Through thewindow: City, imagination, and the framed gaze in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage

This essay discusses Johnson’s Jahrestage and the novel’s portrayal of New York. Many of the novel’s city descriptions begin as Gesine, or someone else, looks through a door or a window. The epicenter of this framed gaze is Gesine’s (and the author Uwe Johnson’s) apartment on Riverside Drive. New York appears as a framed image, and in this frame or at its edges the German past always lurks by triggering Gesine’s memories, hallucinatory daydreams, descriptive evocations, or symbolic references. These evocations, however, seem to prevent mimetic representation of the city. I argue that the presence of the framed gaze undermines the juxtaposition of the novel’s two levels that is fundamental to the novel’s structure. Rather, the frame acts as yet another marker of the novel’s multi-perspectivism. As city descriptions and the novel’s historical discourse are visually intertwined in the framed gaze, the respective observer’s point of view smothers mimetic representation.