340
URSULA BRUMM
find meaning and significance most often when he gives free rein
to his imagination.
Uwe Johnson, the other newcomer on the literary scene, is an
East German who has lived in West Berlin for several months.
His West German publisher Suhrkamp was unwilling to market
his
novel
Conjectures on Jacob (Mutmassungen iiber Jakob)
under a
pseudonym. Uwe attended an East German university and in ad–
dition busied himself with the study of the symbolic significance
of the signal box at a railroad station; both activities are reflected
in this astonishing first novel by a 25-year-old writer who
is
quite
obviously influenced by Faulkner, too much influence, one might
say, for characters and events are slightly over-obscured by a
narrative technique of Faulknerian discontinuity. But at the same
time Johnson has represented the daily life, the feeling of life, the
moral problems-in short, human existence-in the East more
accurately than anyone else before. In this book, the estrangement
of the two parts of Germany and its people, the secret, dangerous,
forbidden character of their encounters, is shrouded in the hope–
less gloom which political reality casts over the life of the
individual. Jacob's death in shunting
trains
remains unexplained;
and conjecture-was it accident, liquidation, or half-voluntary
suicide?-leads to no solution.
Ursula Brumm
(Translated from the German by E. B. Ashton)
