War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler’s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. “They’ll need to fight soon (or burst),” he noted in his diary on 6 October.
The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics.
On the basis of letters and diary extracts, critics of the past concluded that the 1969 Nobel Prize winner travelled across Germany in a state of self-absorption, without paying attention to the rise of totalitarianism. But the notebooks in their entirety show that Beckett was studying National Socialist resentment in close detail.
He noticed changes in fashion, such as the predominance of the “Hitler coat”, and collected the “holy phrases” of the Nazi movement in lists: Führer (“leader”), Bewegung (“movement”), Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”), and Freiheit und Ehre (“freedom and honour”), even if they repulsed him. Ihre Kraft durch Freude Unterhaltung macht mich fertig, he noted in German on 1 November 1936: “Their Strength Through Joy conversation is killing me.”
For now Beckett, who would join the French resistance in 1940, kept his disgust mostly private, merely taking pleasure in subtle parodies of totalitarian behaviour, by “(sticking) the wrong arm out” when invited to give the Nazi salute.
“He was aware that his diaries could have been confiscated,” said the notebooks’ co-editor Mark Nixon, a professor of modern literature and Beckett studies at the University of Reading. “He has to be careful as he has to get out of Germany with them. Maybe he could have been more explicit had this danger not hung over him. But they do clearly form a rebellion against Nazi rationalising discourse.”
Beckett’s tour of some 30 German towns and cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Munich, was motivated by a desire to view works of art and to improve his language skills. An interest in German – his third language after English and French – was probably influenced by lengthy visits between 1928 and 1932 to his cousin and sweetheart Peggy Sinclair and her family, who lived in Kassel.
The curiosity about German language and culture was reminiscent of the American English writer Christopher Isherwood, who, asked how he documented Germany between 1929 and 1933, said: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking.”
Beckett’s observed the country’s descent into totalitarianism in an already depressed state of mind. Peggy had died in Germany of tuberculosis in May 1933, his father of a heart attack the following month. The remaining Sinclairs, of Jewish descent, had been forced to flee Germany in 1936.
By the time he set out for Cuxhaven, Beckett had two years of psychoanalysis behind him, and his diaries reflect deep anguish, psychosomatic complaints, medical ailments, bodily functions, financial woes and angst over his writer’s block. At times, it is hard to separate his own problems from the darkening political situation around him. Bald fange ich wirklich an zu kotzen. Oder fahr heim (“soon I’ll really start to puke. Or I’ll go home”) he writes on 15 January, 1937.
“Beckett writes what he sees, that’s the value of him,” Nixon said. “At the same time the diaries are an important part of the journey of Beckett becoming Beckett. In the diaries he keeps telling himself to be more minimal, which is the Beckett we know, who strips everything away that doesn’t matter.”
The writer’s subsequent move to France and involvement with the French resistance can be seen as a reaction to what he witnessed in Nazi Germany, Nixon believes. “He was an eye witness to totalitarianism,” he said. “His literature is very clearly based on this experience.”
Filled with tiny, hard-to-decipher right-leaning handwriting, the 545 pages of the German diaries were found in the cellar of his Paris flat after his death in 1989 by his nephew Edward Beckett, who has worked with the editors Nixon and Oliver Lubrich to bring the 120,000 words to publication.
They are, Nixon says, Beckett’s own personal witness statement, and were not meant for publication. Some entries reveal an unsavoury side to the revered modernist master, including misogynistic remarks and accounts of brothel visits.
“Their value as a historical document is in large part due to the fact that he never edited them. The reason it’s ethically OK to be publishing them is that he didn’t destroy them like he did other things.”
While Suhrkamp’s bilingual edition, translated by Gaby Hartel, is tailored to political historical interest, an English-language edition, expected to be published next April, will concentrate more on the place of the diaries in Beckett’s literary development. Rights have been acquired by China, France and Italy among other countries.
• Samuel Beckett: German Diaries (German and English version) is published by Suhrkamp on 20 August
