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The Death of the Collective Subject in Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob
Author(s) -
Kenosian David
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1046/j.0105-7510.2003.00790.x
Subject(s) - subject (documents) , historiography , politics , narrative , subjectivity , literature , political subjectivity , history , philosophy , humanities , sociology , epistemology , art , political science , law , archaeology , library science , computer science
In previous interpretations of Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob , critics have focused primarily on Johnson's relationship to socialism on the complex narrative structure of the novel. In this essay, I explore a topic that has received comparatively little attention: Johnson's notion of subjectivity. I show that Johnson's attempt to challenge Marxist concepts of the collective subject is inseparably linked to his views on representing history. Johnson's first move is to eliminate the omniscient Socialist Realist narrator who is supposed to have a greater understanding of societal forces than do the characters in the fictional world. But in Mutmassungen über Jakob , it is the protagonist (Jakob) who has a greater understanding of politics than the former Socialist Realist narrator (Rohlfs). Their relationship undermines the political hierarchy constituted by workers and party. In addition, history in the novel is not narrated from a privileged epistemological position. Rather, it is reconstructed in a negotiation among various subjects (characters) at the porous border between history and memory. This self‐reflexive model of historiography is, as implied by Uwe Johnson, democratic, in contradistinction to Socialist Realism. Finally, I point out that this model of writing history in Mutmassungen über Jakob anticipates the polyphonic representation of the past in Johnson's Jahrestage (1970–83). In Johnson's final work, German history is consequently written in dialogues with Germans, immigrants from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors, and textual sources from various countries.