Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Part I The Writer Who Became a Reef 11

1 Reading Uwe Johnson in Kent, 1970-3 13

2 On the Move but Nobody's Refugee 25

3 The Border: The Distance: The Difference 37

4 Praise and Denunciation: A Pain for All Zealots 44

5 New York City: Beginning Anniversaries 51

6 Leaving Berlin 65

Part II The Island: Modernity's Mudbank 75

7 1974: Looking out from Bellevue Road 77

8 Neither St Helena nor Hong Kong 87

9 Shellness: A Point with Three Warnings 99

10 Coincidence on England's Baltic Shore 114

11 Leysdown: The "On-Sea" Scenario 125

12 Rolls without Royce: Leysdown Aloft 147

13 Two Ways Down to the Sea: The Trade Union Baron and the Suffragists 165

Part III The Five Towns of Sheerness: Definitely Not Berlin, New York or Rome 181

14 Moving In 183

15 Blue-Faced and Shivering: A Town on England's Fatal Shore? 203

16 Fritz J. Raddatz's Perambulation 234

17 Becoming "Sheerness-on-Sea": The Scramble for a Second Horse 262

18 "Black Tuesday": The Day the World Ended 276

19 First Moves on the Afterlife: The Modernist Chair Comes to Sheerness 289

Part IV Culture: Three Island Encounters 313

20 All Praise to the Sheerness Times Guardian 315

21 A Painter of Our Time 346

22 A Job for the Town Photographer 367

Part V Society: "I Don't Want to Get Personal" 381

23 Becoming "Charlie" 383

24 Sheerness as "Moral Utopia"? (On Not Meeting Ray Pahl) 410

25 "It's Your Opinion": A Postcard for the Kent Evening Post 447

26 Implosion: Two Stories from the Site 459

Part VI The Storm of Memory: A New Use for the Sash Windows of North Kent 481

27 Unjamming Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass 483

28 Sea Defences: From God's Will to "Puddicombe's Folly" 493

29 Beach, Sea and "The View of a Memory" 515

30 What Is That Thing?: The SS Richard Montgomery 527

31 The Doomsday Shuffle 545

32 Becoming Unfathomable: The Bomb Ship as "Murky Reality" 565

33 Explosion: From the Richard Montgomery to the Cap Arcona 589

34 Triumph of the Sheerness Wall 606

Afterword 622

Notes 644

Gazetteer 714

Acknowledgements 729

Editorial Reviews

★ 2020-10-07
Engrossing account of the exiled East German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984), who found an obscure shelter in a gray English backwater.

Wright, an accomplished interpreter of all things English, finds a site of frozen time in a bypassed place only 40-odd miles downriver from London, scorned by Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson for its “thousands and thousands of mobile homes, all of which I suspect belong to former London cabbies.” The Isle of Sheppey is indeed rather plain, emerging from the North Sea, Wright quips, “in a marshy and noncommittal kind of way.” Like so many edgelands, there was once a lot going on there, attested to by memories of a vast naval dockyard where a lucky survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade once worked; a half-sunken ship full of World War II ammunition that threatened to blow the town of Sheerness off the map; a hillside packed with the graves of Danes murdered at the behest of Aethelred the Unready “as an early ancestor of encroachment-hating Brexiteers”; and a rural schoolhouse once inhabited by a reformer who immigrated to Canada and became a feminist icon “who carried ancestral memories of Kentish radicalism with her as she campaigned for and among women farmers.” Into this milieu came Johnson, a curmudgeonly novelist who retained a Marxist vision even after fleeing East Germany—and who drank himself to death in Sheerness before the age of 50, “a man who wanted, by the end of his short life, to disappear into letters.” Johnson, whose magnum opus Anniversariestook decades to appear in English translation, found on Sheppey a rejoinder to his native Baltic coast, replete with Cold War vestiges (he descended into paranoia, convinced that his estranged wife was a spy). His grim determination to finish his late modernist masterpiece, despite his mental illness and alcoholism, befits the raw, forgotten places in which he lived.

A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate.

Kirkus Reviews

"A monumental sifting and arranging of local particulars, stitched against the savage farce of a great European novelist’s elective exile... Patrick Wright has picked over the landfill of a very specific Estuary culture to devastating effect." - Iain Sinclair

"A double 'biography' of the great but always tempestuous German writer Uwe Johnson and his ultimate home, the gritty and disreputable Isle of Sheppey. 'Biography' is in quotes because Wright is a saboteur of genres and his books encompass multiple worlds. I stand in awe of what he has accomplished here." - Mike Davis

"A masterful modernist history, and Patrick Wright’s most important book, bringing Europe to England by showing it has always been here, at a moment when too many want to believe something else." - David Edgerton

"An extraordinary, haunting book... a phenomenal achievement." - Gillian Darley, author of Excellent Essex

"An astonishing chronicle of the great German author Uwe Johnson, who moved to Sheerness, Kent, in the 70s.” - Helen MacDonald

“To repeat: this tidal book, reaching into everything and then withdrawing to show what is left behind, is a triumph." - Neal Ascherson, author of Black Sea 

"A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate." - Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher