This book is truly a masterpiece. . . . It is a record, and an enduring one for our whole post-Hitler era. You have actually made this past tangible and-perhaps a much harder task-you have made it convincing. Now I know how it was and is over there-know it down to the tips of my toes. . . . This seems to be the only appropriate way to speak and think: about great-grandmother and grandmother and mother and child, in the interplay of generations and across two continents. -Hannah Arendt, February 7, 1972, Letter to Uwe Johnson

Uwe Johnson is the most incorruptible writer I've ever read, always searching for what we so frivolously call the truth. In Anniversaries he approaches this fundamental thing, the truth, from different sides, across different continents, across time. Page after page, we are shown how we need to see clearly, without prejudice, to think properly. Page after page, thinking with Johnson offers us the greatest of pleasures. -Jenny Erpenbeck

A gripping, complex, highly significant work in which the author displays not only his mastery as a storyteller but also his humor, irony, and descriptive power. -The New York Times

Johnson has Balzac's passion for the telling detail, the revealing exactitude, here a passion that is impelled by the imagination of love. So intensely are the figures imagined-Gesine and her daughter, Gesine's desolated mother, and all the tribe of Baltic relatives who variously endure and resist the Nazi scourge-that the ballast of Manhattan fact is needed to keep the book on the page, the life in focus, to keep the agony from getting out of drawing. -Richard Howard