Pomeranus non cantat? Uwe Johnson and Pomerania: A topos of the lost (first) homeland or where I come from doesn’t alredy exist

Abstract

Uwe Johnson was perceived before 1989 exclusively as a writer of the division of Germany. Born in Pomerania (Kamien Pomorski), he spent his childhood and early youth in Mecklenburg. After obtaining his university degree in German philology in the German Democratic Republic, he moved to West Berlin. In the same year he published his first novel Mutmasungen uber Jakob (the Polish edition Domniemania w sprawie Jakuba appeared in 2008), which besides the reflection on the division of Germany in the context of the Cold War, dividing Europe into two political camps, extensively describes his holidays he spent until 10 years of age in Darzewice near Wolin. It was, looking through the prism of the author’s whole biography, the most happy period in his life and therefore a point of reference for forming a worldview in a bipolar world of the ideological indoctrination. The characters of his novels written in prose, like Jakob Abs, the main character of the novel mentioned above, hail from Pomerania. The article provides an analysis of determinants of the author’s regional identity from the perspective of self-reflection in which a central position occupies the category of small homeland as understood in the theory of concrete utopia (Ernst Bloch), as well that of spiritual affinity (Johann Wolfgang Goethe), and spiritual homelessness (Siegfried Kracauer).