Johnson, Uwe

The German author Uwe Johnson was born in Cammin, Pomerania (present day Kamien Pomorski in Poland). He grew up at Anklam, Vorpommern. His mother fled with her children in 1945, during the final months of the war, to the village of Recknitz in Mecklenburg. The father had been deported to the Soviet Union and was declared dead in 1948. Johnson read languages and literature at the universities of Rostock and Leipzig in 1952–56 and joined a church youth organization, which led to a dispute with his university in Rostock. He eventually moved to West Berlin in 1959. In 1966–68, he lived and worked in New York before finally settling in Sheerness-on-Sea, England in 1974. He was married in 1962 and had a daughter. His wife left him in 1978. Johnson’s circle included Max Frisch, Günter Grass and the publisher Siegfried Unseld.