The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness

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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. In 1974, a strange man called "Charles" 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 beer and smoking Gaulloises while flicking through the Kent Evening Post. But who was this unlikely newcomer This "Charles" was in actual fact Uwe Johnson, one of the greatest and most-influential East-German writers of the post-war period. But what quirk of Cold War history had caused him to end up in Sheerness, when his contemporaries had instead fled the DDR to Rome, New York or West Berlin Drawn from Johnson's letters to his friends Max Frisch, Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, and others, as well as contemporary accounts and archival materials, this intriguing mix of literary and cultural history and memoir uncovers the last ten years of Johnson's life as it was in Sheerness, set against the backdrop of the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1970s.

Reviews

"Amonumental sifting and arranging of local particulars, stitched against the savage farce of a great European novelists elective exile... Patrick Wright has picked over the landfill of a very specific Estuary culture to devastating effect."
"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."
"Amasterful modernist history, and Patrick Wrights 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."
"An extraordinary, haunting book... a phenomenal achievement."
"An astonishing chronicle of the great German author Uwe Johnson, who moved to Sheerness, Kent, in the 70s.
To repeat: this tidal book, reaching into everything and then withdrawing to show what is left behind, is a triumph."
"A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate."
A huge achievement: a comprehensive portrait of a place and a person, and the best book about Brexit thats yet been written."
Wright is not a biographer or a journalist but a sort of spirit-ethnographer, patient and attentive to change and complexity.
"A glorious rabbit hole of a book ... a longue dure portrait, from the 17th century to Thatcher, of a single location on the edges of British national life."
Wright plays both the anatomist and the elegist for the blighted modernity of seemingly forsaken spots such as Sheppey a fragmentary panorama of traumatic, half-remembered history, personal and national.
Thorough, discerning, compassionate.
"The most involving and originally-conceived social history of modern England to have appeared in decades."
"A hymn to estuarial peculiarity and a lament for an awkward man determined never to find his place."
"I was entirely captivated by this microscopic, discursive study of Uwe Johnson... a great book about the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe, and not a page too long."

Author Bio

Patrick Wight is Emeritus Professor of Literature, Culture 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.