The novel takes the form of a yearlong diary by the enigmatic, rather brilliant Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year Hitler came to power. Through some shady maneuvering she got herself and her small daughter, Marie, to New York in 1961. Gesine is haunted — by her family’s embrace of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, the death of her daughter’s father — and she takes an apartment in Manhattan and enters into a new kind of nightmare. It is a city of empty lots, roiling protests and “scar-encrusted cats.” Gesine is horrified by the Vietnam War and the savagery of American racism, how quickly Marie learns to act casually superior to black people and how ferociously white New Yorkers, and her Jewish neighbors, work to keep the city segregated.

Image Uwe Johnson Credit... Michael Bengel

“Subjectivity remains the most important criterion of the diary,” the German writer Christa Wolf wrote in her own very unusual diary, “One Day a Year,” in which she recorded the events of a single day — Sept. 27 — for over 50 years. In “Anniversaries,” however, subjectivity is annihilated. The pronouns are wildly unstable: Gesine refers to herself as “I,” then “she,” then sometimes even “we.” Her accounts of “her” day are given over to news reports, sometimes in full (she is obsessed with The New York Times, and the paper inspires in her all the passion, pleading, scorn and occasional disappointment of a love affair). Or she channels the past of her ancestors — or her ancestors intrude into the narrative to taunt or praise or beg for her forgiveness. Other times, the diary follows Marie, a worldly 10-year-old flâneur, “cool as a gherkin,” who combs the Bowery looking for adventure.

This kind of syntactic ambiguity sets off a burst of ethical questions: Where do the borders of a person, and her responsibilities, really begin and end? We follow the world through Gesine’s diary — the long, bloody year of 1968, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. As Marie grows up, the questions mother and daughter pose to themselves and each other grow ever more complicated. When is attention without action sinful? When do we use our responsibilities to our children as a way of shirking other, perhaps even greater obligations? Searls’s superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.

“America was a rumor. I came to verify the rumor,” Johnson told The Times in a 1966 article about his own move to New York, to the same address he gave Gesine: 243 Riverside Drive, Apt. 204. (He and his narrator also share elements of the same family history, of Nazi relatives and abandonment). Johnson had been a fiery prodigy; at 27, he was the third recipient of the International Publishers’ Prize, after Samuel Beckett and Borges. He fled the stifling world of German literary celebrity and took a job with a New York publishing house, assembling an anthology of German literature. He floundered, and considered devoting his life to translating his beloved Faulkner when he had a chance sighting.