Jahrestage (Anniversaries). Part Two

Back to the year 1968, back to Gesine and Marie on New York’s Riverside Drive. Back to the village of Jerichow of her memories, where a young Gesine is waiting for her father’s return from war imprisonment in a zone of Soviet rule. Her protector is Jakob. He takes care of her and she falls in love with him. First at school and later as a student, Gesine encounters oppression by the strengthened SED-regime at first hand. She experiences absurd snitching and indoctrination rituals, but there is also friendship and youthful resistance. And once again, the Cresspahls are faced with a new system, new power and – above all – a new kind of necessary assimilation.

In “Jahrestage. Zweiter Teil”, based on Uwe Johnson, the major topic that drives both the author and his protagonist unfolds once more. No country anywhere and no act of migration can remove Gesine’s moral burden of being bound up in political conflicts and bring her peace.