"Uwe Johnson. Jahrestage - aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl"

A performance
With: Ninon Gloger (piano)
Text montage/direction: Wolfgang Stockmann

A few months before the Berlin Wall goes up, in April 1961, Gesine Cresspahl - a single mother - emigrates from Mecklenburg to New York with her young daughter Marie. She builds her life in her new home. Then, in the pivotal years of 1967/68, everything suddenly shifts: the US Air Force strikes Vietnam, Martin Luther King is shot, violent clashes erupt in Black neighbourhoods, and students rebel across the US and the wider Western world. The novel tells all of this. At the same time, it follows Gesine as she tells her now ten-year-old daughter, day by day for an entire year, stories about their family's past in the fictional small town of Jerichow in Mecklenburg - stories of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, of the Soviet occupation zone and the early years of the GDR. Running through it all is an ever-present, dramatic present: daily dispatches from the New York Times on events in the US and around the world.

The FAZ wrote of the audiobook edition on which this performance is based that it is not "the comfortable consumption of a classic" but "an engagement with a difficult, monumental work"; Charly Hübner was called "an ideal choice" for the role. This performance likewise resists easy summary, instead tracing a path into Johnson's narrative current: characters, episodes, conversations, memories, reports, New York Times dispatches and everyday events from 1967/1968, set against the Vietnam War protests, student uprisings and the build-up to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Caren Miosga studied history and Slavic studies in Hamburg, worked in radio and television, and became widely known as the presenter of "Tagesthemen". She now hosts her own ARD programme.