No writer has been more trapped in a year’s granularity than Uwe Johnson was in 1968, chronicled in “Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl.” Photograph by Paul Swiridoff / ullstein bild / Getty

The day was a favorite unit of time for the modernist novel. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” demonstrated that one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, could contain an epic of consciousness. Virginia Woolf had Mrs. Dalloway buy the flowers herself one morning in 1923; Big Ben marks the hours till the party that closes the book, as that day, also in June, breathes with life, memory, war, shell shock. William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” gives us four days: an out-of-order Easter weekend, in 1928, plus a day in June when Quentin Compson carries around the weighty metaphor of a broken wristwatch.

A novel can animate a day, and a year can furnish an arc—a courtship, a divorce—but stack three hundred and sixty-five days and you threaten to suffocate a novel. Frank Sinatra sang of “a very good year,” but no one sings of “a very good three hundred and sixty-five days.” And no writer has been more trapped in a year’s granularity than the German writer Uwe Johnson was in the slow wreckage of 1968, which he chronicled in his masterwork, “Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl.” Now, on the golden anniversary of that gray year, Damion Searls brings us the novel’s first full English translation. It is heroic not only for its bulk—seventeen hundred pages—but for its minutiae: Searls carries over the many voices, dialects, and language games of the daunting German original. This formidable doorstop by the Faulkner of East Germany can finally stop our American doors.

The narrative device seems simple. Gesine Cresspahl, thirty-four, has moved from East Germany to New York; each chapter of the novel is a day in her life, proceeding from August 21, 1967, to August 20, 1968. (The last date is pointed: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia looms always on the novel’s horizon.) The present plods along, day by day, and the German past is excavated beneath it, as Gesine tells her bleak family history to her ten-year-old daughter, Marie. We tack between modern New York and the German backwater of Jerichow—a fictional town lying in the nonfictional northern region of Mecklenburg, on the Baltic coast—where Gesine was born into the Third Reich, on March 3, 1933.

Gesine’s father, Heinrich, is the novel’s ill-fated historical protagonist, whom we follow through Nazism, war, defeat, and Soviet occupation. Gesine’s mother’s family are Nazis, “gun-toting idiots,” and Heinrich is stuck with them, even after Gesine’s tormented mother ties herself up in a burning barn. This elaborate suicide occurs on November 9, 1938, of all nights: Kristallnacht. The water pump was unavailable, because the local Nazis had “used it to make trouble at the Jews’ place.” In the present, on November 9, 1967, the Cresspahl residence, on the Upper West Side, will get a bunch of wrong-number phone calls.

The present is filtered through the Times, which Gesine reads in its entirety every day; whole passages are pasted into the text. The tally of deployment and death in Vietnam ticks grimly by. She reads that Purple Hearts will now be given “only for serious injuries,” that Mahalia Jackson has been hospitalized in Berlin, that John McCain has been shot down over Hanoi, and that Stalin’s daughter has defected from the Soviet Union. Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva is a running gag, if this cheerless novel can be said to have gags: she writes a memoir, all “pleading yowls,” and soon she is “planning to buy a car, the best there is in America!” The tactic smacks of the frenetic newsreels blasting from John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” novels, of the nineteen-thirties—“THREAT OF MUTINY BY U.S. TROOPS,” “BOLSHEVISM READY TO COLLAPSE SAYS ESCAPED GENERAL,” “BRITISH TRY HARD TO KEEP PROMISE TO HANG KAISER”—but in “Anniversaries” the effect is more like a mute in a trumpet. The Times is Gesine’s “honest old Auntie,” a bastion of fact and balance. It’s also a safe screen through which to view a breaking world.

Uwe Johnson was born in 1934 and grew up in Mecklenburg. His father, like Heinrich Cresspahl, was imprisoned by the Soviets after the war. (Heinrich is broken but survives; Johnson’s father died.) Johnson’s mother made it to West Germany in 1956; Uwe followed three years later, around the time that his first novel, “Mutmassungen über Jakob,” was published there. (Jerichow and its main characters first appear in that novel; “Anniversaries” is both prequel and sequel, filling in the decades before and after it.) Johnson was a latecomer to the Gruppe 47, a loose collection of German writers—Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass among them—who were shaped by Nazism’s rise and fall, by American or Soviet occupation, by the postwar “economic miracle” in West Germany, and by the Berlin Wall.

Like many a modern European writer, Johnson saw America in fiction before he saw it in fact. He translated Herman Melville in East Germany, but Faulkner stirred him most. Jerichow, Mecklenburg, is Johnson’s answer to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: a setting, both mythic and mundane, for interlocking novels that aspire to a historical reckoning but finally find history unreckonable. Travelling to America in 1961, Johnson made sure to visit Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi. He lived in New York from 1966 to 1968, at Gesine’s address—243 Riverside Drive, Apt. 204—and began writing “Anniversaries” there in 1967, unaware of what was to come.

1968, it feels cruel to mention at this point, had three hundred and sixty-six days. It was on Leap Day that Johnson’s fellow Gruppe 47 member Hans Magnus Enzensberger announced, in The New York Review of Books, that he was “Leaving America.” He had only just arrived, but after three months he’d realized that “the class which rules the United States of America, and the government which implements its policies,” were “the most dangerous body of men on earth.” To leave was the intellectual’s only noble course. “Most Americans have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world,” he lectured his American readers, but a German could detect the parallels between the Nazi nineteen-thirties and the American nineteen-sixties. Enzensberger argued that the U.S. presented a greater and more insidious threat than Nazi Germany had. This German could also see that the apparent freedom of American intellectual life was “precarious and deceptive,” co-opted by “the system,” and that even by accepting a fellowship at Wesleyan, “I had lost my credibility.” (The essay was an open letter to Wesleyan’s president.) To get his credibility back, Enzensberger decided to take his talents to Cuba. “I just feel that I can learn more from the Cuban people and be of greater use to them than I could ever be to the students of Wesleyan University,” he wrote.

One could read “Anniversaries” as a seventeen-hundred-page answer to such empty grandiosity. (“You should never read other people’s mail,” Gesine says of the open letter, “even if they show it to you.”) To leave was a righteous gesture; Johnson was concerned with what it meant to stay. “Anniversaries” can feel like it must be the most ambivalent immigration novel ever written. Sometimes it captures the desire to lay a claim, to define or redefine oneself in a new country, to assimilate. Among its vast cast is Mrs. Ferwalter, a Slovakian Holocaust survivor now living on the Upper West Side. A thousand pages in, she becomes a U.S. citizen. Her American passport will be “a new protective shell, another bulwark against the past.” At her citizenship test, she is asked a question about civics that becomes a question about something else: “Who becomes president if Mr. Johnson dies. – Gott ferbitt! she cried, and passed.”