First edition. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1965. Dust jacket by Willy Fleckhaus.

Published only four years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Zwei Ansichten is among the earliest literary attempts to grasp the new reality of a divided Germany. It doesn't start with constructing a political thesis. Johnson follows two, related, ordinary lives: a West German photographer and an East Berlin nurse whose relationship is interrupted by the sudden appearance of the border. History enters the novel not as an abstraction, but as an event that reorganizes perception itself. 

Willy Fleckhaus's dust jacket astutely extends this logic. Its impossible geometric cubes continuously oscillate between flat pattern and three-dimensional form, refusing a single stable reading. Here's the central question: every view depends upon another. 

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Language: German
Condition: Worn down but healthy.