Literary references in the works of Uwe Johnson are a fascinating and complex area of research. This study elaborates much known as well as less obvious intertexts regarding their possibilities for interpretation in Uwe Johnson's main work Jahrestage. The study is built on the abundant state of research, includes own discoveries and establishes new relationships with regard to story aspects and narrative presentation. Relevant will be the location of pretexts, possible functions and which contexts are required in order to find a meaning behind the – sometimes self-reflective – dialogue with a previous text or an already literary processed topic.