Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries deploys transnational migrant Gesine Cresspahl as a protagonist-narrator to retell the story of her life, family, and national home(s) from the perspective of New York City in 1967–1968. Newly translated into English in its entirety by Damion Searls, Johnson’s modern epic reconstitutes realist storytelling in the wake of catastrophe. This chapter accounts for Anniversaries’ quest for epic truth and human justice amid Johnson’s literary registration of the rise and fall of German Nazism, the ensuing Cold War disorder, and the travails of New York city social life. Repurposing techniques of realist and modernist narration, scrutinizing the world’s course anno 1968 via a multilingual, multipolar, and multi-scalar spatial and temporal mapping as vast as it is intricate, Johnson and Cresspahl fictionally combine efforts to remember and mourn past atrocities as well as stake out tenable lives in the narrated present. Anniversaries’ fanciful and self-aware, irrealist but verifiable, traumatized yet searching storytelling builds up and elaborates a critical counter-publicity capable of remediating modernity’s interrelated crises in their long durée. Exemplifying modern realism’s undiminished tasks, Anniversaries grants readers and New World literature an immense and resourceful compendium for navigating the twenty-first century.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.